Great Jones Cookware and the Illusion of the Millennial Aesthetic
Image: Collected
By all appearances, Great Jones was a startup success story. Launched by the childhood friends Sierra Tishgart and Maddy Moelis in 2018, the direct-to-consumer kitchenware line positioned itself as a hipper, more affordable update to legacy brands such as Le Creuset and Lodge. Its best-known product, a cast-iron Dutch oven called the Dutchess, came in bright hues such as blueberry, broccoli, mustard, and taffy, a version of millennial pink. Moelis, the daughter of a multimillionaire real-estate mogul, and Tishgart, a food-media tastemaker, declared their mission “to empower home cooks,” and brought on celebrities such as David Chang as investors. The company accumulated more than eighty-six thousand followers on Instagram, posting high-saturation shots of its wares inaccessibly elegant kitchens. It launched new products such as the Hot Dish, a patterned casserole pan, and got Bon Appetit stars to perform video demos. By swathing unsexy cooking equipment in an Instagrammable, customizable style, the brand seemed to create and occupy a new niche in aspirational millennial home goods.
Then, earlier this week, an investigation by Anna Silman for Insider revealed that Tishgart had pushed out Moelis last August and that all of Great Jones’s six original full-time employees had left by the end of September. The shell of a brand left behind nevertheless continued to post Instagram photos and sell pots—a spokesperson told Insider that the fourth quarter of 2020 was its best to date. The saga suggests the gulf between the messaging and the reality of a certain type of online brand and the ease with which customers accept the stories such companies sell. As an avid follower of Great Jones’s Instagram, I certainly assumed that it had more than six employees. I never would have guessed that at one point it had none. (A representative of Great Jones, which now has four full-time employees, denied that Moelis was pushed out, and disputed other aspects of the Insider reporting.)
The direct-to-consumer wave began in the twenty-tens as a new generation of startups promising to “disrupt” traditional industries for consumer goods. Instead of leaving the market to century-old stalwarts like Gillette, for example, a company like Dollar Shave Club, founded in 2011, would set up its own supply chains to manufacture razors; add clean, millennial-friendly branding and marketing gimmicks; undercut its competitors with the help of a cushion of venture capital; buy enormous volumes of online advertising to reach digital-native consumers without the intermediary of big-box retailers; and then hope it grew big enough, fast enough to become attractive as an acquisition or for an initial public offering. Some brands presented actual innovations: the eyewear company Warby Parker offered at-home try-on boxes; Everlane made its clothing supply chain transparent. Sometimes, the strategy worked: Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club in 2016 for a reported billion dollars.
Often, though, the difference between D.T.C. startups and their more established competitors was primarily aesthetic. Hims sold Instagram-friendly packages to make Viagra and Propecia more approachable for aging millennial men. Joybird covered run-of-the-mill sofas in alluring jewel-toned fabrics. The D.T.C. brands’ logos were cast in smooth, Internet-optimized sans-serif typefaces, and their graphics often took the form of pastel-colored geometric illustrations picturing a perfectly diverse crowd of users happily enjoying the product (a cliché memorialized by the Twitter account Humans of Flat). Labels have accrued to describe this genre. Venkatesh Rao, a writer and management consultant, dubbed it “premium mediocre,” referencing the products’ unfulfilled promise of quality. Molly Fischer, in an essay for New York magazine, defined the “millennial aesthetic,” a comfortable realm of “soft, clean forms.” “Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same,” Fischer wrote. The sameness is no surprise, given that all of these companies had to market their products through the same algorithmic social-media feeds.
Just as streetwear brands such as Supreme release new garments through highly anticipated “drops,” D.T.C. brands often create novelty and the illusion of innovation through subtle, superficial product changes—a new colorway or a collaboration with another brand (two logos instead of one!). An elaborate narrative and famous supporters can make up for, or distract from, the mundanity of the actual items being sold. D.T.C. marketing often proffers a product’s sense of heritage (“furniture for keeping,” the Detroit furniture brand Floyd promises), but the startups are too green and fragile to have actual track records of durability or dependability. They might shut down at the first funding hiccup. Yet even tiny, six-person startups can offer high-design packaging and branding if they rely on outside infrastructure for manufacturing and fulfillment. Tishgart and Moelis’s company may have been named for the late cookbook author and editor Judith Jones and a picturesque street in Manhattan, but its Web site vaguely lists “factories in Guangdong, Tianjin, and the U.S. as part of our global supply chain.”
A strange but increasingly familiar kind of illusion underlies the D.T.C. model. What Great Jones sells has less to do with the functionality or provenance of its kitchenware than with fostering the customer’s sense of in-crowd belonging online. As Albert Burneko put it in Defector, the brand is for “people shopping for cookware that will make them feel like they are pals with Alison Roman”—the young cookbook author who became famous with the help of social media before falling into controversy herself. Can a company that loses all of its staff still manufacture a sense of community? So long as the Instagram posts keep coming, the answer seems to be yes.
