Richard Lambert has a hard time smiling. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to. He looks at the camera steely faced with the hint of a smirk escaping between flashes. His yellow shirt pops against the whitewashed brick wall. He’s sitting, legs crossed, then uncrossed, he turns to the left and then the right. He puts on his leather bomber jacket for a few frames and then takes it off again.
He looks, in a word, cool. And he should.Lambert has made a living by catering specifically to a young, affluent, urban demographic that flocks to Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood, one of the coolest in the city. Lambert’s latest project is Parts & Labour, a $1.4 million, 6,000-squarefoot multi-level restaurant that occupies an old hardware store in Parkdale and has, for now at least, the informal title of being one of the coolest destinations in the city.
The inside stays true to its name; achieving a reclaimed-industrial vibe thanks to partners Kei Ng and Brian Richer, of Toronto design firm Castor, one of the hottest shops around and the visionaries behind another popular restaurant, OddFellows. Parts & Labour turns the wheel on traditional dining, marrying industrial with new wave and fine dining. Multi-coloured lights made from repurposed fire extinguishers hang above the bar, which is lined with corkscrew-styled stools. Bundles of fluorescent-tube lights are fixed above the eight communal dining tables.
Lambert got it just right to appeal to Toronto’s hipster crowd, says Max Valiquette, a Toronto-based consultant who focuses on modern consumers.
“What they’ve done is taken something very cool… and understood what was authentically cool about it, the fact that they’re really Queen West people, that they maintain that particular esthetic, and they’ve found an appropriate way to translate it into something that gives people that cool experience,” he says. “It’s in a former hardware store… they didn’t put up a new sign so they call it Parts & Labour.
It’s that authentic cool thing.” “Cool” certainly isn’t for every marketer, but any brand manager who’s sought that label and tried to capture cool can tell you what a daunting task it can be because it is so fleeting. Depending on who’s using the word, cool has been used to describe everything from Justin Bieber to Justin Trudeau, Johnny Cash to Johnny Knoxville. New products, labels, lines, ideas, experiences and brands flow constantly over us. Some disappear instantly into oblivion, some achieve a measure of steady, consistent success, and some become cool before most consumers have even heard of them. The latter is essentially the early stages of what author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell referred to as “The Law of the Few” in The Tipping Point– when a small number of key people champion an idea, concept or product before it tips into “exponential popularity.”
Of course, when that happens, it may not be “cool” anymore. On the upside, you’re selling a lot of product. It isn’t always easy for marketers to keep their fingers on the pulse of what’s cool. But spotting trends has become an important function in many ad-industry firms, and more companies are offering services that help identify the next big thing. It’s what Gladwell famously dubbed “cool hunting,” a marketing practice based on observations and predictions of cultural trends. In his seminal 1997 article “The Cool Hunt,” he explored the idea of how “certain kids in certain places” dictate what’s cool.
He used the example of Hush Puppies, which by the early 1990s was a dying brand until a few hipsters in New York City’s East Village brought it back from the brink and into mainstream popularity without any advertising push. These were kids that had spent hours sifting through thrift-store bins. “And why did they do that?” asks Gladwell. “Because their definition of cool is doing something that nobody else is doing.” Without increasing its ad budget, sales increased and Hush Puppies were all of a sudden cool again.
“Fashion was at the mercy of those kids, whoever they were, and it was a wonderful thing if the kids picked you, but a scary thing, too, because it meant that cool was something you could not control,” he wrote. “You needed someone to find cool and tell you what it was.” Part of what made Hush Puppies cool back then was being able to say you were wearing the original design. There was authenticity in that, and to some extent exclusivity, because the trend was born from a relatively small group of people in an area known for its arty vibe.
Lambert, a certain kid in a certain place, learned first hand about being “cool” with The Social–a club he and business partner Jesse Girard opened in 2005. Here the two played host to throngs of electro-loving hipsters and along the way secured themselves as the ambassadors of cool in the city’s west end.
“You’re kind of telling people what they should like,” admits Lambert. “The Social was always like that… Not everyone knows how to be or how to act and it’s the same with the restaurant. They come and they eat so you’re telling them this is good food, this is good design, good atmosphere. And either they believe you and they come and if they don’t, they don’t.” Lambert, who has no previous marketing experience, says during his career he’s only ever placed three magazine ads that were “extremely strategic and very small” promoting The Social and his clothing store Vintage 69. He has yet to use any traditional media to promote Parts & Labour.
“To pay for advertising, for this business anyway, it’s not a good source. When I open a magazine and see a big spread on a restaurant, it doesn’t inspire me to go there.” The restaurant instead relies on Facebook, Twitter, and word of mouth. “Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t just open the doors. But [the promotion] is pretty scaled back because you kind of want to grow slow too, you don’t want to ram it down people’s throats.”
Not trying too hard is key, says Michael Reha, founder of Montreal agency Newad, which also publishes Nightlife magazine.
In 2009, Newad conducted research that identified four different tribes within the young urban demographic: the creatives (capacity to inspire others), the disseminators (capacity to circulate information) the unifiers (capacity to mobilize other people), and other players. These young adults are essential to building and maintaining brand awareness because they help spread the word, says Reha. In other words, they’re at the origin of many new trends. He uses high-end preppy clothing line Tommy Hilfiger as an example. The brand was adopted by the New York City hip hop scene 20 years ago, and as a result gained widespread acceptance.
“It was adopted by a certain group of people and expanded to the masses,” he says. But young urban adults want to be in control, to decide when, where and how to get the information on brands. They are extremely marketing savvy and know a sales pitch when they hear one. Too often marketers either forget this, or don’t understand it, he says.
“They’re in a boardroom and [they decide] they’re going to do this cool ad with young people in it and they look all good and they have tattoos and it’s really cool and they have a cellphone but that’s not how it really works,” says Reha. “If you want to convince them to use or adopt the product, you have to do it in a way that’s credible and authentic to them and that’s based on their friends, personality and ego.”
