Small Data Read online

  That’s when I decided to conduct a little experiment. For the next week and a half, every time I flew into a capital city—Berlin, Bern, Paris, Rome, London—I left my hotel and took a long walk. I had no intention of sightseeing. I had a single mission: to track the gazes of every woman on the sidewalk as they passed another woman on the sidewalk. I realized that almost always, the first thing a woman’s eyes landed on were the other woman’s shoes.

  Back on the job, I began photographing the inside of closets, taking photo after photo of the shoes inside. A week later, I returned to the same girls’ bedrooms, where I decided to take additional photos of the insides of their closets. Which was when I noticed a strange thing had taken place in only seven days’ time. Contrasting the photos I’d taken a week before against the new set, I found that the appearance and even the sequence of the shoes had changed. Only rarely was a pair of shoes in its old spot. This confused me, considering that almost every girl had told me that despite the number of shoes she wore, she seldom put on more than one or two pairs a week. Still, when I brought up this contradiction, most girls shrugged. Maybe they’d tried on the shoes, maybe they hadn’t. They couldn’t remember.

  When you gaze at one thing for a long time, you become blind, and as far as teenaged shoe wear was concerned, I felt as though I’d lost my ability to see things clearly. If I can’t understand something, or if something makes no sense, I need to walk away from it for a few days and shock my senses back to normal. In this case, I needed to look elsewhere within the same family ecosystem, but at another end of the spectrum: the bathroom.

  Some girls had their own bathrooms; others shared bathrooms with siblings; still others shared family bathrooms. Not surprisingly, most were stocked with standard products like toothbrushes, toothpaste tubes, deodorants, perfumes and lip glosses. What was missing? Anything? No. Nothing was missing. Or was there? It took a few days for the answer to hit me: there were few if any face or hand creams, and when there were, the lotions I saw were water-based. Ten years earlier, the face and hand creams you’d find in most girls’ bathrooms were oil-based. Oil-based creams not only last longer, they also cause less damage to skin in cold weather. Yet in only a decade, they had vanished from girls’ bathrooms. Why?

  Hand creams. Skin creams. Selfies. Hidden shoe collections. It was almost the definition of small data. Alone, none of these things had anything significant to say, but together, they indicated a possible hypothesis. That hypothesis—if I could even call it that at that stage—was, possibly, connected to technology. The moment I realized that oil-based hand and face creams had disappeared from girls’ cosmetic collections, my first thought was that face and hand moisturizers make users’ fingers fatally sticky. They leave gluey-looking marks on keyboards and space bars. Not only that, but shining skin also creates a reflective glare, which most people would agree is antithetical to the spirit of a good selfie. Most girls are canny enough to know that oil-based creams, text messaging and selfie taking don’t mix.

  By now I had a theory in mind but I first needed to collect more evidence. Over the next few days, in every home I visited, I asked the same question: would the girls—or their parents—be willing to show me their monthly cell phone statements? Not just the short form, either, or the amount they owed to landline and cell phone providers, but the extended version, the one that enumerated all their mobile phone calls and text messages? Some girls and their parents hesitated; others looked at me strangely; still others asked if this was really necessary. Yet when I explained my theory, most of the mothers were just as intrigued as I was.

  Why was I asking? Because a single question lay unanswered, and I knew that monthly cell phone statements could help me zero in on the answer. What, exactly, was going on in girls’ bedrooms between 6 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. every morning? Most girls told me they got up early in the morning, and “got ready for school.” Based on my bedroom visits, I know they weren’t spending time in the shower. How did I know this? From past work I’d done with a European shampoo manufacturer, I know that the bigger the hole in the spout of a shampoo bottle, the more bottles the manufacturer can sell. The reasons why are obvious. When you squeeze a bottle with a large spout, more shampoo than necessary comes out. The bottles thus empty out faster, obliging us to buy replacement bottles. There is, I knew, a direct correlation between the length of a shower and the size of the hole in a shampoo bottle. The bigger the hole, the longer the shower. The smaller the hole, the shorter the shower. I’d tucked this phenomenon away as a curiosity, nothing more, but realized now it might explain more than I’d thought.

  With the help of my assistant, I spent the next 48 hours poring through phone bills, and when I was done, I knew my hypothesis was right. Phone bills are “big data” seemingly without value, but with the addition of small data, we soon came up with a strong theory. By studying families’ cell phone data plans, it was clear that girls were waking up earlier and earlier, despite going to bed later and later. (It’s little wonder that sleep deprivation among teenagers is such an issue around the globe.) Most household digital phone use began regularly at around six in the morning, which was the precise time most girls told me they rolled out of bed. Still, it wasn’t what you might think. The girls I interviewed weren’t prompt do-gooders eager to ensure they made it to school in time, or turned in an error-free term paper. No, they were waking up early and, in the stillness of their homes or apartments, using that time to text their friends one selfie after another.

