The Appeal of Need Supply Co.
I have a theory of horror film that goes something like this: one reason we enjoy horror film is that the genre invites us to try and understand the phenomenology of the situations presented therein. Take The Boy (William Brent Bell, 2016), for example: The Boy is about Brahms, a porcelain doll whose wealthy “parents” commit suicide after consigning it to the care of Greta, a young woman portrayed by Lauren Cohan. The film’s trailer presents the nature of the Brahms doll as a central question. Is the doll’s unprovoked movement supernaturally derived, à la Child’s Play (Tom Holland, 1988)? After seeing the trailer for the first time, I thought that the exterior of the doll could be a porcelain cast or shell covering an underdeveloped — perhaps premature? — human being.
The Boy’s central question, the nature of Brahms, should be thought of as not only a question of the identity of Brahms (Who/what is Brahms? Why is Brahms purportedly able to move about?), but also as a question of what it means for Greta to exist in the world of The Boy. Greta rather straightforwardly asks the cosmos what is possible in the film’s world in a conversation with Malcolm, a grocery “boy” portrayed by Rupert Evans, after the scene where she and Malcolm leave Brahms alone in a room and return a bit later to find him moved from his previous location on the floor. Even though Greta is unsure how Brahms is able to move, she can no longer afford to ignore the doll’s “rules,” since Brahms is moving.
The Boy can thus be thought of as a mystery, the mystery of which pertains to what is possible in the world Greta inhabits. (It should noted that the film neatly answers all of our questions as to the nature of Brahms by its end.) Let us now extend our hypothesis — that the appeal of a property can be understood as to stem from our interaction with it and our subsequent attempt to reconcile the implications of its apparent mechanics.
Need Supply Co. is a Richmond, VA-based boutique fashion and apparel company. While it was founded in 1996 under the name Blues Apparel, the Need Supply brand began to be what it is today in 2008 with the launch of its online store. Need Supply has since become a premier online shopping and lifestyle brand.
Along with its evolving online catalog of curated pieces, the Need Supply website has a blog whose articles run the gamut from straight commentary on the fashion world and interviews of figures in the art world to travelogues of Need Supply employees. The Need Supply website also features a series of “Meet a Maker” videos which highlight a figure in the fashion world whose product is being sold by the company.
Speaking to the difficulties of establishing an online brand’s identity, Gabriel Ricioppo, the Creative Director and co-owner of Need Supply, states in an audio interview that
It’s building some kind of a connection with the customers, and online, obviously, that’s a little bit harder to do because you don’t have that face-to-face. You have to find other ways to do it really. That’s part of why we have the Human Being Journal, we have a blog that we put a lot of energy into. We really try to share with people that there is a culture behind what we’re doing, and I think that’s the same challenge that other stores will have if they are looking at the same kind of thing we are, with that idea of long term growth, and if they want to be around through the changes that just naturally happen in fashion.
Need Supply’s identity is intimately tied to the fact that its sole US retail store and corporate headquarters are located in Richmond, however. Chris Bossola, founder and CEO of Need Supply, states in the same audio interview that
Figuring out that product mix is always key. Being in a small town like Richmond, it’s trying to find that mix of product that’s forward enough to be interesting, but that also is going to sell. That’s been a challenge for us the whole time we’ve been in business. I think it’s one of our strengths online is that we have this broad mix of product that differentiates us from other retailers, and I think that comes from our roots of being here in Richmond. Richmond is a lot like every other city than Manhattan is, or LA. I think that challenge turned out to be the reason that we’ve done so well online.
Need Supply’s Carytown location is highlighted regularly on the company’s various feeds.
Need Supply’s status as a physical place, at the same time that it is an online store, is highlighted to an inadvertently comedic effect in a haul video by YouTube user Michaela Christine.
The reality of Need Supply’s being based in Richmond should thus be thought of as central to the company’s image as a whole.
The term brand is normally conceived as a noun describing (the thing that is) a company. Brands are multivalent and complicated, and the concept is hard to define, yet we all know what a brand is in practice. Coca-Cola is a brand. Xbox is a brand. And Need Supply Co. is a brand.
Sarah Banet-Weiser uses the term brand in a slightly different manner in her 2012 cultural studies monograph Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture. Banet-Weiser uses brand as a verb describing the process by which a thing is made commercial. She writes
While commodities are certainly part of branding — indeed, commodities are a crucial part of these stories about ourselves — the process of branding is broader, situated within culture (5).
Audiences, within capitalist media industries, are not only the targets for products; they are the product, and they are both of these things simultaneously. […] Like the commodification of race, transforming the politics of feminism into a product to be sold means to reify feminism — to make identity into a kind of thing (36).
Banet-Weiser posits branding as the process by which one thing is made into another thing, the latter of which is commercial in nature. Like with brands in general, the difficulty of charting the mechanics by which this process comes about makes definition a non-viable course of action. We see branding happen every day, however.
A good example of branding at work is the Twitter presences of Rooster Teeth Productions’ employees. Rooster Teeth is a video production company based in Austin, TX, that produces a very large amount of video content for YouTube and the company’s own website. The company is known for web series Red vs. Blue and RWBY as well as its more traditional gaming and internet-themed content by its Achievement Hunter and Funhaus “divisions.”
The employees of Rooster Teeth are predominantly the hosts or stars of its content, such as the Rooster Teeth Podcast and On The Spot, and provide voices for almost all of the characters in Red vs. Blue and RWBY. While not all Rooster Teeth employees appear onscreen, the more screen-conscious ones, such as Barbara Dunkelman, Jack Patillo, and Blaine Gibson, will often have very active Twitter followings.
One could say, on a more cynical note, that the Rooster Teeth community’s embracing of the company’s employees through Twitter constitutes a branding of these employees’ personalities or senses of individuality. What should matter in our valuation of Rooster Teeth employees’ Twitter presences, however, is that the community’s following of the company’s stars on Twitter comprises an essential part of what it means to be a part of the distributed Rooster Teeth community. This is the idea behind influence marketing: that the best way to reach a certain kind of consumer is to place your product in their view in the most natural way possible — as a constituent part of the social flows they were already a part of.
We could say that Need Supply Co. constitutes a branding of Richmond, VA: that Richmond, VA, as a thing, is co-opted and made commercial in its relevance to the company’s image as a whole.
We could take the previous point one step further and say that Need Supply’s incorporation of Richmond, VA, into its image as a whole constitutes a branding of place or labor itself: that the unabashedly physical nature of online shopping is laid bare and dramatized. This is the critique of virtualism put forth in thinkpieces on the labyrinthine interiors of Google’s “Steel Mountain”-esque data-storage facilities or Amazon’s steadily propagating number of US fulfillment centers. This is also the critique of virtualism put forth in Goldeneye’s (Martin Campbell, 1995) final scene when James Bond literally puts a wrench in the works of Boris Grishenko’s attempt to arm the Goldeneye weapon. These critiques have two overarching messages: that the physical has always been digital insofar as the physical has always been mediated, and that the digital is overwhelmingly physical.
I would say that we like Need Supply Co. because its phenomenology is not clear-cut. Most people will experience Need Supply as an online shopping destination. They will also know Need Supply, however, as a brand with one retail location in the US and two in Japan; as a blog with beautiful, high-quality photos and interesting articles; as a hip fashion journal; as a company whose employees keep their finger on the pulse of the fashion world.
That is, we like Need Supply Co. because it constitutes a figure of desire for the people that make up its world. A neat definition of Need Supply is not possible because one person’s investment in the property will be different from the next. This is why we can call Need Supply a “lifestyle” brand: Need Supply simply becomes another fold in the way its customers live their lives.