New home, new name

black&quickly is now b&q creative and you can henceforth come knocking on our virtual door at http://www.bandqcreative.com/

We do so hope you’ll come to visit, as we’re working quite hard on a number of projects, partnerships and daily postings.

— b&q

Why one T-shirt is better than five

• Wearing five would probably make you sweaty.

• If you wear T-shirts often enough to need five of them, you’re probably under-dressed about 80% of the time.

• Owning one instead of five saves around $75 — enough to pay for six years of Vanity Fair, or two months of an apple a day.

• Cotton is among the most pesticide-intensive crops on the planet.

• Just one T-shirt makes it easy to travel light, especially by foot or bicycle where storage is scarce.

• No wasted time deciding which T-shirt to wear.

• You learn that what you think is enough is really too much.

“Action sports” is not a misnomer (Part 2)

This is a rebuttal to Part 1, posted previously.

The growth in off-board training and professionalism in action sports is a sign of maturity, rather than of a culture losing its way. Recall that no sport begins its life as an established institution; basketball wasn’t born as the NBA, golf wasn’t invented for the Masters. Both rose from obscurity to inspire Nike shoes and committed cable packages and kids’ leagues worldwide. Board sports are simply following an age-old trajectory.

Everything we include under the term “conventional athletics” was once just a makeshift diversion from daily labor, or else some form of military practice, and skateboarding (for instance) is no different. There’s nothing unique about a board as compared to a ball or a track or a court; every sport (every subculture, in fact) undergoes changes and growing pains as it becomes more widely adopted. Action sports’ evolution from fringe counter-culture to global phenomenon mirrors that of yoga, or internet use, or upscale coffeehouse patronage.

The current friction in surf/skate/snow communities over this unwelcome jockiness arises from a basic branding trick. Boarding is sold to its practitioners — both literally (through product marketing) and figuratively (as a cool tribe of which to be part) — as something special, slightly off-center, and protected from the ravages of the hated mainstream. Other subcultures sell out, but we don’t; it’s in our nature to quit the team, dodge the draft, call in sick, question everything.

But we haven’t been rebels for a couple of generations now; the notion that we are has survived only because we badly want to imagine ourselves the masters of our own lives and decisions, un-beholden to The Man. Rebels! If we can achieve that sense of control with the swipe of a credit card — a board = an image — then that’s much easier and more fun than actually behaving like individuals, which is risky and difficult.

Being an individual hasn’t much to do with how hard other people work to excel at something you enjoy — but this seems to be the premise of our disdain for professionalism in action sports (How dare they try?!).

In truth, being an individual hasn’t much to do with other people at all; that’s why it’s called being an individual. Get over it and go ride.

— Stuart

From the authors

If you’ve found your way here somehow, we’re patently ecstatic — but you’re early. Please pour yourself a drink — the cabinet’s just there — and make yourself comfortable as we develop this site into something worthy of your brilliant, curious mind. It really is so good to see you.

— The authors

“Action sports” is a misnomer (Part 1)

Is bowling a sport, or a game? Is ice-dancing a sport or an art form? Is golf a sport or a hobby?

The only useful response to each of these questions is: It’s whatever you want it to be. There’s no point putting labels on things that inherently resist definition — things like skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding, for instance. Not everyone will agree and nothing will be accomplished.

But that answer is unsuitable when it comes to separating people into an Us and a Them — and that’s what young people expect from their “action sports” (note that the term itself is just a waffly rendition of “sport,” one that’s eschewed and ridiculed by actual participants.) We define ourselves through these activities, and because we have an ingrained need to self-categorize, we must know: Am I an athlete, or a skater?

This identity crisis pervades board sports today, wherein opportunities for real money and fame have sparked an arms race of sorts: boarders need to get serious about pushing their performance levels in order to stay relevant. That’s problematic because modern boardriding is chartered as a distinctly non-serious activity in the first place. It seems that the high-performance tail has begun to wag the lifestyle dog, so to speak — being that lifestyle is the reason there’s even any action sports industry to speak of. It’s all backwards.