  Speaking approximately, the average girl took 17 selfies every morning. Why? The obvious answer is that thanks to technology, they could. A less smart-alecky answer is that humans are fundamentally insecure people, that at least in early adolescence we want to be like everyone else, and that the fear of expulsion from our tribe is stronger than practically anything else. That said, fashion will always dictate its needs and changes, and for teenaged girls, there seemed to be three points, or angles, of desire. The first began in the privacy of their bedrooms, where they surfed products and fashions online. The second involved planning and strategizing about what they would wear that day and the next. The third angle was now out in the open, and the girls—and the size of the holes in the shampoo bottles—confirmed it when I asked them about it, too.

  It appeared that every morning, after waking up, the first thing they did was snap photographs of the clothes and shoes they were considering wearing, and text them to all their friends, who would respond positively or negatively. They spent every morning like this, coordinating their fashion choices, using their peers as stand-ins for Anna Wintour, critics who could weigh in not only about what looked best, but who could also ensure two girls wouldn’t show up at school wearing the same shirt, shoes or pair of pants.

  Like any members of a tribe, these girls were dressing and color-coordinating their identities in the world. As I found out earlier, their goal wasn’t to stand out so much that they might become phosphorescent; their goal was to stand out only slightly. Their parents, naturally, had no idea about any of this, nor should they have. This low-key fashion parade took place behind closed doors, in the stillness of the early morning.

  Again, none of us are immune to the pressures of fashion and status, and if nothing else, Facebook and other social media sites have made what is implicit about human beings—what, before the Internet, we used to imagine or theorize about, without any supporting data—explicit. Even the most confident people on earth are insecure when no one’s looking. Traveling as much as I do, I spend a lot of time in airport lounges, where I sit surrounded by expensively dressed businessmen tapping away on their laptops or talking on their phones. Over the years I’ve noticed that many of them turn their boarding cards upside down, or else park them in their lapel pockets, so that you can’t make them out. Eventually, I figured it out. These men’s gold Visa or American Express cards gave them access to the business and first-class lounge, but in truth they were traveli
ng in economy class. Also? Pore through any businessman’s wallet and you will find that any number of club memberships and credit cards expired long ago. Yet these cards are often prominently displayed. No matter our age or gender, we are always sending out conscious and unconscious signals to the world—and the girls I interviewed were no exception.

  What did morning selfies have to do with the world of adolescent fashion, you might be wondering? How could I take an observation, or a series of discordant observations, and wrap them into a case, or argument, or strategy for helping Tally Weijl?

  It bears repeating that the Web has destroyed the concept of “local,” not just as it connects to souvenirs, but in how we feel we stack up to others. Before the Internet, we contrasted ourselves to people in our high schools and hometowns, and to friends attending nearby schools. These days, we compare ourselves to many millions more people our age across the globe. Teenaged girls are especially susceptible to falling into this trap, where nothing they wear, or do, is ever good enough unless their friends validate it first.

  The extreme coordination required to align clothing daily has made girls’ response time shorter. In the old days, girls might have coordinated outfits in the weeks and days before a prom or other significant school event took place. In an Information Era, this level of coordination can easily take place every morning, and it has a direct and consequential effect on retailers like Tally Weijl. After all, comparing and contrasting clothes and shoes forces young girls to add even more items to their existing collections. The need for even more shoes, more shirts, more pants, more lingerie, more sweaters, more coats and more scarves increases accordingly. With multiple fashion “seasons,” the adolescent girls of today are forced to refresh and replenish their wardrobes almost constantly.

  Tally Weijl had given me a specific mission: to dig up the small data that would not only create and strengthen brand loyalty, but also, in an industry that demands change and reinvention every two months, could remain novel for decades. No retailer in the world catered to young women in the gray area between childhood and their future adult selves. It was uncharted territory. To attract and retain its core demographic, Tally Weijl had to appeal to the teddy bear and the sophisticated Victoria’s Secret model at the same time.

  Combining the offline and online world is known across the retail industry as retail convergence. In response, some retailers today have digitally “live” shelves—similar to those electronic speed limit signs that tell you how fast you are driving as you go past them—that customers can swipe with loyalty cards that offer real-time online or in-store discounts, and Waze, the community-based traffic and navigation app, has teamed up with a number of corporations, including Target, to offer geo-location-enabled deals and discounts at nearby stores.

  Fashion retailers, Tally Weijl among them, are understandably frightened of losing their hold on the young female shopper who is nonetheless almost never offline. To create our own methods of convergence, the Tally Weijl board and I had to agree on what the word social meant in an Information Age. We agreed that offline and on, the biggest advantage of shopping is its social benefits. Shopping gets us out of the house, and stores and malls provide a community, even a small city, of fellow fashion believers. Another thing online retailers cannot do is replace tactility, the human desire to touch and “feel” a shirt or pair of pants before buying it—which is perhaps why Amazon opened its first bricks and mortar bookstore in Seattle in late 2015.

  The Internet is also a city that rivals the offline retail world in connectedness, sociability—and place. It gives users access to stores, and brands, and other countries that most of our hometowns would find it hard to compete with. It also offers users social equity and belonging, the approval and disapproval of a peer group whose opinions now define and dominate teenaged girls’ lives. At the same time, when we do anything online, including shop, we’re alone. My goal was to bring together the authentic sociability of shopping offline with the artificial company that online shopping offers, to create something that, as far as I knew, the world of retail had never seen before.

