Slow Shopping

Politecnico di Milano Scuola di Design MSc. in Design degli Interni a.a. 2016/2017 SLOW SHOPPING studente Mana Kouchak relatore Peter Arthur Di Sabatino corelatore Luca Fois

Politecnico di Milano Scuola del Design MSc. in Design degli Interni a.a. 2016/2017 SLOW SHOPPING studente relatore corelatore

Mana Kouchak Peter Arthur De Sabatino Luca Fois

Preface

When I finished my three years of studying Architecture for my bachelor degree, I decided to write about Psychology in Interior design for the final thesis. I wanted to write about how a space can affect a person’s feeling and through that, his point of view, and also how a person could express his mentality in the context of the concept of an interior design. Eventually, I could not do it and I had to change the topic of my thesis. Of course because I did not have enough knowledge about it. But this matter stayed with me as a question to be answered. I could feel how the spaces are affecting my feelings and my state of mind and I was always sure that there is a deep and strong relation between the design of a space and the emotional state of its users. I always believed that the spaces are meant for people. This was the main reason that I decided to study interior design and I have to be honest, I am very satisfied with this course, and I feel myself capable of finding this strong relation, not only through my feelings, but also scientifically. So here I am, writing my final thesis of my masters degree in interior design, answering the big question that has been always with me through out the years. Here is an example of how a space can express the way of being, and how it can also promote a certain mentality. A mentality that can help the future of the border-less, international society we live in.

politics? What do we do to be sustainable? Does all of this bottle go in plastics or should I put the tap in an other section? What am I gonna do with my personal life? What if I don’t graduate? What if I don’t find a job? Am I healthy enough? See, the list of the questions and worries are endless. They make us feel bad. They make us feel like we are not doing enough. Of course the solution wouldn’t be to erase the questions in our minds and not just care. All the topics mentioned and so many that I didn’t even mention here are really, really important and our life and the future generation’s life depends on them.

But there is one thing we can do, and that is to relax. To calm down. Studies have proven that when people are in a steady calm state, they function better.

Productivity rises. The risk of errors lowers. We don’t need studies to show us that anyway. We have all experienced the down effects of being nervous and stressed at some point.

This world we are living in has arrived to some level of crazy that it had never faced before. The twenty first century is facing so many problems, not only with the people but also with the nature. What do we do with the

Believe it or not, for me, what has always made me feel good and happy, has been shopping. When I enter into shopping areas I feel good. I simply feel good. It’s like I enter into a Zen mode. I enjoy spending time with myself. I feel

After realizing that it is crucial to calm down, we need to choose our acts in a smarter way. We need to not only calm down in what we do, but also to add things that calm us down to our to do list. Things that fill us with so much positivity and “feeling good” that can prepare us to face the problems of the world and of our own personal life.

like I love myself more. Trust me, I prefer to go shopping instead of going to a spa center. And it’s also cheaper! Now that may sound really paradoxical. But when I say shopping I am not necessarily talking about purchasing anything. I mean sometimes I do, but most of the times I don’t.

However there are some shops that are recently failing to give me the good relaxed feeling. As if the fast life of the outside of the store has taken over what is happening inside the store. Usually the more convenient stores are like this. The ones that are not super fancy and super expensive. The other stores however, that are calmer and have a slower flow, are the ones that are so expensive and they make you feel like they have prepared the relaxed mood for you, so you actually buy something. If you don’t buy, you don’t deserve the nice ambiance.

And this is why I wanted to come up with the idea of Slow Shopping. I may not be exactly the first one to come up with this Idea. There are so many stores that are practicing it. Like so many of the multi-functional ones, those that have a cafe and a book store and a little section for kids to play and so on. Or those stores that tend to be slow for specific customers, like elderly or disabled people. But my type of Slow Shopping is the one that insists on being slow, just for the sake of calming down, for absolutely everyone, with no manipulative hidden messages, such as “now that you have the luxury of being relaxed, you better buy something”.

I understand that not everyone feels the same way about shopping as I do, but shopping is an act that nobody can eliminate from their life. Bringing the Slow Life and the Slow Thinking to our everyday tasks is a great way to practice these matters and bringing them as a concept to the stores can hopefully help raising an awareness towards them.

“AN INTERIOR IS THE N AT U R A L PROJECTION OF THE SOUL.” COCO CHANEL

Index

Abstract

1

Introduction

5

1. Philosophy of Slow

9

1-1. Where did all this time rage start from?

16

1-2. Let’s see what Slow can do

23

1-3. How can we apply Slow to our lives?

26

1-4. Slow Food

29

2.Yesterday Of Shopping: Changing points throughout the history of trade.

