Renegade Craft Fair: Long Tail No More?
Been keeping track of this pretty compelling developing debate occuring on Chris Andersen’s blog about whether or not research supports the existence of a “long-tail” economy now that the internet turned out not to be a fad (wow!). Lots has been written on the groundwork that Andersen’s book put together, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how thinking about the commercial effects of the web gets shaped by the discussion.
WSJ recently did a story on it. As per usual of their style, it’s pretty haughty of newfangled technology types, but still pretty informative. I’m still pretty skeptical that the long tail is a totally bankrupt way of conceptualizing the web economy — true, Andersen is sometimes overstepping what his data seems to suggest, but generally I think we’ll find that the Long Tail works for some markets, and not for others.
However, viewing on a microlevel, I have to admit that the recent Renegade Craft Fair that went down in San Francisco a few weeks back shook my faith. Totally ancedotal, but unsettling nonetheless. It was essentially a big gathering of artists that usually hang out on Etsy and otherwise make a living selling cool small-scale crafts. Lots of fun. But, walking around the fair, it was pretty suprising to see how much the same all the products from different vendors looked.
Full disclosure: I think Threadless is awesome and Etsy (and its most recent project Alchemy) are amazing amazing crowdsourced businesses. But it’s been somewhat eerie over the past few years to see the DIY/Hipster/Techie community that’s developed around these online communities resolve to a relatively narrow aesthetic band.
If long tail held strong in retail markets completely, we’d expect these open communities of creative contribution (Etsy in particular) to support design diversity between many various artists serving niche markets, making many different tastes entirely sustainable. But really, it appears like the market still travels largely over the same narrow paths.
Perhaps even more troubling, many of the crafts on sale seemed to show the clear influence of big market players like Urban Outfitters or the UglyDolls (or is it shawnimals?), that seem to have set the aesthetic choices of all the smaller vendors, which threatens the long tail hypothesis for retail even more. (Or is it the other way around? Wonder if there’s been any marketing studies on that).
In any case, was jotting down some shared commonalities among 80-90% of the items on sale, figured it might be worth reproducing them here.
The Current “Consolidated” DIY Style:
Animals: birds (ravens and owls in particular), elephants, octopuses, things with antlers, rabbits.
Images: hearts, organs, skeletons, intricate floral print, robots, clocks, Obama, trees, knitting/sewing pride (notably, there’s been a downshift in the use of brightly colored guns as an image)
Coloring/Shading: colors on beige, greens, purples, neon colors on subdued colors, no outlines for illustrations.
Time Periods Where Print Images Are Drawn From: the 1950s or the late 19th century. Almost exclusively.
I mean, they look great. But really, these images are SO constant, I’m tempted to create a generic print generator for all your independent designer needs. That’d be pretty handy, cafepress a bunch of shirts on Etsy and BAM, instant profit.
