Supreme Flagship Store New York City

The next university project entails us to create an individual 2 part brand zine, choosing a brand of our own from a list and analysing the brand, discovering its position in the market, it's competitors, its consumers, looking at brand touch-points and then finally creating a new concept for the brand. I chose Supreme, a New York born world renowned street wear brand. Whilst in New York I conducted an informal interview with a member of staff at the Lafayette Street flagship store.

What would you say the target age range of customers is?

I would say it’s very much changed in the past few years, it used to be primarily 12-26 but recently we’ve seen a lot of 25 and overs so I would say an age range of 12-40

What would you say is the most popular product?

Most definitely the hats, but it has changed again over time.

How would you summarize the brand?

The brand is wrapped together with Art and Music, punk, rock, reggae which all relates back to skateboarding being the main inspiration for both the brand and the flagship store here in NYC.

Could you run through the plain visual merchandising in store?

We have a plain minimal layout as we like to let the product speak for itself. We rarely change the visual merchandising in store as we like to keep true to the brands roots and keep it as simple as possible. We don’t like to go crazy or digital.

What is your personal favorite Supreme collaboration?

My favorite is the collaboration with Cartoonist Robert Crumb, as the graphics were originals for Supreme unlike collaborations with artists such as Keith Haring where the images are pulled.

What would you like to see from Supreme in the future?

Just to continue its work with artists and for the creative team to not pick what’s hot. To keep establishing good relationships with musicians and to not worry about what’s popular at the moment and about being popular.

Tone of Voice- Vice

Within our recent seminar we were asked to bring along a magazine that we religiously read, as I am not a huge reader of magazines (needs to change), I cautiously picked one from the pile at the front of the seminar group that I was unfamiliar with. I think that picking a magazine that I did not know would be more of a challenge and I would be able to use my first impression of it to analyse its content deeply. I picked up the magazine Vice.

We were then asked to choose an article at random and analyse it's tone of voice to establish the magazines content and audience. I looked at the article 'A Semi-transient Expert on Hobos' written by Liz Armstrong, an interview with film maker and photographer Bill Daniel who documents the graffiti that hobos write on freight trains. I established that it was full of colloquial language and came across as chatty, conversational, humorous and laid back even before the interview had begun. It was a reflective interview (not a narrative) and the interviewer was very different than most. A lot of taboo language was used "I fucked up his plans" this to me signifies that the audience of the magazine is older and more mature.

Bill Daniel

From the article and flicking through the magazine I came to the conclusion that it is a photography, art, common interest, political and lifestyle magazine for 18+ audience with immature minds as you must need to be laid back to understand the language and tone of voice which was being used for some serious articles and interviews. This activity helped me to realise to use the same technique for analysing brands, make connections? What attitude do they have? What are they trying to represent?