39

2-1. Before the 15th century

40

2-2. Rise of the Bourgeoisie

2-3. Industrialization takes over

49

2-4. Shopping centers enter the game

3. Shopping Today

55 59

3-1. Concept matters

65 66

3-2. Outlet Stores

74

3-3. Online Shopping

75

3-4. Marketing Today

76

3-5. User Analysis - Shopping Map

83

3-5-1. The study objects

85

3-5-2. The six clusters

91

3-6. Comparisons and conclusions

4. Shopping tomorrow ? : Slow Shopping

129 135

4-1. A Conclusion

136

4-2. Fast Fashion

138

4-3. How to become a better shopper?

143

4-4. How to make better (slower) shops?

145

4-5. A Slow Shop Prototype

163

4-6. User Analysis for the Slow Shop

181

Bibliography List of Images and Diagrams

187 193

Abstract

Today we are faced with many different types of shopping spaces that are trying to shift from the traditional retail system. The main factor that is mutual in these new forms of shopping spaces is “time” which is the dominator that has made them so popular. These almost new forms of shopping are a response to a new society of consumers, with their modern socio-economical conditions. Many of the consumers of the last decade are not as naive as before anymore. They are not easily fooled by the brands and basically they think more about the objects that they may purchase. So it’s not the brand anymore that insist to the consumer to buy it, but it’s the consumer that gets curious about an item, follows it and eventually buys it, or if he doesn’t make a purchase, he will at least get to experience it. Also the financial crisis, the competitive pressure of the society and the social media, which is the fruit of the new technologies of our new era have varied the scale of priorities and values. We can say that the act of shopping in the new society is moving on a time-space axis with a somewhat easily guessable future. The retail system could be considered as a faithful mirror of the society. As mentioned also before, time is a key factor in the act of shopping. The modern, smart and open-minded shopper is different from a machine-like consumer. The smart shopper will probably want to spend more time experiencing what he may purchase. Slow Shopping is a new phenomenon, which is based on the Slow Philosophy. Generally, when someone spends more time on doing something, he more probably does it more consciously and puts more thoughts and attention to it. In a shopping process he can think more if he actually needs a particular item or not, or if he is comfortable with applying and using a certain product or not. One may also consider the sustainability of the items, whether it’s cruelty free or not and etc. Slow shopping doesn’t necessary mean spending longer time in shops. That may not be possible every time, For example, people may not want to spend a lot of time to buy their daily essentials from a supermarket, but Slow Shopping can be induced in other ways. For example, even if users don’t want to spend a lot of time for their shopping process, they can still buy products that have been produced and transported in a Slow way. In this work, I have analyzed this type of shopping, its potential users and how it could affect the way of consumption, and in general, our society.

2

Abstract (Italian)

Ai giorni d’oggi incontriamo sempre di più diverse tipologie di spazi dedicati alla vendita che stano cercando di oltrepassare i modelli tradizionali. L’aspetto più importante che accomuna queste nuove tipologie di spazi di vendita è il fattore “tempo”, denominatore che li ha resi popolari. Queste alquanto nuove forme di shopping sono la risposta ad una società di consumatori impregnata dalle loro moderne condizioni socio – economiche. Molti dei consumatori dell’ultimo decennio però non sono più cosi naive. Essi possiedono una sensibilità e conoscenza profonda del prodotto senza farsi aggiogare dai brand commerciali. In questo contesto quindi i rapporti si invertono: non è più il brand che insiste e persuade il cliente all’acquisto, ma è il consumatore che diventa curioso nei confronti del prodotto, lo persegue e infine lo acquista; oppure non conclude l’acquisto ma diventa allo stesso tempo partecipe dell’esperienza.

Inoltre la scala delle priorità e dei valori, quando si parla del mondo del retail, ha conosciuto un importante variazione come conseguenza della crisi economica e della competitività che caratterizza la società e i social media, frutto anche delle nuove tecnologie. Possiamo dunque affermare che l’atto dell’acquisto nella nuova società si muove in un asse spazio temporale verso un futuro chiaramente tracciato. Il sistema del retail può essere definito come lo specchio veritiero della società. Come precedentemente affermato, il tempo compre un ruolo fondamentale nell’azione dell’acquisto. Il consumatore moderno, intelligente e innovativo è diverso dal consumatore tradizionale. Il nuovo consumatore tende a spendere sempre più tempo, creando attraverso l’acquisto una esperienza coinvolgente.

Slow Shopping è il nuovo fenomeno che trae i propri fondamenti teorici dalla Slow Philosophy. Tendenzialmente, quando una persona spende più tempo in un azione, è molto più probabile che ciò venga attuato più attentamente, prendendo coscienza di ciò che viene attuato. In un processo di acquisto, il consumatore può pensare di più sulla necessità di un prodotto o sulla validità delle sue diverse applicazioni.

Altri temi emergenti prendono vita in questo modo: la presa di coscienza riguardo alla sostenibilità del prodotto messo in vendita, la sua eticità e cosi via. Slow shopping non significa soltanto spendere più tempo in un negozio. Ciò è difficilmente realizzabile in tutte le circostanza: per esempio, alcune tipologie di consumatori non sceglierebbero di dedicare molto tempo all’acquisto dei beni di necessità quotidiana.

