Great Jones Cookware and the Illusion of the Millennial Aesthetic

For a long time, retail survived on taste and real estate — curation and distribution. The internet made it possible for regional clothing stores like Need Supply to sell to a global audience and build larger businesses. But then it also made it easier for consumers to find everything, anywhere — at the lowest price — challenging any sense of loyal... See more

But like me and my Amazon coat, it may be harder than ever to form a lasting relationship. Maybe you bought the vacuum cleaner that you saw everywhere on TikTok, but will you ever buy from that company again? These young companies, as Lowitz described, “succeed in making sales but not customers.”

Second, I’m reflecting on a point former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale famously made in 1995: “There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.” I think we’re burnt out by the fragmentation that the D2C era brought to everything. After subscribing to tons of hyper-niche content over the years, the idea of a couple brands we ... See more

The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were

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