Of course, this model doesn’t always hold up once a lacklustre product reaches the consumer. D.T.C. brands frequently lack brick-and-mortar retail outlets and even customer-service phone numbers. Verifying the quality of a product before buying it is not an option; finding anyone responsible for the end result is a headache. I don’t own any Great Jones pots, but I do have bath towels from a popular D.T.C. brand, which I finally bought after repeatedly being served their ads on Instagram. The company’s logo is curvilinear and all-caps; its towels are photographed held by disembodied hands against hazy monochrome backgrounds. The Web site recounts a story about “product functionality” and “the most advanced textile mill in the world.” The towels are offered in unusual colors such as ochre, denim, and oatmeal, and they arrive in transparent packaging that emphasizes their visual impact. Yet none of the above makes them any better. Thin, drab, and slouching in the bathroom like sad ghosts, my D.T.C. towels make me long for the plush cotton of a less aestheticized, more boring brand like L. L. Bean, which also happen to cost half as much.
“Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?” the subheading of Fischer’s New York essay asked. Perhaps it will fade out when customers learn that a compelling narrative is not the same thing as the integrity of a product or of the business selling it. We’ve seen many times before how the growth-at-all-costs startup mentality can backfire. In the D.T.C. sector, the suitcase brand Away and the menstruation-friendly underwear brand Thinx both suffered damage to their buzzy reputations when their co-founders were exposed as manipulative, erratic bosses. (Both co-founders have denied these allegations.) As more such startups reveal themselves to be hollow or exploitative, the stylistic hallmarks that were once ubiquitous online may become associated with flimsiness and datedness—the kitsch of the twenty-tens, like neon-colored plastic in the eighties. I own an Away suitcase, too, and I feel a little embarrassed when I cart it around. Its smooth, turquoise-blue shell already feels like a relic, and it seems to implicate me in the startup’s issues, the way buying factory-farmed meat helps to perpetuate an unsustainable system.
According to Insider, Moelis was focussed on improving day-to-day operations at Great Jones, while Tishgart devoted herself to the kind of marketing and design that would help accelerate growth. Toward that end, Tishgart made herself into an extension of Great Jones’s brand. Her quirky-minimalist apartment was photographed for Domino, her wedding chronicled in Vogue. The stories that her former staff members shared with Insider are pretty mild, as far as girl-boss tyranny goes: Did Tishgart ask employees to return shoes for her? Did she bring her dog to work knowing that a staff member had allergies? (Great Jones has disputed the details of these incidents.) In any event, she seems to have been savvy about what the D.T.C. ecosystem requires of a startup founder. Online, image is a brand’s best tool and core asset. The goal is to sustain the illusion of success until financial stability sets in—or until the company collapses under the pressure of the façade.
Then, earlier this week, an investigation by Anna Silman for Insider revealed that Tishgart had pushed out Moelis last August and that all of Great Jones’s six original full-time employees had left by the end of September. The shell of a brand left behind nevertheless continued to post Instagram photos and sell pots—a spokesperson told Insider that the fourth quarter of 2020 was its best to date. The saga suggests the gulf between the messaging and the reality of a certain type of online brand and the ease with which customers accept the stories such companies sell. As an avid follower of Great Jones’s Instagram, I certainly assumed that it had more than six employees. I never would have guessed that at one point it had none. (A representative of Great Jones, which now has four full-time employees, denied that Moelis was pushed out, and disputed other aspects of the Insider reporting.)
The direct-to-consumer wave began in the twenty-tens as a new generation of startups promising to “disrupt” traditional industries for consumer goods. Instead of leaving the market to century-old stalwarts like Gillette, for example, a company like Dollar Shave Club, founded in 2011, would set up its own supply chains to manufacture razors; add clean, millennial-friendly branding and marketing gimmicks; undercut its competitors with the help of a cushion of venture capital; buy enormous volumes of online advertising to reach digital-native consumers without the intermediary of big-box retailers; and then hope it grew big enough, fast enough to become attractive as an acquisition or for an initial public offering. Some brands presented actual innovations: the eyewear company Warby Parker offered at-home try-on boxes; Everlane made its clothing supply chain transparent. Sometimes, the strategy worked: Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club in 2016 for a reported billion dollars.