Lo Slow shopping può essere stimolato in questo caso in altri modi: anche se il consumatore non dispone di un tempo adeguato per il processo di acquisto, essi possono sempre raggiungere il fine dell’acquisto di prodotti la cui catena di produzione segue i concetti della filosofia Slow. Attraverso il mio lavoro verrano analizzati le diverse tipologie di acquisto, i potenziali consumatori e come essi influenzano il mondo del consumo e, in generale, la nostra società.

Introduction

5

BRIEF ABSTRACT TOPIC

Slow Shopping

WHAT

A new mentality in shopping

HOW

A research through the history of shopping and understanding the state of shopping today by analyzing different shopping experiences and also by directly asking people’s feelings and opinions about shopping today. Then, coming up with some hypothesis of how shopping could be in the future. After a careful study, suggesting the best design that can help improving the today’s world’s different aspects, especially the society and its surroundings, that is our planet, through an everyday practice: Shopping

WHY

Shops and all different types of retail spaces are not only places of trade. There is a different aspect to them which is even more important to the society. People use shopping places as gathering places. Places where they can spend some time in them.This is of course not a matter of today’s world. Almost from the beginning of the shopping’s history, people would spend some time of the day

in the shopping areas, not only to buy their daily essentials, but also to catch up with their friends and neighbors. In that time, shopping areas were probably the first sources of news. This gives us enough reason to focus also on this aspect of shopping and to accept it as a part of each community’s public space and therefor, give importance to the experience that this spaces create for their users.

Today we are faced with many different types of shopping spaces that are trying to shift from the traditional retail system, like temporary stores, temporary shops, pop-up stores, Guerrilla stores shop in shop, shop on wheel, road show, concept stores, flagship stores and… the main factor that is mutual in these new forms of shopping spaces is “time” which is the dominator that has made them so popular. These almost new forms of shopping are a response to a new society of consumers, with their modern socio-economical conditions.

Many of the consumers of the last decade are not as naive as before anymore.

They are not easily fooled by the brands and basically they think more about the objects that they may purchase. So it’s not the brand anymore that insist to the consumer to buy it, but it’s the consumer that gets curious about an item, follows it and eventually buys it, or if he doesn’t make a purchase, he will at least get to experience it.

Also the financial crisis, the competitive pressure of the society and the social media which is the fruit of the new technologies of our new era have varied the scale of priorities and values. We can say that the act of shopping in the 6

new society is moving on a time-space axis with a somewhat easily guessable future. The retail system could be considered as a faithful mirror of the society.

By analyzing it we can see that they have both been in a process of slow, but continuous transformation. These careful analysis can eventually be concrete in the design hypothesis for the society of today, together with all its needs and desires.

As the society more and more tends to like and be interested in new, unique and special design objects, it is crucial for the firms and designers to have the opportunity to launch and show their novelty in the market. Want them be fashion designers or product designers or even service and system designers. It is true that the Internet and the media offers endless possibilities for advertisement and transparency, but physical presence and contact and overall, the experience of the product still makes a stronger impact on a person. Also, although these days there are some new typologies of retail systems and spaces that are taking their place in the industry, but maybe overall, it is rather in a monotone and uniform stage at the moment, and I believe that they can have a more inspiring effect on their users if some creativity and experimentation would be added to their design.

As mentioned also before, time is a key factor in the act of shopping.

The modern, smart and open minded shopper is different from a machine-like consumer. The smart shopper will probably want to spend more time expe7

riencing what s/he may purchase. Slow Shopping is a new phenomenon, which is based on the Slow Philosophy and it is being studied and also already being applied in different stores, and it’s had positive feedbacks concerning the satisfaction of both the owners and the customers. Generally, when someone spends more time on doing something, s/he more probably does it more consciously and puts more thoughts and attention to it. In a shopping process s/he can think more if s/he actually needs a particular item or not, if s/he is comfortable with applying and using a certain product or not, and also one may also consider the sustainability of the items, whether it’s cruelty free or not and etc.

Slow shopping doesn’t necessary mean spending longer time in shops.

That may not be possible every time, For example, people may not want to spend a lot of time to buy their daily essentials from a supermarket, but Slow Shopping can be induced in other ways. For example, even if users don’t want to spend a lot of time for their shopping process, they can still buy products that have been produced and transported in a Slow way. For instance in the same supermarket, the products are produced and brought to their sales point in a Slow manner.

In this work, I have analyzed this type of shopping, Its potential users and how it could affect the way of consumption, and in general, our society.

8

1. Philosophy of Slow

9

Going through the history of almost everything, we realize that the early years of the twenty first century is facing a new condition of the Darwinian world of commerce. As Klaus Schwab, founder and president of the World Economic Forum said: “we are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to one in which the fast eat the slow.” These days everything is in a race against the clock, and people have learned to live with that, and it’s not like they’ve had much of a choice.” Guy Claxton, a British psychologist believes that acceleration is now second nature to us: “we have developed an inner psychology of speed, of saving time and maximizing efficiency, which is getting stronger by the day.”