Furthermore, the sponsor dollars on offer, which boarders will do any number of pushups and wind sprints to capture, are supplied by selling that lifestyle more than by selling a performance standard. The appeal of a Shaun White depends far less on his adding yet another rotation in the half-pipe than on the perception that Shaun is a flashy gallivant having an unreasonably good time, eight days week. At some point, high performance exhibits diminishing returns, if and when it comes at the cost of that freewheeling image board sports are built around.

When the fun goes, the audience will go as well — or at least change.

— Stuart

Quiet creative drowns out loud noise

Reading a book is linear; one page cedes to the next in a very predictable way. Reading blogs is non-linear; Related News and Blogrolls and Archives and hyperlinks can send one pinging around the web for hours, plunging into topics totally remote from the initial inquiry. But because the value of a website and its author depends so strongly on their ability to identify and promote other good websites and authors, meandering from link to link is often quite worthwhile. The “If you like me, you’ll like this” method of sharing information online is really a curating process whereby trust is built between the reader and the recommending party, and whereby the best linked content rises to the top.

The same holds true offline in the cutting edge youth market. Referrals from an influencer are a much more organic and fruitful means of identifying good quality than, say, clever SEO or an expensive ad campaign. The pushers of “loud” content — content that draws attention by being the most ubiquitous or well-distributed — don’t have the authoritative equity to draw on that a quieter but more established influencer has. We’ll copy the coolest kid in school before we follow the million-dollar exhortations of a Fortune 500 marketer.

Brands looking to make a connection with young people need to find and utilize the core consumer who can act as a stone in the pond of their market, making a splash that sends ripples to even the farthest corners without being perceived as phony or alien. By tailoring strategy and creative to the influencer, a marketer can be much quieter in its approach, while still ultimately drowning out the efforts of its louder competitors.

— Stuart

Red Bull Natural

In a SURFING Magazine web post that speaks with inane brevity to surfer Jamie O’Brien on the topics of his Red Bull sponsorship and consumption habit, someone named “1tubejunkie” left the following comment:

JOB is young and healthy. He’s obviously not too concerned with healthy eating habits. If he was, he has enough pull that he could probably get Red Bull to make a naturally honey sweetened drink. That would be a good thing for RB because they might pull in more healthy eaters who also enjoy an energy drink now and then.

Intriguing notion, surely it’s been tossed around by Red Bull executives. Even were it to be a commercial failure in its own right, some all-natural version of Red Bull seems like a no-brainer in the context of the brand’s greater marketing goals. The act of simply making an all-natural product available would foster some goodwill with moms and whistle-blowers, who are quick to compare  caffeine- and preservative-packed energy drinks with the wares of a Marlboro or a Smirnoff. Those naysayers are a major obstacle to penetrating the youth market — much of which has yet to develop a taste for coffee — but to which Red Bull and others are reticent to pitch directly. A report from Beverage Marketing notes that:

Because of some negative perceptions surrounding energy drinks, Red Bull has been mindful of not marketing itself to children and other non-adults, but even so, it is evident the company has made indirect strides to tap into the teen market.

Those strides could be made more aggressive and explicit, and would be far less assailable from a health standpoint, if Red Bull Natural were on shelves nationwide. To illustrate, consider something like Frosted Mini-Wheats, which are now made with 100% whole grain and are therefore — as far as the average American is concerned — the nutritional equal of fresh spinach. It doesn’t take much.

Furthermore, the cachet of a natural product containing recognizable (read: pronounceable) ingredients — particularly among active, upwardly mobile Gen Y consumers who demand more such “real” food — might attract new fans to the Red Bull brand. Coffee, the main competition for caffeine dollars among young working adults and students, has the advantages of antioxidant content and organic/Fair Trade certification, if desired. Red Bull certainly doesn’t, but could at least put up a fight on the health front by placing “Made with raw organic cane sugar” labels on a new green/silver can. I think I would try one.

— Stuart

Marketing women’s surfing

Is it conceivable that female surfers (not their physically abler, aerially contorted male counterparts) might be the ones who move the chains of the sport in the next five years? Even after decades of sideshow status, during which it’s been all but concluded that female pros are as relevant to performance surfing as seagulls?

Yes, definitely.

I’d argue, at least, that women have a golden opportunity to expand their influence in the sport — that they could gain major “significance share” off of the men — and that in so doing, the successful ones would position themselves as marketing powerhouses for endemic sponsors and non.

