Sun, Jul 14, 2002 page11

• Diesel rattles customers for a sale

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  To the uninitiated, walking into the Diesel jeans store on Union Square West in New York city feels a lot like stumbling into a rave. Techno music pounds at a mind-rattling level. A television plays a videotape of a Japanese boxing match, inexplicably. There are no helpful signs pointing to men's or women's departments, and no obvious staff members in sight.

  Customers who are industrious, or simply brave enough to reach the "denim bar" -- Diesel's name for the counter separating shoppers from the wall of jeans at the back of the store -- find themselves confronted by 35 different types of blue jeans with strangely Teutonic names like Fanker, Kulter, Ravix and Kratt. A placard intending to explain the various options looks like an organizational chart for a decent-size federal agency.

  Diesel stores are so confusing that it begs a question: Are they the worst run stores in America, or is something sneaky going on?

  The answer: something sneaky. Diesel jeans cost US$115 to US$210 a pair, and 60 percent of the company's customers are young men, many taking their first anxious steps out of the comfortable but anonymous world of chinos and into the hipper (and more tight-fitting) realm of haute denim.

  The company, which was founded in Italy in 1978 and last year had its sales climb 40 percent from 2000, reaching US$500 million, is one of the brands most successfully exploiting young men's new fashion interest -- and willingness to spend to support it. With a retail sales staff whose average age is 22, mirroring that of its customers, Diesel's 20 US stores have perfected the art of putting regular guys into the kind of hip-hugging jeans you'd expect to see in a Lenny Kravitz video.

  While large clothing retailers such as Banana Republic and Gap have standardized and simplified the layout of their stores in an effort to put customers at ease, Diesel's approach is based on the unconventional premise that the best customer is a disoriented one.

  "We're conscious of the fact that, outwardly, we have an intimidating environment," said Niall Maher, Diesel's director of retail operations. "We didn't design our stores to be user-friendly because we want you to interact with our people. You can't understand Diesel without talking to someone."

  Indeed, it is at just the moment when a potential Diesel customer reaches a kind of shopping vertigo that members of the company's intimidatingly with-it staff make their move. Acting as salesmen-in-shining-armor, they rescue -- or prey upon, depending on one's point of view -- wayward shoppers. Sales personnel, who have been given a five-day course in denim, walk helpless shoppers through a maze of textile-industry terms like warp and weft, as well as Diesel's own confounding lexicon of styles and washes.

  While many retailers carefully script interactions between customers and sales staff, Diesel encourages its people to be themselves, employing the same wiles to sell jeans as they might to get a free drink at a club or impress girls.

  "At Diesel, they're ensuring that there's some level of theater on the floor that they have control over," said Paco Underhill, the author of Why We Buy: the Science of Shopping. "They own the set and one of the actors who can drive the interaction."

  Stephen Miranda is one such player. A 22-year-old aspiring artist from Brooklyn with sideburns and a shaggy rock-star hairdo, Miranda can be found on most days strutting around Diesel's Union Square store in an exceedingly tight pair of jeans. "I read the sports pages, but I wear tighter jeans than my mother," he said.

  When Miranda spots a wayward-looking shopper, he said, he uses a deceptively soft pitch. "I try to be their shopping friend," he said.

  While customers are basking in the sense of relief at being rescued, Miranda is actually engaging in a bit of psychographic profiling, trying to glean whatever information he can about them from their clothing, attitude and friends. Based on his assessment, he then recommends a number of styles he hopes will suit the customer.

  On a recent Saturday, Miranda demonstrated his technique on a man wandering toward the denim bar. The man was obviously lost, and was accompanied by an attractive woman, who was significantly taller -- and blonder -- than he.

  "He's a regular guy with a really hot girlfriend," Miranda said. "That pushes him in a certain direction. She's going to have a say. It's going to be something with a little machismo to it."

  Miranda pulled his "shopping friend" bit. Moments later, the regular guy was turning circles before the mirror in a US$125 pair of jeans. On average he sells US$9,000 to US$10,000 worth of jeans a week. Success hangs on the ability to find the customers who are the most lost.

  Douglas Rushkoff, a media critic who has written about Diesel advertising campaigns, said the company's store design is a new take on an old trick. In the 1950s, the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen realized that when shoppers were distracted by confusing mall layouts and grandiose visual stimuli, they seemed more prone to impulse buying.

  "They realized the best way to get people to buy stuff is not to facilitate their shopping but to disorient them," Rushkoff said. "Diesel shoppers say, `I'm not hip enough to get this,' and then in comes the hip salesperson. What makes them hip is that they know how to navigate the space."

  The result can be a sometimes curious bond between shoppers and their Diesel sales "friend," a sort of retailing equivalent to the Stockholm syndrome, whereby captives bond with their captors.
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