Time has created an obsession of doing everything as fast as possible in many of us, leaving us to not have “time to think” that maybe speed is not always the best policy. Evolution has always worked on the principle of the survival of the fittest, and the fittest is not necessarily the fastest. Remember who won the race between the tortoise and the hare? We are not realizing how we are stretching ourselves to the breaking point with this obsession, because we are just too busy to hurry through life.

It is important to note that the Slow Philosophy is not a declaration of war against speed. Nobody wants to live without Internet. Nobody wants to travel on the back of a poor horse instead of using the new ways of transportation. The speed that we have today, thanks to the new science and

technologies have indeed helped us in ways that are wonderful and liberating, and we love that. However, there is always a delicate barrier between love and obsession. The problem is that we never realized when our love of speed turned into an obsession, an addiction of doing more and more in less and less time. This is what has made us become more aggressive. Because we are impatient. The latter has actually a name that has been introduced by Larry Dossey in 1982. It’s called “time-sickness”. It is to describe the obsessive belief that time is getting away.That there is not enough time. Well aren’t we all timesick? How many times have we seen a young furious driver losing it because maybe there was an old lady trying to get out of the taxi right in front of her house, or maybe there was somebody that needed a little more time to fit his/ her car in a little parking spot? Why do we have to forget to be a little more understanding? Your little kid wants a bed time story? No worries! There is a sound kit that guarantees to finish the longest story of Hans Christian Anderson in a sixty second sound bite. Problem solved. Problem solved? The thing is, maybe we have to think twice sometimes. Maybe there are some things that cannot, should not be sped up.

Let’s take a look at how the modern capitalism works. Modern capitalism generates extraordinary wealth. And who cares if it’s at the cost of devouring natural resources, faster than Mother Nature can replace them?

Amazonian rain forests are being destroyed together with so many ecosystems and endangered species. The irony is when capitalism goes too fast even 10

for its own good.They rush too much to bring the products to the distribution phase that there is no more time left for quality control. Remember how there was suddenly no more iPhone 5 in the market, while there were still the older versions? The result for the industries is nothing but a cost of billions. (Honore, 2004)

to the list. In 2002, a national survey found that a third of Japanese men over thirty were over weight. Unfortunately use of drugs such as Cocaine or crystal Amphetamines has become a thing among the most dedicated employees. Drug usage in the American workplace has jumped by 70% since 1998.

(Quest Diagnostics, 2002)

Then there is the human cost of turbo-capitalism. Although the theory has always been that the economy must serve the people, in practice we have seen it becoming the other way around in so many cases. This very matter has turned the societies unhappy and unhealthy. Long hours of job makes us unproductive. Almost whatever health condition we have today is medically related to stress: insomnia, migraines, hypertension or even more serious conditions such as cancer or some mental issues. (Andrews, 2006) Work ethic and feeling responsible is turning into workaholism. Even illness can’t keep the “good employee” away from the office. Overwork is a health hazard.

One of the reasons people call out for stimulants is the most simple one: lack of sleep! The average American gets at least 90 minutes less sleep than he used to in the past century. The same goes for Europe, especially southern Europe, the spiritual house of “la dolce vita”. The afternoon siesta that once used to be a normal part of everyday life has been forgotten by so many, since only 7% of the people still have time for that kind of “luxury”. (Official Journal of the American Academy of Neurology, 2002).

-Do you work out? + Are you serious? I barely have time to sleep!

Not only there is no time for physical activities, but also the stressed out, tired worker tends to drink more alcohol or reach for convenience foods. It is no coincidence that the fastest nations are also the fattest. Up to a third of Americans and a fifth of Britons are now clinically obese. Even Japan is coming 11

The hazard of impatience is not only work related. It can happen in even the slowest activities one can imagine. Yoga for instance, is a sport activity that is all about calmness and relaxation. However many tend to push hard, too fast, too soon, even in yoga. It takes time and practice for humans body to be able to do the movements. But ignoring this fact has caused unfortunately some cases of physical harm. An impatient trainer broke a pupil’s pelvic bone by forcing her into the splits position. A man in his thirties now has a permanent numb patch in his right thigh after tearing a nerve during a yoga session.

After health, social life is probably the most endangered matter of our time. Nobody has time for friends anymore. Even for family, the dearest people in our lives, our parents and grand parents, our children. Post-it stickers on the fridge door are now the main form of communication in many homes.

According to figures released by the British government, the average working parent spends twice as long dealing with emails as playing with their children.

Twenty-four-hour child-minding centers have become very popular in Japan.

Kids are supposed to grow up faster. A teenagers is considered as an adult somehow, that’s why parents spend so few time with them, thinking that they don’t need that anymore, although the teen years are the most delicate years of a person’s life. The problem is not always about parents having too much work to do. It’s the children that have become so busy too! Kids are torn between ballet practice and confirmation classes, between homework and violin practice, between cheer-leading and the fall musical. In the face of these demands, there is no more time left for relatives. And there is no time to “just hang-out”. Life of a hurry inevitably becomes superficial. How can we make any kind of real connections if we rush? Even with our own selves!

