Loose Cannon: Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?
Stout heart, readers: There is some direct marketing commentary in the second half of today’s column. I review a Web site that creates a rich online experience around a fairly mundane offering — men’s haircuts.
Before we get to that, an update: I was down in New Orleans this past weekend, attempting to eat my weight in chicken-and-sausage gumbo. But I also revisited a few folks I wrote about a year ago during my coverage of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans (Loose Cannon: Here is New Orleans and related stories). If you click on the above link, you may have to scroll down a bit to see the coverage — but I promise it’s there.
Part I
A year and a half after Katrina battered the Gulf Coast, New Orleans is still battling to get on its feet. The work force which fed into the city’s hospitality-and-tourism-based economy is still dispersed, and customer care is not what it was.
Mail service, especially for First Class mail, is recovering, but it’s not up to pre-storm levels. Standard mail is not as reliable as First Class, several merchants told me, and Philipe LaMancusa, co-founder of the French Quarter’s Kitchen Witch cookbook store (www.kwcookbooks.com), reported that parcel post, which he uses both to receive and send out merchandise, is especially unreliable.
Another merchant, Ginja Jar proprietress Ginger Mexic, told me last year that the insurance policies on her art collectibles store were canceled after the hurricane. She’s found another insurer, but she’s nervous about holding on to this policy. In fact, when someone recently smashed the front window of her shop and made off with a few items, she chose not to file a claim, fearing loss of her coverage.
Overall, the mood among retailers who have reopened is grim determination. Several who are struggling to make a go of it told me if another major hurricane hits, they will leave and not return. And many expect a rash of closings during the summer, after the city’s major early-year events such as Jazzfest, the French Quarter Festival and Mardi Gras are over, the oppressive heat sets in and the tourist trade drops off.
Not that the streets are teeming with visitors now. Shops that rely on selling large volumes of “trinkets and trash” — cheap t-shirts, beads and the like — are closing. Along the very commercial Royal Street, the most common new businesses are high-end art galleries, where a single sale can cover a month’s rent.
Outside the Quarter there is evidence of construction and redevelopment, but it’s not as pronounced as within. And the Eighth and Ninth wards, which were devastated, remain so.
For all this, there is improvement over where the French Quarter was a year ago. Businesses are keeping longer hours than they had been — during the initial months after the hurricane, restaurants were closing after one shift due to a lack of waitstaff. Debbie Lindsey, Kitchen Witch’s ever-effervescent co-founder, has signed a five-year lease extension for the store. And contractor and construction trucks dot the city. The smell of newly cut wood provides stiff competition for the odors of drunken revelry traditionally found on Bourbon Street — and at times the newly cut wood smell is winning.
Part II
Every once in a while, when giving a live presentation, I’ve mentioned a Web site created for a New Orleans-based business which illustrates how even a run-of-the-mill activity can serve as a springboard for a captivating online experience. What makes this site even more exceptional is that it was not designed for a large company.
Click on the Web site for Aidan Gill for Men, a Magazine Street barber, (www.aidangillformen.com/), and you’re immediately presented with a luxurious description of a shave. Investigate a link titled “The Shave Perfected,” and up pops a loving treatise to King Gilette, creator of the Gilette razor, alongside a photo essay on the Platonic ideal of facial hair removal. You can almost smell bay rum wafting from the page.
The site’s “virtual tour” feature does not consist of static photographs. Instead, it offers a viewer-directed camera that swoops and zooms throughout the store, providing glimpses of welcoming leather-lined barber chairs and other appropriate features. (Playing with the camera is a fun way to kill a few minutes at work — in the name of researching Web site tactics, of course.)
For those susceptible to vertigo who wish to avoid the moving camera, the site features a “Dandy of the Week” — a full-color drawing and brief biography of a historical figure noted, at least by Aidan Gill, for his meticulous detail to personal grooming.
Finally, the site offers a terrific example of line extension. No, not the shop’s online store — although there is an e-commerce link, of course — but rather “The Child’s Heirloom Haircut” page. “There is something momentous about a child’s first haircut, the tiniest first step toward growing up,” this page starts. “It’s an occasion when anything can happen. Trepidation might give way to tears at the sight of the scissors, or a boy might look into his father’s eyes and find the courage to take his seat in the chair….”
This momentous haircut is commemorated with “an 8″ X 10″ black and white museum-quality print by Cheryl Gerber, housed in a handsome frame with an acid-free mount and finished with a lock of your child’s hair beneath the photograph.” If I have a single quarrel with the site, it’s that this is portrayed as a father/son bonding experience. This level of grooming-based scrapbooking strikes me as being at least as attractive to mothers as fathers.
The haircut, I should mention, is done “under the scissors of proprietor Aidan Gill himself.” The man is clearly a masochist (as I child I was a holy terror when placed in a barber chair) but his Web site, which offers some very creative ways a haircut can be turned into an experience, shows that he’s a hell of a marketer as well.
(A tip of the Loose Cannon chapeau to Wunderman’s Andrew Sexton, who brought the Aidan Gill site to my attention.)
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