El sentido de la contribución de Buridan

Establishing a narrative that places a company and its products in the context of The Outdoors is key to the marketing strategy used by many companies. The Outdoors, as opposed to The City, is the major hyperreal location selected for hipster marketing, largely because of its status as the more directly positive of the two locations – marketing with The City must necessarily walk a delicate tightrope of gnosis and irony (although plenty of brands do, as we will see later in the example of Relic). The City,

32 Much of the hipster’s nostalgia is diverted into discussions of “timeless” aesthetics that avoid the discomfort of real history, and this is no different, although this particular case is especially convincing.

99 therefore, is visible most often only by the shadow of inauthenticity that it casts over regular life. An association with The Outdoors makes a product symbolic of the myths of adventure, freedom and authenticity, and is therefore a reasonably uncomplicated brand image to maintain. We find two useful examples of how this association is works in Best Made Co. and Sanborn Canoe Co., two American companies that produce camping and outdoor supplies aimed at a hipster audience. Best Made is a high-end outdoor and camping supply store that sells products online and also has a store in New York. Sanborn makes handcrafted canoe paddles and sells them online alongside a number of other similarly themed goods. Both have evidenced significant popularity among hipsters, who regularly re-blog promotional imagery and post images of their purchases from these companies.

These companies make for an interesting (although hardly anomalous) case study because their products appear, at first glance, somewhat incongruous: Best Made specialises in distinctively painted felling axes, which sell for between 275 and 350 American dollars, and Sanborn’s primary product is its range of canoe paddles (also brightly painted), which sell for between 140 and 210 American dollars. Both of these products are handmade in-house and are extremely high quality, genuinely practical tools, which begs the question of what exactly an inner-city hipster wants with a nearly metre-long axe designed for felling trees.

Both companies make extensive use of a feeling of historical continuity in their branding. The addition of Co. to a company name (as with Herschel Supply Co.) is a common device for implying a company’s connection to the past – a connection that, in these cases, is largely symbolic: both were established in 2009. A customer might easily visit the Best Made website and imagine that their business had existed for decades, and that they had stumbled into popularity among hipsters perhaps by accident. Their products are branded in a way clearly designed to suggest that the Best Made name carries significant weight among campers – a good example being their “Famous Red Wool Blanket”, which, rather than actually being famous (how could it be, after only four years in business?) simply has the word FAMOUS woven into the corner. Despite this conceit, the blanket borrows some credibility from a more legitimate source – the blanket itself is actually made by Pendleton Woolen Mills, who they call “undoubtedly the nation's oldest and most legendary maker of wool blankets” and whose history is perhaps close to a real-world approximation of the image that Best Made seeks to cultivate. Similarly, Sanborn’s website places their business and its practices within a “heritage [that]

had been bred in the early years of the 1900s (and most certainly earlier still), through past generations of our families’ paddling in northern Minnesota and beyond”. We see a different method of establishing this same continuity in some of the products for sale by 1924, (made by companies like Atelier de l’Armée and Kiriko) that are made from vintage dead-stock fabric such as tent canvas used in the second world war. It is clear that, for stores that deal in The Outdoors and its associated

100 authenticity, the pedigree of age – or rather, agelessness – is considered to be essential. Sanborn’s statement about its history is deliberately absent any real temporal referents, and Best Made makes no effort, in spite of a clear and consistent overall design ethic, to tie their products to any time period outside of a generalised past – what we see instead is a range that resembles the kinds of things one might find in the musty drawers of a family cabin. As we can see in figure 6, which shows the wall of Sanborn’s offices, this cabin-drawer eclecticism is a popular motif among hipster companies because it allows the customer to imply a wide history of experiences and gnoses rather than only one – to fake the mystery and sense of lived-in antiquity that one gets from rifling through a real cabin’s drawers.