  But when I proposed it to the Tally board, my first concept was a flop. What if we created a dream house, or loft, where a select group of girls could live, I asked the board? We could recruit them via a special in-store contest, or even via a Willy Wonka–like Golden Ticket system. The girls could live in the loft, courtesy of Tally Weijl, and we’d also provide them with perks including a 24-hour chauffeur, a catwalk, a spa and a music studio. We would stream their parties, shows and get-togethers on the Tally Weijl website, in stores, on the brand’s YouTube channel and via Periscope, the live-streaming app. In return, the house or loft would serve as a word-of-mouth broadcast center for the Tally Weijl brand.

  Everyone liked the idea, to the extent that we began looking for affordable Parisian real estate. A year later, we still hadn’t found the perfect property, and in the end the chief designer pulled the plug on the idea, not willing to compromise the Tally Weijl brand by using a less aspirational locale. But two weeks later, the board approved a second concept, and so far it seems to be working extremely well.

  The new Tally Weijl—Tally 2.0—was rolled out in 2013, in a pilot store in Vienna. Since then, its success has spread across numerous cities in Europe.

  Knowing that adolescent girls are changeable, and not especially loyal to much of anything, I wanted to create a religious temple in the new Tally Weijl. My Subtext Research had taught me that girls today, or at least the ones I’d interviewed, needed something they could believe in, and many no longer had that in their lives. In my experience, once girls uncovered that belief, and found a place where they could come together and even worship as a tribe, they would and could remain loyal to something. My hope was that thing would be the new Tally store.

  If the old Tally Weijl was cramped, noisy and abrasive, the new Tally Weijl was spacious, colorful, flamboyant and over-the-top. We hired a well-known English theater director who turned Vienna’s flagship Tally store into an event, a circus, a spectacle. On opening night, costumed actors—stilt walkers, street musicians, bearded men in dark glasses and frilly dresses—strolled in and out of the store, sipping pink bubbly water out of champagne glasses. Waitresses in green and purple wigs served trays of cotton candy and pink heart-shaped cookies and oversized lollipops. Inside and outside the store, palm and tarot card readers offered readings as white-powdered circus acrobats bent themselves into curlicue shapes.

  An encyclopedia could be written about the gay influence on heterosexual culture and fashion, and the ways in which gay men serve as bellwethers for trends eventually adopted by the mainstream. Two decades ago, for example, men who wore earrings were “gay,” and hair gel and moisturizer were also emblems of the gay male world. Today, of course, any number of straight men sport an earring and use facial creams. Where, and how, does the gay male influence on heterosexual culture begin? The answer is complex, but as far as fashion is concerned, the tastes of gay men often influence young girls who, seeing how good something looks on a gay man, persuade their boyfriends to try it out. Working with Tyra Banks on developing a new merchandising line that built on her strong public awareness from America’s Next Top Model, FABlife and Victoria’s Secret, I spent a day studying her database to uncover the brand’s core demographics. The line was directed at teenaged girls, or college-age girls, but I was also surprised to learn that the target audience of many lingerie lines was gay males in their early and late twenties. The reasoning was simple and time-tested: if the line found favor with a younger homosexual population, who found it stylish, or provocative, or elegant, it was only a matter of time before a gay male recommended it to his younger heterosexual female friends. Moreover, many gay men are extremely opinionated; if they dislike a brand or store, find it corny or tacky, they will come right out and say so. Their opinion, in short, acts as a kind of quality control. If a young, observant gay male li
kes something, it’s probably all right, which is why the crowd flocking at Tally’s on opening night had a big percentage of young gay men in attendance, whom we hoped might serve as fashion arbiters for younger female consumers.

  Earlier, I brought up the question Steve Jobs asked Disney CEO Robert Iger: “If a store could talk, what would it say to the people entering it?” Tally Weijl 2.0—which was chic, trendy, colorful, and simultaneously child-like and sophisticated—had a lot to say. Instead of talking down to them, I wanted Tally to communicate directly to the girl who loved her teddy bear while also keeping her gaze trained on a future international catwalk. Our vision, one that reflected the mind-set of both the brand and its customers? Eat dessert first. Tally Weijl’s new flagship store itself was a sexy, girlish, phantasmagoric explosion of raspberries and greens, lime-green rugs and pink-red ottomans, all atop a floor of authentic wooden pallets. The deliberately retro-looking décor included reupholstered chairs from Ireland and Scotland, cozy and traditional and at the same time jazzy and diva-like; its mix of fanciful and functional assured teenaged consumers that they were still within a safe family environment, but also suspended in a world of fantasy and theater. We also created what I called the “Best Friends Area,” an area of the store that included a giant bed where girls could rest, relax and catch up on text messages. We even provided cell phone cords and chargers to ensure there was no conceivable excuse for a girl to leave Tally Weijl—at least not until she had finished shopping.