PARTY LIKE IT’S 2009

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who stay until the very end of every party – the ones that will order the vodka delivery at 2am and take over the music selection once the host has passed out – and the guests who – once they’ve determined that their personal apex of enjoyment has been reached – slip away without saying a word.

Whether you subscribe to the Leave-While-It’s-Still-Fun philosophy or consider it your moral obligation to always be The Last One Standing, you have probably noticed that being on Social Media lately feels like the neighbors have called the cops and now you’re just waiting for the knock on the door. 

Most people I talk to about “the apps”, all confess that they are currently opening them out of habit, staying way longer than they meant to, and then feeling something akin to self-loathing once they stop scrolling. 

But this isn’t going to be yet another “j’accuse” about how Social Media is draining us of our collective humanity because there is tons of information about this subject and I’m the owner of four second hand clothing shops, not a social scientist.

Instead I want to examine a few of the specific problems that Meta (for simplicity’s sake, I will just focus on this one) poses for small and medium-sized companies like BIVIO Milano – and why I’ve decided to dust off a mostly-forgotten Y2K digital artifact like the humble blog in an attempt to “party” like it’s 2009. 

THE INEQUITY OF A SINGLE PLAYING FIELD

Here’s the thing.

In the “before times” – which, for us “Generation Xers”, lasted until we were in our thirties – a scrappy but solid little local business like BIVIO Milano would never dream of occupying the same advertising space as giant conglomerates, multinational brands, legacy news outlets or worldwide celebrities. A mid-sized second-hand clothing store chain in a city like Milan would never have appeared in the pages of a glossy magazine, a stadium billboard, or national airwaves – much less try to compete with creative teams from billion-dollar advertising companies or PR firms in the production of “campaigns”.

What do my independently-owned brick-and-mortar stores in a mid-sized European Capital have in common with corporate behemoths like Nike, L’Oréal, Disney or LVMH? Not a whole lot. Except that we are expected to engage the exact same customers across the exact same platforms. 

As the American journalist and author Chris Hayes writes in his riveting book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource and explains in an equally excellent interview on Vox,  “…information is limitless. There’s tons of information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone has to fight over that.”

As individuals, you and I could (and may) decide tomorrow to log out of Instagram for a week or a month or the rest of our lives, and if you believe the experts, it would appear that the positives would outweigh the negatives if we did. But as any Business Owner knows, it is unthinkable to not be on Social Media. If your company involves commerce or service or any sort, you MUST have a presence. And nowadays, that presence is undeniably “pay to play”.

So if BIVIO Milano – just like your favorite local breakfast spot, hair salon, and yoga studio – is supposed to “buy that attention” alongside companies who spend more in a month on online ads than we spend in a year on an employee, then honestly, it feels like the game is rigged. Because, of course, it is. 

Even with the “verified blue check” (whose new “multi-tiered” model runs from $15 to $500/month) plus the thousands of dollars we spend a year in “ad spend” – not to mention the person we pay to manage those ads – our “marketing” and “brand storytelling” has stopped feeling fun or creative but now feels merely like an exercise in math and metrics in order to chase an algorithm that nobody understands and appears to change without notice or explanation. And because we are in the throes of late-model capitalism, there is a flourishing eco-system of marketers and digital consultants who would only be too happy to help companies like mine navigate this system…for more monthly fees or “individual consulting” sessions. It’s not that these experts don’t produce “measurable results”, it’s that at a certain point a small business with limited resources has to decide how best to spend its time, energy and money.  

Of course, all this feels even more frustrating for a company like BIVIO – a retail business that began – and remains – primarily “offline”. If we were a direct-to-consumer label, or a brand whose aim was to sell organic sweatshirts or premium electric toothbrushes or gut-health supplements for pets to discerning customers across the globe, of course we would be investing a whole lot of money in trying to get noticed by people who we will never meet or who will never set foot in our workplace. But at BIVIO, we specialize in one-off, orphaned items looking for new homes. We buy and sell hundreds of these items every day, 7 days a week,  and we never know what’s going to come or go at any moment across any of our four locations. Which means that once that specific dark blue, long-sleeved size M Ralph Lauren crewneck sweater priced at €39 sells on the third Friday in March, we might not get another one in for the whole season. What’s the point of taking a photo of it and putting it online? We make less than 10% of our revenue from “remote” sales. The rest comes from people walking into our shops and buying stuff. So what am I “paying to play” for…exactly? I don’t need eyeballs, I need feet. 

WHEN THE BOSS HAS NO ACCOUNTABILITY

How can I put this nicely? The Boss of Meta is a creep. He’s so cringe I wouldn’t let him buy me a drink at a bar if he were the last man on earth (also because he may be part bot). Bro became a billionaire at age 23 yet claims that privacy laws and limits on hate speech are endangering his “core values”. Just listening to him speak feels like a violation of common sense and human decency. 