“When things happen too fast, Nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.”

Milan Kundera, Slowness, 1996 This is how we end up with over-scheduled and under-connected families.

According to the Michigan Survey, household conversations between parents and children - time for just talking - have dropped nearly off the radar screen.

And there has been an 88% decline in the number of families taking vacations.

Other American surveys have found a one-third decrease in the number of families who say they eat dinner together regularly. This of course does not mean that families don’t love their children or don’t care about them. There are so many researches that show extra curricular involvement is good for kids. Sports, music, other fine arts contribute to a rich life for a child. The issue is one of balance. And balance of course requires setting priorities. (de Graaf, 2003) For us grown ups, “just” staying and “just” talking and spending quality time with the loved ones feels like a waste of time.

-I could be ahead of my schedule if I didn’t have to listen to the memories of my grandfather for the 100th time and for an entire hour….

- Why does my little girl explain every single detail of what happened today at school.

We have lost the art of doing nothing, of slowing down and simply spending time, even on our own, without thoughts. Boredom, is a modern invention. The word itself didn’t exist 150 years ago. Doing nothing makes us panic and nervous. It makes us feel useless. (Honore, 2004) 12

It is not the first time in the history that there is an awareness about slowing down. The avant guards in the 19th century had also their own way to resist the pressure to accelerate. Painters and Poets, writers and craftsmen, looked for ways to preserve the advantages of slowness in the machine age.

Today, however, this awareness is moving towards mainstream with more urgency than ever before, creating the global Slow Movement.

In this movement, the term fast and slow have a deeper and wider definition than their literal meaning. They are not only describing a rate of change.

They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. If we wanted to describe them with a few keywords, fast would be busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, superficial, impatient, active, quantity over quality. And slow on the other hand would be the opposite: calm, careful, respective, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality over quantity. In short, slow is about making real and meaningful connections with people, culture, art, food, everything. Slow does not mean being careless and ignoring all the deadlines and being on-time. It means keeping a slow frame of mind, even when we are doing things quickly. Slow philosophy helps people to keep cool and to remain slow inside, even as they rush to meet a deadline at work or to get the children on-time to school. Slow Movement does not mean going back in time to some preindustrial utopia, but it is to help people live better in a fast paced, modern world. Slow Philosophy can be summed up in one word: Balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and slow down when slowness is called 13

for. Seek to live at what musicians call the “tempo giusto”, or the right speed.

(Honore, 2004) Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of Slow Food, is one of the leading proponents of the Slow Movement. Slow Food is the international movement dedicated to the very civilized notion that what we eat should be cultivated, cooked and consumed at a relaxed pace. It emerged in the late 1980s in reaction to Mc Donald’s moving into Rome, Italy. The instigators of this movement knew that it wouldn’t be just Mc Donald’s moving to Rome, it would be a whole new culture. They knew immediately that introducing fast food to Italy could destroy its tourist base. Who would come to Piazza San Pietro if it turned into some dull suburban strip mall? The Italians could see that fast food was really a symbol of a way of life that involved destruction of the well-being of people and the planet. The movement understood that if international corporate farming continues to have its way, not only the planet’s condition would go worse and issues like the global warming would go out of control, but there would be also no more good and healthy food left. (Andrews, 2006) The manifesto of the Slow Food group is more than just prolonging the lunch hour. It is against speed in all its forms: “Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast life, which disrupts our habits,

“I’m starting with the man in the mirror.”

14

pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Food.” As Petrini said once in an interview: “ If you are always slow, you are stupid, and that is not at all what we are aiming for. Being slow means that you control the rhythm of your own life. You decide how fast you want to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own “tempos”.

(Honore, 2004) The Slow life can be a solution to many of the problems of the today’s life, which many of them were mentioned above. For true change tho, we need new policies as well as a new belief system, and that is possible by changing the personal lives which can lead to a change in the society. Of course the personal level of change can be a great starting point … I’m starting with the man in the mirror … but the solution must concern also the institutional policy level. Personal change alone is not enough, but it is where the solution germinates. We won’t have new laws unless the legislatures know there is a strong movement pushing for them. To bring the matter into practice, it is necessary to introduce it to people through different activities. If we can apply the philosophies of this movement in some daily activities of people such as education, working, shopping, or - as it has been already done - eating, we can also slowly build a culture.

An effective way would be bringing solutions to our problems concerning pleasure as well as principle. The good life is based on ethics and enjoyment.

15

We want not only to save life, but to savor it, and we need to “make time” for that. The man of today that is buried under the workload and stressed and depressed needs to find a way to gain the state of feeling vital, energetic and alive. He needs to feel excited and enthusiastic. The idea of leisure involves time away from work and it is also a philosophy of time. Leisure offers a meditative approach to life that brings greater depth and greater wisdom. Leisure time can be spent alone or in a community. A man needs both, a time for retreat and staying away from everything and everyone, but also a time spent with other people. Community is a face-to-face caring, where people have the chance to feel respected from the others and show care and respect back at them. It is a state in which we feel accepted for our true selves and connected to others.