Both companies work to associate their brand with The Outdoors and its authenticity in various ways. The most straightforward of these is Sanborn’s Tumblr (sanborncanoecompany.tumblr.com), which is much like 1924’s in that it places Sanborn’s products within a gallery of other visually and thematically relevant images. These images are generally of The Outdoors and for obvious reasons the majority involve canoeing or show large bodies of water. Many show camping and hiking, and as discussed earlier, most deliberately obscure the faces of human figures, either by distance, angle, or cropping, in order to allow the viewer to place themselves in The Outdoors in their place. Many of these images place focus on the accoutrements of camping trips, showing fashion items like clothing or backpacks, or practical equipment like axes and enamelled mugs (branded with the Sanborn logo), thereby fetishizing their connection to authentic activities and providing a case for their use value. By

Figure 5: a promotional image showing the Best Made axe case, reblogged by Tumblr user wilddirt.

Tumblr users often reblog or post images like this, showing that they associate brands like Best Made with the authenticity in their own Outdoor experiences

Figure 6: "Our wall of assorted things is filling up...” posted by Tumblr user

101 doing this Sanborn gives context to their products and positions them as necessary for engagement with The Outdoors, a quality that is important given both the high cost of their paddles and the relative rarity of their use.

Although Best Made uses their Tumblr page only as a product blog (i.e. simply as a means of announcing new products and the like) they have employed similar strategies of contextualisation through the use of documentary style promotional videos, which are a common tool for hip businesses. There are a number of such videos on Best Made’s website, the most interesting of which is Whole Foods: a short film about Best Made (2012) produced by online magazine Dark Rye. The film begins (after an introduction with text superimposed over a roaring fire, and shots of a man sanding an axe handle and another cutting down a tree) with members of the Best Made team leaving their offices in New York and travelling into the country for a camping trip, and then interviews them about their relationship to the outdoors and the experience of chopping wood. The video is almost unwatchably corny in parts, including an introduction that refers to Best Made’s staff as “true stewards of the land” and a lot of self-satisfied proselytizing about the importance of axes and campfires in human history. In spite of this, the video is very well-shot and well-edited, showing clearly the presence of high-grade equipment and the high level of skill required to get the most out of them, delivering a video that is filled with scenes that would not look out of place if they were posted as an image of The Outdoors on Tumblr. The video makes a very clear distinction between The Outdoors and The City, drawing them and their relative authenticities into contrast. When the group leaves New York it is a dreary, overcast place dominated by imposing buildings that frame each shot like prison walls, giving an oppressive, confining feeling. Filming inside the car, they travel through a similarly claustrophobic traffic tunnel that gives way incrementally to the view through the metal struts above the Brooklyn Bridge and then the open road. The camp site is lush, beautiful and verdant, with the background kept out of focus in order to make it appear endless, and the camera begins to shoot scenes of the process of cutting down a tree in slow motion, set to the slow, soulful sound of what could be a violin. The effect is very clear: no moment is allowed to be imperfect or unmediated in The Outdoors. Excluding the intrusion of narration from some Best Made staff, who without visible embarrassment deliver lines like “that’s what’s so powerful about [an axe]: it’s on the one hand the giver, but also the taker”, this film comes very close to depicting the idealised Outdoors, showing wood-chopping, camaraderie and cooking over a campfire, as well as a location that radiates beauty and serenity. As one narrator explains, these authentic behaviours represent “a return to something that they, I think, they didn’t even know that they had lost” implying that their trip into the wilderness, which has all of the trappings of a ritual, is very much a dip into sacred waters. When the time comes to return to the city, they will do so cleansed and redeemed. These behaviours are shrewdly associated

102 with Best Made products: the wood-cutters use Best Made axes, the cook uses knives, a cooking pot and cutlery that Best Made sells, and most of the people shown have Best Made clothing on. The authentic experience, although it is oversold here, is directly connected with having the right products to take advantage of it. These products, at least until they arrive in the mail, are now known to exist in, or be artefacts of, the authentic Outdoor experience. As we see from the regular appearance of images that show people prominently displaying products like Best Made’s in their own wilderness adventures, this connection between products and the hyperreal is crucial and ultimately very convincing.