Friday, December 19, 2008

Sit on this

I've always had the greatest admiration for good salespeople and marketing bods, because it's something at which I'm utterly hopeless. It's a combination of my crapness with strangers, my principled loathing for shopping and consumerism of almost any kind and my utter inability to feign enthusiasm about anything whatsoever, including things I quite like. So I'll say at the outset that Sally, who works for the modern furniture retailer Regency Shop, does good sales. I'm not quite sure why a retailer specialising in modern design should be named after a period of the early 19th century, but hey, maybe that's why I'm not in marketing.

I'm also slightly befuddled as to why Sally contacted me and asked me to put a link to her Beau-Brummell-meets-the-Bauhaus emporium on my blog. To be fair, she does offer a hint:

"I realize that you have knowledge of barcelona :)... it'd be swell if you can place our barcelona chair link on your blog..."

Now I do have a cursory knowledge of Barcelona, having visited the place somewhere between once and three times; well, precisely between once and three times, as in twice, the last being more than eight years ago. It's jolly nice and I hope to go back, this time maybe for more than three days. But I don't know why this should give me any particular insight into a particular piece of furniture about which the only thing I know is that it was designed by Mies van der Rohe. And I'm not even sure how Sally knows about my limited knowledge of Barcelona; a trawl of my blog turns up one reference, in which I make a passing reference to the city in a post otherwise devoted to Cambodia.

But Sally's not done; in a final twist, she clarifies that the Barcelona chair that Regency Shop offers at the very reasonable price of $345 (plus shipping) isn't actually a Barcelona chair, presumably to avoid paying pesky royalties to the Mies van der Rohe estate:

"we call it the ibiza chair."

So Sally wants me to give a mention to this chair, because it's named after somewhere I haven't been. Or, more specifically, because I've been somewhere it's not named after. And you know what? I did!

Told you she was good.

PS: More conceptual Mies stuff here.

5 comments:

Vicus Scurra said...

I am utterly hopeless at genocide, which does not mean I admire the people who do it.
Tell all these marketing and sales people that I ain't buying note.

Rog said...

Blimey she's good though, choosing just the most tenuous link possible to gain your interest and provoke a link and a post.
If she'd made a more obvious approach via her Baudrillard Wardrobe you'd have smelt a rat and ignored it.

West said...

Anyone got any idea of what the shipping costs of getting the Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads might be?

;?

xxx
Bob

Cringe worrification: hiputp

Precisely.

patroclus said...

>>...my utter inability to feign enthusiasm about anything whatsoever, including things I quite like.<<

I refer you to Dorothy Sayers, who observes in 'Murder Must Advertise' that '...the most convincing copy [is] always written with the tongue firmly in the cheek, a genuine conviction of the commodity's worth producing - for some reason - poverty and flatness of style'.

As regards your giving the oxygen of publicity to Regency Shop and its knocked-off Barcelona chair, I hope you realise that in doing so you are depriving the world of meaning, which is quite serious when you think about it.

Tim F said...

But VS, much as we might despise genocidal maniacs, surely we can take a few tips from their sense of purpose? Their project management skills? Their uniforms?

Or the Foucault pouffe, Murph.

Bob, anyone in East Anglia who has Mies furniture is surely burned as a witch, no?

Patroclus: Damn. Wish I'd had that quote to justify the smartarse advertorial I did for a hotel buffet the other day.

And maybe we can get Elle Dec woman and Sally off of Regency to have a big fight, like the video for Two Tribes.