All these work as a circular association. To have more community, we need more leisure, to make the changes to make more leisure, we need more energy and vitality and joy, but without community we won’t have joy. These elements are at the heart of slow life and thinking about Slow life brings us a new vision of the good life. The slow life is when we reclaim our time for the things that matter. It is an unhurried pace in which we can savor life. It is a belief system that says that the well being of people and the planet must come before individual profit. To make the slow life resonate, we need a new vision connecting slowness with beauty and wonder and all the good things in life.

People need to be inspired so that a change can take place. (Andrews, 2006)

1 - 1. Where did all this “time rage” start from?

Maybe It’s a bit hard to recall, but there was actually a time in which checking our phone and the time and the alarm was not the first thing to do in the morning when we would just wake up. We have a timing that tells us if we have more time to sleep for five more minutes, if we are just on time, or if we have to just rush out of the door without even having breakfast or brushing our hair sometimes. But that’s not when we are done with the clock. It’s not only a tool that tells us when to wake up. It is everywhere. Every - Where. On our wrists, on the wall of our bedroom or living room or kitchen (I personally have two big clocks on the two opposite sides of my kitchen. Guilty!), To the walls and desks of our office or classroom, the corner of our computers and of course, big and bright on the tool we use more than anything everyday, on our phones. It’s always there to help us not to fall behind. It ticks and tracks whatever we do in our lovely fast moving modern world. It is very interesting to me how we have all experienced the feeling of not having enough hours in a day. Wishing there was a little bit more time. How about an extra day? And we are already moving so fast! Much faster than our ancestors at least But what has changed? Why didn’t our ancestors have this problem?

There have always been 365 days in one year and each day has always been 24 hours. At this point is it even a smart idea to slow down? To know the answer to that, we have to understand what’s brought us to being so fast in 16

the first place.

Although there were no clocks or any type of timekeeping instruments thousands of years ago, there are some evidences that show that mankind has always sensed the presence of time. They were even trying different ways to keep track of it. Archaeologists believe that in the ice age (over 20 thousand years ago) the European hunters counted the days between the lunar phases by marking signs on bones. From the new moon to the to the crescent moon to the full moon and back again. Using this technique, soon the great civilizations such as the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians had their own calendars, with which they were able to keep track of years and months and days.

The moon remained the main “clock” for thousands of years. 4000 years BC, the Egyptian calendars were consist of three seasons (flood, seed, harvest) and each lasted for four lunar months. Each month was 28 or 29 days, depending on how long it took the moon to go from one new moon to the next one.

(Formichelli, Martin, 2012) After solving the problem of counting the days in one year, it was time to find measurements for smaller segments. Segments that would make one day: hours. Again it was the Egyptians that invented the first clock 1500 BC, the Egyptian sundial. Before the 13th century which was when the mechanical clocks were invented in Europe, the timekeeping was done by measuring how long it took for sand or water to go through a whole. From the beginning of 17

the 17th century, man was also able to accurately measure not only hours, but also minutes and seconds. (Engler, 2015) What was the main difference between the old sundials and the new mechanical clocks? The answer seems simple. Although they were both helping man to organize and prepare himself for his works to do, but the sundials would also give man a break... That is, although it was absolutely crucial for the ancient civilizations to use the calendars to understand when they should plant and harvest, and their sundials to tell them when it’s going to be the dawn and when the sun would set, but the sundials wouldn’t even work during the night, or during the cloudy days. Even each sundial hour was not lasting the same, due to the tilt of the Earth. This is what the sociologists call the Natural Time. If man follows the natural time, he does each thing when it “feels right” to do it, and not when a digital clock tells them to do; so they would sleep when they were feeling sleepy, they would eat when they would feel hungry and so on. With all the advantages that a Natural Clock had, it is not hard to believe that a busy man of that time would love to have a digital assistant: (Van Rossum, 1996)

“When I wake up in the morning, before anything else I ask myself what I must do that day. These many things, I list them, I think about them, and assign to them the proper time: this one, this morning, that one this afternoon, the other one, tonight.”

Leon Battista Alberti Ever since the industrial revolution, scheduling became a way of life. Of course it was at that time that thanks to the machines suddenly every thing was much faster! Before that the fastest one could go was the speed of a galloping horse or a ship at full sail. Engine power changed everything. Materials and goods were traveling worldwide and before they’d arrive to their destinations, the information would arrive, faster than ever. A factory could be more productive in one day than an artisan could in one week. People were so excited about all these changes. They probably were thinking now that the machines are doing everything for them, they can actually buy more time to spend it how they please. But little did they know, capitalism was the child of the machine era. The quicker you turned capital into profit, the quicker you could re-invest it for even greater gain And this is how the expression “to make a fast buck” and even more dramatic “time is money and money is time” entered the language in the nineteenth century. That is when the workers had started to get paid per hour, and not for what they would produce. Every second cost money. Suddenly business found itself locked in a never ending race

to accelerate output. Being efficient was not enough anymore. The modern capitalism was always seeking to be “even more efficient.”

