My friend Devon's kid turned six last weekend and I bought the present standing in line at Stumptown, on my phone, in about ninety seconds. A Lego set. It showed up Tuesday. I could not tell you who sold it to me without checking my email.
Ten days before that, Toys R Us filed for Chapter 11. I have read something like forty pieces about it since and thirty-eight of them were about Geoffrey the Giraffe.
People posted the jingle. People posted the aisle. People posted the exact feeling of being eight and turning a corner into a wall of bicycles.
All of it sincere. None of it revenue.
Affection is not a moat, and a brand everybody loves but nobody uses is just a memory paying rent on nine hundred stores.
The debt gets the headlines, and the debt is real. The 2005 leveraged buyout left roughly five billion dollars on the books and the interest ate the money that should have gone into the stores. But debt only kills a company with no answer to why it should exist. Toys R Us did not have one.
Here is the part that gets lost. The original positioning was never emotional. It was a distribution claim. Toys R Us was the place with all of the toys, every brand, every aisle, more than the department store down the road could hold. That was a genuine advantage in 1985 and it was worth driving across town for. Category killer was the phrase. It described a shelf, not a feeling.
Then the shelf became infinite and free to browse. Amazon has more selection. Target has better stores. Walmart has the price. The advantage did not erode, it inverted: the thing Toys R Us was built to be best at is now the thing every competitor does better and cheaper. What was left was Geoffrey, and Geoffrey does not move units.
Compare that to a brand where the affection and the reason are the same object. People love Powell's because the store is the product, the getting lost in it, the used copy shelved next to the new one. People love Salt & Straw because the line is part of what you are buying. Take away the warm feeling and you still have a reason to go. Take away the reason to go and the warm feeling turns into a Facebook post about your childhood.
Take away the reason to go and the warm feeling turns into a Facebook post about your childhood.
Truffles and Barnaby have a cat tree from a store on Hawthorne that I picked because it was the only one open at seven on a Sunday. If it closed I would be sad on the internet and then I would buy the next tree online. Both true at once. Only one of them is a business.