I often can’t help but compare the retail experience to museums. It likely wrapped up in my work history, but I often see myself still as a sales person - it’s just that I’m selling history now. Today I stumbled into a shop called The Cool Hunter, which according to its byline is ‘Internationally Curated’. Beyond the industry argument of what constitutes as curated (lets face it, cricket pitches were being curated before museums were), I thought the shop used scarcity theory extremely well and presented it in a fascinating manner.
Scarcity effect is a theory that when you present an item/event as being rare or limited, it’s considered value rises. So if I present a sock knitted in WW1 in a case and talk about how millions of these socks are made it’s perceived value would be low. But if I displayed the same sock and the same story, and added in a section about the person who knitted the sock and who received it and the epic romance that bloomed from that sock, it’s value would increase. This is due to the sock suddenly seeming less like a knitted thing, and more of a one off love story found in a parcel to a WW1 soldier. Museums are kind of lucky, because most things that are displayed already have a scarcity effect applied to them. Museum curators create exhibitions of rare items and wrap narratives around the items which are more common. For retail, rarity is often made through limited editions or events. As an example, Games Workshop will often release a model that will only be sold during a specific event, increasing it’s perceived value. T2 will have member only sales, which are by invitation, and increase the assumption that these are very special prices. These tactics are retail 101. What I appreciated about the Cool Hunter was that it is creating a museum like experience to sell their collection of items. Plinths! Items are displayed on plinths, with stock hidden away behind lush (velvet?) curtains. The items are gathered together in a snippet of experience - the perfume stand in the right hand photo below was an excellent example of gathering together a collection that felt like it might fit into a noble ladies dressing room. The pictures are hung as if in a gallery. The book section displayed the items with their covers facing front. Each facet of the store felt as if you might have been buying items from a museum of ‘now’ and potentially ‘cool’. The lack of products made everything feel very exclusive, and for all I know perhaps some of those items were very limited, and most important that felt valuable. Then of course, there is the use of the word curated, presented proudly at the entrance. From the moment that you walk into the store, the message is that the items are hand picked for their importance and ‘cool’ factor. Less cool from the 90s, and more the ‘cool’ that you feel from Audrey Hepburn drinking coffee in Paris. The store was incredibly impressive and I look forward to visiting regularly to see what their curation team is selling next.
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Museum working, game playing and dog loving geek. Tune in for musings about the GLAM sector, and generally geekiness.
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