It’s 5am on the west coast and midday in London, and I’m somewhere over the Atlantic travelling home. I’ve spent the last 10 days in California, completing a road trip from LA to SF and back again that I’ve dreamt about since I first read Kerouac and Burroughs as a teenager. I fully leant into the laidback vibes, and love for equal parts nature and gritty urbanism.
As with my last visit, I was blown away by the volume of new, challenger brands in US retail. In the UK, we see the ‘posher’ supermarkets take bets on small indies. And there are maybe half a dozen excellent but tiny shops in London that stock almost exclusively challenger brands. But our shelves might still be 80% big Consumer, and 20% shared between half a dozen entrants in each category.
The US is a different beast altogether. Go into Erewhon, and it’s the size of our supermarkets with the selection of our tiniest independents. Whole Foods shares shelf space with Big Consumer and small indies. But even your typical neighbourhood grocery store stocks a strong selection of up and coming challenger brands.
I’ve visited the US four times in the last four years, and this only seems to be accelerating. It was while I was in the US this time, however, that this all started to signal something else: slowly, somewhere, we’ve seen the death of the hipster.
What is a hipster?
In 2007, Christian Lorentzen wrote in Time Out New York that
”hipsterism fetishizes the authentic”
Hipster has had many definitions over the years. In the UK in the mid-2000s, it was used interchangeably to describe a cross section of music scene kids (indie, rock, punk). Later it was heavily associated with handlebar moustaches, coffee-drinkers and cyclists. And by proxy of where they associate (Shoreditch, Williamsburg), for a while it was a proxy for the pejorative ‘gentrifier.’
Hipster didn’t begin with Lorentzen. Its earliest etymology goes back to the 1940s jazz scene, through Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” and into the counterculture that followed. But it’s the ‘pursuit of the authentic’ that is the definition I’ve always returned to.
I think about a couple of relative shopping experiences between London and Los Angeles.
In Los Feliz, LA, I visited a shop called ‘General Store’. We have a ‘General Store’ in Peckham, LDN too and so we went to see how they compared.
Our Peckham General Store sells great coffee, locally made sourdough and fresh pastries, wild garlic foraged in the rural home counties, fruit and veg via Natoora but with the implication of being direct-from-farmer. It stocks a tiny selection of natural wines, and a very curated selection of brands.
The brands it stocks are all intentional. The merchandising policy seems to be:
never stock more than one or two products per category,
never stock brands that are available on the mass market,
only stock brands that come from specific locations where that product is seen as the best
You might for example have a type of nougat from a very specific village in Tuscany.
In many respects, this is our hipster pursuit of the authentic.
Los Feliz General Store shared some initial similarities. Head in and the smell of great coffee, and fresh, locally sourced pastries fills the air as well. But this is where the similarities end.
Los Feliz General Store now stocks dozens if not hundreds of new, independent challenger brands. Some, like DTC darling Grüns, I recognise, but the vast, vast majority are all new to me.
I’m like a kid in a candy store and want to try so many of these products. Gummies for every ailment, candles which promise to bring the scent of California home with me, aftershave brands that ooze cool, protein in all manner of forms.
And the selection in this General Store, like the London equivalent, is at the narrower end of the spectrum. 10 minutes down the road in Erewhon, and there’s half a dozen choices of creatine to choose from, another dozen multi-vitamins, crackers and chocolates that depending on your need come packed full of protein, fibre, or carbohydrates, and 30+ different waters.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with an angel investor when I was running my last business Wine List. We were an education wine play where the typical desired outcome was our consumer would understand wine a bit better and begin their own ‘wine journey.’ It was Lorentzen’s Hipster by definition. What better way to pursue the authentic than find individual winemakers who have made something that tastes uniquely of their own land?
Said angel investor recommended I build a wine DTC: try and build the definable wine brand for the future generations, like how Jacob’s Creek or 19 Crimes had beforehand. If you get that right, that’s one of the few ways to make a lot of money in wine, but it was a completely different game to the one we were playing.
Some of the UK-US differences are innate cultural ones. The UK remains a country default-cynical towards consumerism.
But in many ways, lots of US culture eventually finds its way to the UK market. And so when I look at the breadth of brands that the US has on offer, I imagine we will one day share at least some of that breadth as well.
Part of why this shift has happened is practical. DTC and social media have made it radically cheaper to launch a brand. You no longer need a decade of trade distribution to earn shelf space. But I think the deeper reason is that the consumer has changed. The generation buying these products doesn’t find identity in provenance the way an earlier cohort did. They find it in optimisation, in function, in lifestyle as a project. We now find brand identity in creatine, rather than PDO tomatoes.
And maybe that’s the real death knell for the hipster. From San Francisco to Los Angeles, the bougie independent shopper is no longer pursuing the authentic. They’re pursuing what works, what’s new, what fits the life they’re building. Functional lifestyle is the new hipster, and the shelf space proves it.
For challenger brands, particularly UK ones looking at the US market, this matters. Origin stories and craft credentials are at best the minimum entry requirement, and by no means a USP.
Function and lifestyle are key. Strong visual identity that stands out and resonates is vital.
These are observations, not conclusions. The US is further along this curve than we are, and the UK’s natural scepticism towards consumerism means it won’t land here in the same way. But the direction of travel seems clear. If you’re building a brand in the UK and planning to scale, it’s worth asking: are you still selling the authentic, or are you selling the functional? Because the American consumer already knows which one they’re reaching for.
I’m building Ballpoint: the growth agency I always wanted to hire when I was a DTC founder and before that a head of growth. We have scale brands from £1m → £50m through digital advertising. If you’re looking for support, then you can email me on josh@weareballpoint.com.
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I would just fly over to spend time in Erewhon, and surf Malibu. Looks like you had a great trip. Did you check out EXPO West too?