Musings: Fuglosumption

Fuglosumption: the ugly duckling in brand and product consumption.

The story Ugly Duckling is a tale of seclusion and reclusion, repudiation, omission from an order, and then, after a length of suffering, acceptance by a species, post-beauty transformation.

Brands, products, and Fuglosumption:
Once ugly, always ugly: there isn’t usually a way to free an ugly product from the Hades of brand adolescence.

There are products whose ugliness can never be concealed by a brilliant, sexy advertising campaign. Crocs and Uggs, for example, are hideous. It’s not attractive to wear shoes resembling Australia’s indigenous critters.

Uggs resurfaced in the early ’00 decade. The brand’s longevity remains intact. They are a fusion of snow boot and slipper, allowing women to hop around the urban wild, attracting spots of mud and dirty snow to offset the lightly-hued brown suede. And the uncanny shape? A kangaroo’s foot.

The premiere Croc is a garden clog that is part aqueduct, part masseuse. Water filters through the holes and seeps out the heel of the shoe and back into the water table, to preclude foot fungus and pruney toes. Spikes at the foot’s base massage your feet as you move. Unfortunate popular demand has impelled the creation of other clog styles: i.e., you can now don fossilized jelly wedges or heels. And so as to not ostracize snowbirds, Crocs designed a series of garden clogs that are lined in fleece—perhaps for nitrous-oxidizing your garden, in the winter.

Fit-Flops are another beast, utilizing an enormous, chunky heel to work leg muscles whilst ambulating. The prime audience for FitFlops is the over-40 crowd. Paradoxically, Fit-Flop’s advertising campaigns feature nubile female legs—free of vices like wrinkles, cellulite or varicose veins that plague older women’s physiques. And despite the ad campaign’s attempt at sexual appeal, the shoe is still ugly, fashioned in the shape of a 1980 station wagon. At least they omitted the wood paneling.

Claiming comfort isn’t a viable excuse for ugliness—Birkenstocks are very comfortable, and they neither resemble a beer pint nor a pretzel.

Lesson learned: Make something that at least exudes an aesthetic appeal if you want it to have a long shelf life.

Beyond shoes…

Cadillac finally redesigned the physical aesthetic of its cars, yet the vehicles still look like geriatric mobiles. Non-aerodynamic, square shoe-box of a car. If driving a Cadillac is a pre-requisite to: A) driving to Florida, and; B) toting golf clubs, then they should legalize golf carts on the Interstate—simply, these cars are a fusion between a motorcycle and Smart Car (both of which are allowed on highways and interstates).

SUVs
Speaking of shoe boxes, attractive SUVs don’t exist. Even the luxury car industry hasn’t produced an attractive SUV. Hummers are simply unnecessary: driving laws don’t allow ambush via vehicle, or driving up an embankment to exit an interstate. (More golf carts, less Hummer.) More specifically, Hummers are Legos on wheels. And if people get to ride in Legos, then I want my own Taun Taun. Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, and others, all produced a line of SUVs that look like footwear for mountain climbing.

The logos and branding for these companies are lovely, and perhaps that’s what we sometimes pay for—the delusion that a trendy product embodies a brand’s integrity, when the utilitarianism is actually defunct.

Snuggies:
We already have sleeping bags, so why do you need to wear your blanket? At best, you’ll resemble a fleece-encrusted slug. The one benefit yielded by snuggie’dom is the Snuggie Sutra—the kama sutra illustrated with a snuggie.

The aesthetic of a product adds value to it. It offers the cushion of future transactions, such as collecting, refurbishing and reselling. Does anyone recall the beanie babies fad? It’s inane to think people, mostly adults, thought cheap, fleece dolls would transition to high-end, collectible commodity. I was given some as stocking stuffers and subsequently stuffed them at the bottom of my closet. The fad lasted for how long—a year or two—before it was silenced by the concomitant embarrassment of owning a collection of miniature stuffed animals.

My tone is sometimes snarky throughout this blog, but I’m generally amazed at the excessive waste flooding the consumer product market. The marketplace is cluttered with goofishly designed products, as some of the aforementioned, that are mere fads—simply, immediate waste. How many products do you purchase that you soon after realize are disposable?

Ciao, Melissa

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