Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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I'm a sociological entrepreneur!
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
11:52 PM
Tonight I was delighted to go to a presentation of a taped lecture by Lester Thurow, who addressed the MIT Enterprise Forum on "Entrepreneurship in a Global Economy." http://web.mit.edu/entforum/www/SBS/18thurow.htm
He gave me this great tool to describe what we're doing. Entrepreneurship only arises in times of disequilibrium (chaos/opportunity). In times of stability, the big company just always wins. He presented a taxonomy of entrepreneurs for three kinds of disequilibrium:
Technology entrepreneurs (the obvious default)
Geographical entrepreneurs
Take a process and move it from California to Taiwan,
from Taiwan to the PRC, gain economies, make a mint.
Sociological entrepreneurs
Identify or create a sociological demand, exploit it
This last is who I am. Prof. Thurow's example was Starbucks.
What eMarket does is we've more identified than created a demand. Pop culture is our new mythology. It's the teaching story, the heroics, the myth cycle of modernism. What we do, at root, is we sell the material culture of modernism.
It's not about geeky fans. It's about affinity groups, deep cultural symbols, fashion, and self-expression.
You see a slip of a girl in a hiphop club in a black babydoll t-shirt with a supergirl logo on it, framed in tattoo/bodyart style flames. http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSSUG0004/
Chances are she doesn't read comic books.
You see a husky guy strutting down the street in Kuala Lampur wearing a t-shirt with a raging Tazmanian Devil doing martial arts, flanked with dragons.
http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSLOO0169/
Chances are he doesn't spend his Saturday mornings watching cartoons.
I'm wearing my Central Perk "No More Decaf!" shirt in line at the supermarket. A woman does a double take. She hesitates. Then she *has* to come up to me, and ask, "That's not a real coffee shop is it? I mean, that's the coffee shop from Friends right?"
http://www.emerchandise.com/product/TSFRI0028/
In a world where no one talks to strangers, I've made an instant friend, if I want to pursue it.
We're selling affinity, fashion, self-identification, style-tribes, insider jokes, self-expression.
Right now, we get more of our money by serving the pent up demand of folks who go to http://www.hbo.com/, and didn't know that there was all this cool stuff to be had for The Sopranos at http://store.hbo.com/hbo_sopranos/ -- and so on for a couple dozen other sites.
But eventually, as this stuff becomes more and more recognized as pop culture fashion casual, we'll be the Starbucks of pop culture swag.
We sell the altar furnishings of the post-modern home. We sell the saint's medallions of pop culture. We transcend national and language boundaries.
My main ethical goal is to start serving all the pop culture diasporas (bollywood, Mexican soaps, europop, anime/manga, chop socky HK/PRC cinema,...) so that the various cultures' pop vocabulary and iconography get equal time.
http://store.viz.com/ -- here's the first step.
On the other hand, I often wonder why the *HELL* I'm spending my time selling t-shirts. My hope is that eventually, I'll make enough money that I can be independently modest, so that I can risk trying to get paid to write.
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