The rub, as the women should understand by now, is that none among them can compete with the men in terms of surfing ability. To resist this genetic truth is to squander the chance women have to be personalities and ambassadors of an enviable lifestyle, one that isn’t predicated on progressive surfing. Technology offers the smart, attractive, stylish, worldly surf chick a chance to broadcast herself in any fabulous context she should choose. Alton Brown and Anthony Bourdain have done it with food; Rob Dyrdek has done it with skateboarding; Obama did it with “change.”

A girl like Carissa Moore, with her ear to the technological ground, could leverage any combination of platforms and media to bolster her — here it comes — personal brand, and thereby be light-years ahead of the women who bang their heads against a performance wall trying to gain legitimacy. Just recognizing which battle to fight, and which weapons are available, would be a major victory for women’s surfing.

— Stuart

Old fashion

The Great American Apparel Diet has nothing to do with Dov Charney, and nothing to do with his revolving line of trendy basics. But maybe it should. The “diet” is a challenge voluntarily taken up by a group of women who’ve pledged to buy no new clothing for a year, in hopes of saving planet and cash, and maybe having some revelation about consumption = evil.

This experiment should be a prerequisite for college admission; it should be a cultural institution, or should perhaps be rewarded with tax credits — not for the obvious reasons mentioned, but rather to drive home an ugly truth of industrial fashion: that it survives by a process of planned obsolescence. A style is only “in” if contrasted with whatever preceded it, which by then must be “out.” No secret, but it’s a notion worth instilling in the youth before we embark on an adulthood of repeatedly buying the latest textile garbage. We’re lulled into a false sense of timelessness via the “out of closet, out of mind” policy, but being forced to keep that cardigan or fedora on heavy rotation long after the novelty has worn off might make us think twice about choosing quality in fashion.

The Great American Apparel Diet brings up another concept worth considering, namely that when we say someone has “style,” we’re most likely making a comment on

a)    the recentness of his purchase (a temporal observation, as in, you happen to have been to the mall lately compared with other people) or

b)   his clothing budget, in that he has enough money to frequently make new wardrobe acquisitions.

In neither case does true style enter into the equation. It’s the rare person who employs real creativity or original thought in conjuring a remarkable outfit — and that, as one woman involved in the Diet noted, becomes obvious when new clothes are outlawed. Writing on the project’s blog, she said she hoped the Diet would, “provide a good exercise in discipline, using what I have to create new looks.”

Which is more admirable than reaching for the credit card.

(via PSFK)

— Stuart

Cities as brands

Clothes are put on and then stripped, coffee cups are drained and discarded, but the city in which a young person lives is a brand that he or she must rock at all times. It’s a pervasive symbol of how we choose to live, what values we embrace, and of the types of people with whom we associate. Even while traveling away from home, we have to carry into every conversation and new acquaintance the connotation of being from LA or living in Boston. Below are some of the geographic “brands” connecting most strongly with young Americans today.

Portland: This city’s social connotations read like an encyclopedia of Gen-Y buzzwords: environmentalism, cycling, microbreweries, direct-trade coffee, and Nike, just to name a few.

NYC: The original city-as-identity. Young, native New Yorkers still find the place impossible to leave, and outsiders remain drawn to vague notions of “lofts” and “the Village” and to high-powered futures in a tailored suit. Or, alternatively, whatever is the polar opposite of a tailored suit.

Orange County: Specifically the southern coastal portion, which — as a bastion of new money not encroached upon by industry/serious academia and insular in its conservatism — is free to embrace the character of its televised self (Laguna Beach, The OC etc.).

Silicon Valley: Self-associating with the place (and thereby the Web 2.0 community at its rawest, its most funded and its most innovative) is an intellectual tag somewhat akin to Ivy League enrollment. For its particular niche, no physical workspace carries the same aura.

San Francisco: South Park did a whole episode about SF, during which the word “smug” played heavily in describing its populace — but that’s only an assessment from the Green angle, which is not only a point of pride to Gen-Y, it also ignores the foodie, gay, design and professional elements that make young San Franciscans want to scream their allegiance from the roof of a restored Victorian.

— Stuart