Urbanization has of coursed helped raise the pace of life. When you talk to people coming from smaller villages to the big cities what is it that feels the most different, they say that they start to do everything much faster.Their mind is always stretched with new images and new people and new everything all the time. All business is done in a higher pace. The buying and selling, the counting and the weighing, even the talk over the counter, is all done in a rapid and sharp way. (Honore, 2004) However, before the nineteenth century, the clock, the operating system of modern capitalism, hadn’t fully shown its power. Once it made sense that every town had their own timing which was kept by the solar noon. But when the borders were starting to vanish thanks to the speedy transportation meas, one city could not just be, let’s say, half hour behind in respect to its neighbor city. To solve this issue and the chaos that came with it, nations began harmonizing their clocks. By 1855, most of Britain accepted the time transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In 1884, 27 nations agreed to recognize Greenwich as the prime meridian, which eventually led to the creation of global standard time. (Engler, 2015) Now, it was a disaster to persuade the industrial worker to live by the 18

clock and to be “punctual” and “on time”.They kept trying to explain them the concept of “money is time”. They also started teaching the children at school how important and crucial it is to not fall behind from time. Little by little technology and the clock showed themselves in every corner of people’s lives. Everyone soon learned to think faster and to do faster. Of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get everything done at once: (Oppy, 2011)

important and crucial that it had actually become the currency. And here we are now, still on our beloved planet Earth, and what Olerich had fantasized in his story has turned into a reality for us. Borders are disappearing, thanks to the Internet and the very fast transportation means, and also time is more like money than ever before. These days “time-rich” and “time-poor” are phrases that have been added to our language.

“... That venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow... but for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today... In the midst of and age of work, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get ‘everything done at once.”

In our age, apart from all the other deadlines of everyday life, we are fearing one big deadline the most: death. Although thanks to the new medical science we have added a couple of decades to the medium human lifetime, we fear it the most. Everyone wants to slowdown the time and stay young forever. Everyone is always talking about using life to it’s fullest because you never know when your time comes to leave this world. Of course we feel that time is short and we try to live life to its fullest and to make every moment count. But although this instinct belongs to all the humans of the world, we notice that there are some cultures that are more prone than others to race against the clock.The first reason is, of course, cultural. People that believe that as much as time goes, it also comes, or people that believe that after death they are going to be born again to finish all the unfinished, or in some other way to continue living after death, those ones are the ones that tend to not have that instinct overrule their lives. Consumerism the other reason. Even Japanese people that actually don’t have this fast way of life in their culture.

Japan’s native religion that is called Shinto, is in harmony with Buddhism and

Nietzsche ,1882: Preface § 5 This warning from Nietzsche shows us that the intellectuals were starting to sense something that was not going quite right. They could feel that technology was starting to shape us, instead of it being the other way around.

People were already starting to become very impatient. Things were not fast enough for them anymore. They were getting angry and frustrated in no time.

A few years later, in 1893, Henry Olerich published a novel called A Cityless and Countryless World. I was a fictional story that was describing life in Mars.

A place where borders didn’t mean anything and a place in which time was so 19

has many similarities. One of them is that in both religions they believe in time being cyclical, and not linear. However, as we know, Japan has also mastered consumerism in the 1860, in order to catch up with the West.

that maybe all of this is actually too much. And since we don’t want to accept the reality, we are left feeling unsatisfied and anxious of feeling that we don’t have enough time.

Consumerism, or in other words, shopping. The shopping instinct of people makes them feel like there is never enough time for them to grasp, to gain, to enjoy. They always want to have more because they have realized that they can have more. Today all the world is a store and all men and women are shoppers. We want to indulge ourselves into as much consumption and as much experiences as possible. We want to not only keep up with our super busy jobs, but also to learn an instrument and to learn how to paint and how to sing and how to dance and to workout and all at a professional level, only because we can now, and not tomorrow. Tomorrow is too late. Oh, and not to mention that we need to socialize and spend time with family and go to parties and bars and we cannot attend all these socializing acts without being up to date with the latest fashions and gadgets. We also need some intimacy as human beings with our partners and some time to spend on our children, not a lot tho, a little bit is enough because well they are busy too with their school and homework and then piano classes and then ballet courses. And since we kept up with everything we need also an exotic well researched and reserved long before vacation. And then since we are kind at heart we do also some volunteer work. You know what the result is? Stress, tension, anger. We think we can do all that, but the truth that we absolutely don’t want to face is

Technology was supposed to be helping us to save time. The washing machine after its appearance in the early twentieth century was supposed to free people spending so much time on washing their clothes with hand. But then the hygiene standards changed and nowadays we wash our clothes 10 times more often that we used to before the twentieth century. Email is an other example. Sometimes you just cannot disconnect yourself from your everyday job life because you receive job emails 24-7, and you reply.

