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Bali's Hippies. Back in the sixties, fashion designer Paul Ropp, paulropp.com, was president of the White House Distributing Company, and his product was rolling papers "patterned like the American flag," as reported by Jane Perlez in The New York Times. Today, he lives in Bali, and is making quite a living for himself manufacturing "flamboyant clothes smothered with beading and embroidery hand stitched by Balinese workers." Paul, in fact, is one of a bunch of former hippies who moved to Bali as a hippie wanderer but has since become a millionaire businessman specializing in promoting Bali's culture to Westerners, and adapting its creativity."
Says Paul: "I'm a well-traveled guy -- this is the most creative place per capita I know of ... They paint, they carve, they make music ... I'm not talking about some people; I'm talking about everyone. So what's a better environment to be creative in?" Or in which to make money? John Hardy, johnhardy.com, a Canadian, has built a "multi-million dollar silver jewelry and accessories venture," that creates and sells "such fripperies as $595 silver-trimmed leaf clippers for the Neiman Marcus catalog." That's a long way from the "cheap local baskets that ended up as ethnic chic in the early days of SoHo," to be sure. It is also made possible, of course, by the talented, local workforce.
John Hardy's venture is backed, for example, by some 600 Balinese workers, who stand ready to turn out whatever it is he decides he'd like to sell. An Italian designer named Milo, milo-s.com, meanwhile employs Balinese women to "do the fine stitching on his high-end silk clothing." He comments: "The Balinese are very talented with their hands." It's a talent many of them perfected making decorations at Hindu temples. That leads to the one flaw in this Balinese entrepreneurial dream -- "the relaxed pace of life and the Balinese desire to observe their religion in all its elaborate, and decorative manifestations." Says Paul Ropp, surveying his empty workshop, laid vacant by locals off celebrating the Balinese New Year: "Not too good when you're going through the pains of overselling." Peace, brother.
E-Commerce Comfort. "It's a milestone in the norming of e-commerce," says Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, commenting on Pew's new stats showing that "two-thirds of Internet users are now online shoppers," as reported by Bob Tedeschi in The New York Times. "What's striking about this," Mr. Rainie continues, "is that the percentage of Internet users who do shopping has been growing, even as the Internet population continues to grow ... So the increase is doubly important because it's a bigger slice of a bigger pie." A key driving factor here, is simply that most people simply become more comfortable with e-commerce once they've spent three or four years online (and 80 percent of Internet users today have been only at least three years, according to Pew).
Pew, pewinternet.org, also finds that "gaps in income and education between those who shop in cyberspace" and those who don't, "are narrowing. Half of those who live in households with incomes of $50,000 or less have shopped on line." That's great news for retailers like Home Depot because it opens up new opportunities with its "traditional customer base," giving Home Depot "more opportunity to bring" its "traditional strategies online." For example, Home Depot is already enjoying a strong response to an online iteration of its gift registry. Any previous gaps in e-commerce comfort levels between ethnic groups are also narrowing: "Today, Hispanics and African-Americans generally shop online in the same proportions as non-Hispanic whites, a sharp increase from a year or two ago," according to Pew's Mr. Rainie.
The one group that is still not quite there where e-commerce is concerned is, perhaps not surprisingly, older consumers, defined as Americans 65 and older. Alan Beychock of Benchmark Brands, footsmart.com, an online footcare products retailer, says that the media age of his offline customers is 65, compared to 53 among those online. "For people 75 and older," he comments, "I don't think online buying is really going to happen." However, while seniors may be slower to embrace e-commerce, they are joining in. Another Pew study finds that the percentage of seniors shopping online has increased to 49 percent as of February '04, up from 38 percent in '00. Aging boomers no doubt will no doubt push that percentage higher in the years ahead. "There are so many people in the younger senior market and the older boomer market that it makes sense to focus our effort there," says Mr. Beychock of Benchmark Brands.
Tim Manners, editor
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