Often, though, the difference between D.T.C. startups and their more established competitors was primarily aesthetic. Hims sold Instagram-friendly packages to make Viagra and Propecia more approachable for aging millennial men. Joybird covered run-of-the-mill sofas in alluring jewel-toned fabrics. The D.T.C. brands’ logos were cast in smooth, Internet-optimized sans-serif typefaces, and their graphics often took the form of pastel-colored geometric illustrations picturing a perfectly diverse crowd of users happily enjoying the product (a cliché memorialized by the Twitter account Humans of Flat). Labels have accrued to describe this genre. Venkatesh Rao, a writer and management consultant, dubbed it “premium mediocre,” referencing the products’ unfulfilled promise of quality. Molly Fischer, in an essay for New York magazine, defined the “millennial aesthetic,” a comfortable realm of “soft, clean forms.” “Whatever else you might be buying, you were buying design, and all the design looked the same,” Fischer wrote. The sameness is no surprise, given that all of these companies had to market their products through the same algorithmic social-media feeds.
Just as streetwear brands such as Supreme release new garments through highly anticipated “drops,” D.T.C. brands often create novelty and the illusion of innovation through subtle, superficial product changes—a new colorway or a collaboration with another brand (two logos instead of one!). An elaborate narrative and famous supporters can make up for, or distract from, the mundanity of the actual items being sold. D.T.C. marketing often proffers a product’s sense of heritage (“furniture for keeping,” the Detroit furniture brand Floyd promises), but the startups are too green and fragile to have actual track records of durability or dependability. They might shut down at the first funding hiccup. Yet even tiny, six-person startups can offer high-design packaging and branding if they rely on outside infrastructure for manufacturing and fulfillment. Tishgart and Moelis’s company may have been named for the late cookbook author and editor Judith Jones and a picturesque street in Manhattan, but its Web site vaguely lists “factories in Guangdong, Tianjin, and the U.S. as part of our global supply chain.”
A strange but increasingly familiar kind of illusion underlies the D.T.C. model. What Great Jones sells has less to do with the functionality or provenance of its kitchenware than with fostering the customer’s sense of in-crowd belonging online. As Albert Burneko put it in Defector, the brand is for “people shopping for cookware that will make them feel like they are pals with Alison Roman”—the young cookbook author who became famous with the help of social media before falling into controversy herself. Can a company that loses all of its staff still manufacture a sense of community? So long as the Instagram posts keep coming, the answer seems to be yes.
Of course, this model doesn’t always hold up once a lacklustre product reaches the consumer. D.T.C. brands frequently lack brick-and-mortar retail outlets and even customer-service phone numbers. Verifying the quality of a product before buying it is not an option; finding anyone responsible for the end result is a headache. I don’t own any Great Jones pots, but I do have bath towels from a popular D.T.C. brand, which I finally bought after repeatedly being served their ads on Instagram. The company’s logo is curvilinear and all-caps; its towels are photographed held by disembodied hands against hazy monochrome backgrounds. The Web site recounts a story about “product functionality” and “the most advanced textile mill in the world.” The towels are offered in unusual colors such as ochre, denim, and oatmeal, and they arrive in transparent packaging that emphasizes their visual impact. Yet none of the above makes them any better. Thin, drab, and slouching in the bathroom like sad ghosts, my D.T.C. towels make me long for the plush cotton of a less aestheticized, more boring brand like L. L. Bean, which also happen to cost half as much.
“Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?” the subheading of Fischer’s New York essay asked. Perhaps it will fade out when customers learn that a compelling narrative is not the same thing as the integrity of a product or of the business selling it. We’ve seen many times before how the growth-at-all-costs startup mentality can backfire. In the D.T.C. sector, the suitcase brand Away and the menstruation-friendly underwear brand Thinx both suffered damage to their buzzy reputations when their co-founders were exposed as manipulative, erratic bosses. (Both co-founders have denied these allegations.) As more such startups reveal themselves to be hollow or exploitative, the stylistic hallmarks that were once ubiquitous online may become associated with flimsiness and datedness—the kitsch of the twenty-tens, like neon-colored plastic in the eighties. I own an Away suitcase, too, and I feel a little embarrassed when I cart it around. Its smooth, turquoise-blue shell already feels like a relic, and it seems to implicate me in the startup’s issues, the way buying factory-farmed meat helps to perpetuate an unsustainable system.
According to Insider, Moelis was focussed on improving day-to-day operations at Great Jones, while Tishgart devoted herself to the kind of marketing and design that would help accelerate growth. Toward that end, Tishgart made herself into an extension of Great Jones’s brand. Her quirky-minimalist apartment was photographed for Domino, her wedding chronicled in Vogue. The stories that her former staff members shared with Insider are pretty mild, as far as girl-boss tyranny goes: Did Tishgart ask employees to return shoes for her? Did she bring her dog to work knowing that a staff member had allergies? (Great Jones has disputed the details of these incidents.) In any event, she seems to have been savvy about what the D.T.C. ecosystem requires of a startup founder. Online, image is a brand’s best tool and core asset. The goal is to sustain the illusion of success until financial stability sets in—or until the company collapses under the pressure of the façade.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com