He’s the prince of particular, the satrap of selection, the chief of choosing.
Josh Spear has a passion for the things that please him. When Spear likes something, he posts it on his popular blog, joshspear.com.
What happens next? The thing gets noticed.
About 5,000 people a day come to the blog for his daily take on cool, and they’ll sometimes buy the fishbowl or vintage graffiti tie, or get involved in that effort to save a soon-to-be-destroyed modern house.
The recipients of Spear buzz dig the attention, and the sales.
“Things have been snowballing, and Josh has helped getting the word out,” says Denver artist Jason Thielke, who was able to leave his day job as a clothing designer after Spear posted images of, and enthusiasms about, Thielke’s drawings.
Others send Spear e-mail after e-mail at all hours, all day: “Check out our new digital chopsticks, Josh!”; “Josh, you’ve GOT to post these Norwegian T-shirts we found!”; “Hey, Josh. What do you think of our new designer sneaker store in Seattle?”
Spear, a 21-year-old occasional Colorado undergraduate, doesn’t seem surprised.
“I did one of the hardest branding initiatives in the world–branding yourself,” he says during an interview in the two-bedroom condo he shares with a roommate in downtown Boulder, Colo. “And I’m still doing it.”
“Cool-hunting” and “trend-spotting” have been categories of corporate work for decades. The suits want to know what those young people are doing and thinking; they hire trend-spotting “experts” who talk to kids and draft lengthy reports. The companies, armed with the reports, try to appeal to their youthful market.
That model is unraveling. So companies increasingly turn to bloggers like Spear for what they hope are glimpses inside the collective brain of their most maddening demographic: Young Unimpressed Hip America.
“[Consumers] are trusting people like Josh much more than any formal advertising or marketing message getting pushed to them,” says Jennifer McClure, executive director of the Society for New Communications Research. “That’s the phenomenon he is enjoying right now.”
Yes, Spear certainly is enjoying life.
His blog attracted advertisers, enough to make the site profitable. He wouldn’t say how much money the site hauls in.
The blog, however, did spawn Spear, the business.
– He once visited 15 shoe stores in Copenhagen, Denmark, searching of something especially cool, footwearwise, to post on his blog.
– A Dutch vodka company wanted to launch a new product–Bong Spirit Vodka, with the liquor coming in a bottle that doubles as a bong–and they hired Spear to serve as a creative force.
– One of the largest advertising agencies in the world, Chicago’s Leo Burnett Worldwide, is flying Spear to its headquarters to address brand managers.
“They just want me to inspire and fuel their office with what I do, and my thoughts on what they do and how they could do it better,” he says.
How does a harvester of cool find stuff? A lot of it comes to Spear through e-mails from others, pointing him toward this or that Web site. He does his own traipsing through cyberspace, too, looking for things.
One cool-hunter bragged on his site that he had spent eight hours looking for the perfect something-or-other.
“It’s like, dude, that’s not what this is!” exclaims Spear, sitting before his 23-inch cinema-display screen, which is connected to a Macintosh Powerbook laptop.
“I’ve been thinking maybe I should get away from the whole word ‘cool,'” he says. “Cool is cool until it’s cool.”
King of cool
Josh Spear says two rules guide his blog: He has to like the things he posts, and in most cases he has to touch the things he’s championing.
So mail for Spear isn’t stacks of catalogs and bills. It’s watches and T-shirts, shoes and gadgets and dinnerware. He keeps a lot of it. He gives stuff away. The companies rarely want stuff back, whether he plugs it or not, he says. So far, he says, he never has trumpeted an item because of advertiser pressure.
As the business grows, he envisions something other than his own highly particular self working in a dull condo, his roommate making a grilled cheese sandwich and filling his “office” with the smell of burnt cheddar. Instead, he sees his future as “a room with a lot of beanbag chairs, a bunch of flat-screen TVs, some plants and a room full of people figuring out tough problems.”
[THE DENVER POST].
