Just call him an Anthropologist
Whenever I’m in an Anthropologie store, I find myself caught in a sort of reverie — sniffing glass candles or turning over hand-painted bowls as if I were strolling the stalls of an exotic bazaar somewhere far away and mysterious. Apparently, that’s no accident.
“It’s important that we keep the fantasy in mind,” says Anthropologie’s global merchandising manager, Aaron Hoey, with whom I had the good fortune to sit down and chat at the Interior Design Show in January. Dressed like a big kid in jeans and Converse sneakers, wearing a dress shirt and a scarf of French linen trimmed in Kente cloth slung around his neck, Hoey looks like an American on vacation, or perhaps a modern-day Dr. Livingstone. Which in a way he is.
In his words, he’s like the typical Anthropologie customer, “welleducated, affluent, well-read and well-travelled.”
Except that the typical customer is female: “She’s an explorer of the world, a collector and a curator. And our job is to take that woman and show her the unimagined,” he says.
To that end, Hoey has travelled to six continents over the past three years. He has scoured the rice paddies of Bali, the back lanes of Jaipur and the near-forgotten glass-blowing factories of Bohemia, taking photographs of objects that inspire him and picking up bibelots for the 160 or so Anthropologie stores along the way.
“Anybody can go to London or Paris,” says Hoey. “And then they are all looking at the same things. It’s really about getting off the beaten path and meeting people and discovering hidden places where ordinary tourists just don’t go.”
Hoey’s most recent trip, for instance, saw him in a tiny threeseater plane being flown across the Namibian desert by a 19-year-old female pilot. In a remote Himba village, one of the oldest tribal cultures on Earth, his design team met with the chief in his mud hut and traded sacks of grain for some native artifacts, just like real anthropologists might do.
“It has to be this authentic for it to feel authentic in the store,” observes Hoey. “Otherwise it would just be the same thing as everywhere else.”
The beauty of Hoey’s role is that Anthropologie is committed to doing things differently. Based a bit off the fashion track in Philadelphia, with head offices in an atmospheric 19th-century shipbuilding dry docks in that city’s former Navy yard, Anthropologie is actually part of a large retail consortium. Its parent company, URBN, also owns and operates Urban Outfitters, Free People, Terrain and BHLDN, yet the corporate strategy is to give each brand autonomy and imagine each store as an independent boutique.
“Part of our business is this idea of the found one-of-a-kind object, antique or craft,” says Hoey. “Unlike at an H&M or a Target, I can buy just five baskets from a little guy somewhere and put them in five of our stores.” Before joining Anthropologie, he spent 14 years working under the brilliant Mickey Drexler while he was CEO of the Gap. This excellent fashion education taught him what the essence of the shopping experience really is. “People crave a sense of adventure,” says Hoey. “Life’s boring without it. Malls are boring and repetitive and everyone is selling the same old thing. What people want to experience is something really new.” To help make that happen, each Anthropologie store has at least one full-time artist on staff with free creative rein to devise wildly inventive window displays (the Yorkville location, for instance, is adorned with a wonderful bird made from packing materials), in-store signage, even handmade price tags, all without approval from head office. Anthropologie also prides itself on its product collaborations with artists. An Amsterdam artist who collages bits of vintage oil paintings now covers the seats and backs of chairs with her work. A ceramicist in Sydney paints one-of-a-kind teacups and latte bowls. And Hoey has delved deep into the archives of the late 1960s textile designer Vera, creator of the collectible signed scarves, to create powerful graphic patterns for rugs and upholstery. While Hoey admits that almost all of his considerable product development budget is spent on travel and exploration, he wouldn’t just come back from a trip to France and throw a big Provencethemed installation into the store.
“Anyone can do that,” says Hoey. “We are all about the collision of cultures — taking, say, Japan, colliding it with the gardens of England and ending up with something you’ve never seen before.”
Part of Anthropologie’s magic is how it has made room for resourcefulness.
“Fancy gets overplayed,” says Hoey. “We are all about being scrappy and coming up with something completely unique and unimagined.”
Which, in a way, could just be the mission statement for a new, emerging 21st-century esthetic — one that is individual, authentic and all about discovery. Karen von Hahn is a Toronto-based writer, trend observer and style commentator. kvh@karenvonhahn.com