Can Hypebeast Magic Revive J. Crew?
I think we’re starting to get a handle on the way today’s kids are spending their time and money — but we need to do better to keep them from ruining the fun for us grown-ups.
I’m talking about the ways we let the next generation (or their parents) buy into the idea that shopping for clothes should be fun, not a chore.
You might consider that a pretty good example of how parents and kids mix.
We’ve already tried the easy solution by telling them to shop at the mall, and they’re just as likely to buy something from a fashion chain as they are to buy it at home. We can’t stop that so we need to change the message.
Today’s message: Stop thinking so much, buy and save, and enjoy!
This idea has been around since the end of the 1800s, when a businessman named John Wanamaker wrote in The American Bee in 1900, “I’m so glad I don’t have to go into Wall Street anymore.”
Wanamaker was a father of the modern shopping mall. His wife had introduced him to children’s clothing stores, and he became a master of the retail business. He wrote The American Bee as a joke at first, but as he read his own words, he believed he was actually telling the truth.
“My name is John Wanamaker, and I have been a Wall Street broker for more than 20 years,” he wrote in the now-famous column, then called The American Bee.
“I want to tell everybody who is planning to go into Wall Street, because everybody who writes for the paper knows what I am going to get into here. After having gone into Wall Street for 20 years I can say with perfect truth that that is the last place for anybody to go.”
A few years later, one of Wanamaker’s nephews ran the Washington Post and saw how the Post was trying to market itself as an arbiter of news. He was quoted in