Strictly from the business angle, working with his company feels like a losing proposition on good days…or a mob shakedown on bad ones. BIVIO has been sending Meta significant sums of money on a regular basis for over a decade, and yet Meta has taken down BIVIO’s account twice in two years without any explanation. I, Hilary, was only able to “recover” it because I, Hilary, was friends with a person who knew people who knew people that worked at Meta, and I, Hilary, spent about 200 hours – hours of my life that I will never get back – dedicated exclusively to begging for help from people who were friends of friends of friends, because attempting to get answers or results through “official” channels were useless. To put it bluntly: there was nobody at that $1.7 trillion company whose actual job it was to explain how BIVIO had violated Meta’s terms of service or tell us if and how we could get a decade of hard work back.

When she refused, he wrote a furious email to…well, my company. And how did he reach us? By simply using the email that you can find on our website. And guess who answered the email? I did. On a Sunday, while my kid was in the bath. Why? Because I am the Boss. So how come a moderately profitable second-hand clothing business run by a divorced mother who lives in a two-bedroom rented apartment gets held to a higher standard and has better customer service than the one run by the third-richest person ever to have existed since the dawn of humankind? 

As we “say” on Instagram (to avoid the robot overlords), F*ck that Sh:t. 

LOOKING TO THE PAST FOR QUALITY DOESN’T JUST APPLY TO CLOTHES

As a purveyor of second-hand fashion, BIVIO is a company that revolves around the past. Our business model is entirely circular by design, and consists of selecting and buying “yesterday’s” stuff from people who no longer wear it, then marking it up and re-selling it to people who will. As someone who believes that capitalism’s obsession with infinite growth will lead to the rapid destruction of our planet and most of the living things on it, I opened BIVIO twelve years ago less out of an interest in clothes or fashion per se, but from the conviction that the redistribution of goods is not just a moral issue, but a practical one. Of course, most folks don’t find that kind of talk very sexy, so our marketing concept tends to lean heavily on the clothes. Also because, we’re like, based in Milan.

Our clients – most of them adorable and not eager to shut us down over a sticky zipper – represent truly diverse segments of nationality, orientation, age and purchasing power. Some are attracted to second-hand shopping for “the bargain” (ie, luxury items at a fraction of the cost) and some, like me, just feel more inspired when consumption has a bit of friction to it – that it’s the “discovery” that makes it fun. 

Yet anyone who gets dressed and pays attention to what their clothes look and feel like when they do, would agree that, on the whole, clothing used to be better. Especially Italians, many of whom still possess closets full of items made entirely by a tailor. However, buying clothing made decades ago doesn’t just mean it was manufactured according to a higher standard, it’s also one of the easiest ways to achieve unique style. The most interesting dressers know that integrating elements from different eras is the best way to not look like anyone else – and genuinely stylish people never look like anyone else. As a nostalgic pragmatist, I often wonder why this search for quality when it comes to clothing doesn’t translate so easily when it comes to communication?

Gen-Z is the most recent generation with access to personal income, so industries across all sectors focus much of their strategy on ways to “capture” them. You could read the ample market research, or you could just believe me when I say that yeah, the “kids these days” are deeply into second-hand. Since half my staff is under thirty and Gen Z makes up a crucial part of my customer base, a huge part of my job is understanding what they like, what they want and how to collaborate and communicate with them. 

I can also tell you that the Y2K trend is real; when items come through my shops that make me want to hide under a table (low-rise jeans, slip dresses with asymmetric hemlines, Juicy Couture sweatsuits), the fresh-faced cuties with a little money to spend snap them up faster than we can put them out on the floor. And it’s not just the clothes.

And this is why a BIVIOblog feels right for this moment and right for this specific business. Our little company has a lot of cool stories to tell and for more than a decade, we’ve managed to do something that feels akin to a miracle – create a “local”, independently-owned chain of shops where people can come in and buy clothes from people they know – clothes that were sold to us by people we know. I’m proud of our pragmatically nostalgic business model and grateful that it’s working, year after exhausting year. But I am tired – and I think my staff is too – of telling BIVIO’s “stories” exclusively through an algorithm engineered by billionaires whose ultimate goal is to remove all “friction” (ie, humanity)  from every aspect of daily life, and whose companies prioritize transactions over interactions.

We’re not leaving the party, and we’re not calling the cops. We’re just gonna go out to breakfast at our favorite local spot, sit down and have a conversation with our friends, out of earshot from the robot overlords.

Welcome to the BIVIOblog.