- ... Such a good professors, I sent him an email at 11 pm and he replied to me at 11:15.

And this is where we are now. Two centuries after the industrial and machine revolution. Here we are with our obsession. We enjoy going fast. And we get used to this joy, and that is saying “we get addicted” in a sugar coated way. We don’t even feel the speed anymore. Velocitization is what we are suffering from: To cause (an automobile driver) to misjudge or become unaware of true speed or to become drowsy as a result of prolonged traveling at a high speed (as on an open highway) - Miriam Webster. And this is exactly why we are never happy about the speed of things we use. The time in which we were using dial up Internet, we were amazed by how fast we were getting 20

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connecting to the other side of the world. Now the speed of the net is not even comparable with the speed of a dial-up. However if a page fails to open or takes a longer while than it should, we lose it. And when i say a while, I’m talking about two or three seconds. Now, the solution to this problem is not being more patient, but it’s getting an even faster connection, because we can, but also because, we are addicted. And we need some help!

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1 - 2. Let’s see what slow can do “Smile, breathe, and go slowly.”

Thich Nhat Hanh As life speeds up and we catch up with it by checking our phones constantly to get the feeds and the notifications and the pretty things that make us feel less bored and “busy” by bringing us things to do and by bringing us instant gratification, we are losing sight of something quite fundamental. We completely neglect the fact that maybe there are some things in life that actually need more time and patience. Like the relationships we create with other people in business. Most of us want to get rich over night and that is just not possible. So instead of killing ourselves to make the impossible possible by sacrificing the most crucial thing in our life that is our health, it is more intelligent to learn what we can permit to ask ourselves. Rushing can sometimes work the opposite way. It may lead us to taking one step forward and two steps backward. There are some things in life that can happen automatically and on their own. It’s enough that we get out of their ways. For instance, when we are in a waiting room with some other people, if we just put our phones away and stay in the “real physical world” for a moment, we can start creating short conversations and there you go, you just created a relationship with an other human being. As simple as that. (Spencer, 2015)

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Maybe we understand that we are tired of rushing through time. We understand that we do want to slow down, but no one said only by understanding it, we can make it happen. No one said it was easy. It’s actually not.

It is totally normal to get scared of falling behind. There are people that run companies, they can train a pit bull, they can stay up for 2 nights in a row, they can hike for hours, but slowing down would seem like moving mountains to them. They are terrified. They think that if they slow down, they can never get on the track again. They stay behind from their to do list. Who would reply to the clients!!! And eventually of course, the world will fall apart.They are exactly these fears that have us going full speed with our 100% capacity at all time.

Until we literally crash. (Woodward, 2013) It’s interesting and yet not really surprising how we easily forget to appreciate this luxurious gift of ours: our healthy bodies. It is not surprising because it is something that we have been born with. It has always been there and it has always functioned just fine and we have kind of forgotten that something can actually some time go wrong with it, if we don’t take care of ourselves like we should. We are so busy keeping up with our to do lists that we barely have time to check in every one in a while with our own body, just to see how it is keeping up with us and our heartless, super busy schedule. Usually, our health is the last thing of our priorities, yet without it, we cannot do any of the other things that come first. We actually believe that we are superhuman that can live on coffee and snacks. No meals, no sleep, no problem. “I am strong.” I

am the perfect employee. This is what every employer dreams of. A “strong” employee.

Many of us have actually experienced the results of neglecting self-care.

We know that we cannot go on like this forever and we have to stop pretending that we can. But what is the price? True happiness? If we just work harder and harder and eventually arrive to what we were once calling success we will be happy? No. Because we will have new standards of success. And what happens is that the only finish line will be death. Then what about life? By moving on this path we are satisfying the human nature of wanting more and getting approvals and being able to make an impact.To be significant and to stand out.

What is there is no good Internet connection? What if we run out of battery?

We get nervous of course. Because we have forgotten to be patient. And the case that is becoming hopeless is the case of the new generation. They never had to be patient in their lives. They have never practiced it to forget it. Who knows, maybe patience as a word wouldn’t even exist anymore? But could it be possible? I really whatever we want not further than a click away from us?

That is not even close to reality.There are things that are out of our hands, like relationships, like waiting for a heartbreaking period to pass, and many other situations. So if we practice patience when we can, we are actually preparing ourselves for the situations in which patience is the only choice we have.

Now the first step would be to accept ourselves, our true selves, for what we are. WE have to understand that we are enough the way we are. And we have to understand the true capacity of our bodies. Our lives would never be the same without this body. (Viers, 2015)

The next gift of slow for us will be the ability of not missing out on appreciating and indulging ourselves into the small things of our lives that make us happy. If we slow down we can actually take a moment and see the little achievements we make on our way to our main goal and where we are right now. Being grateful gives us hope and more energy to move forward.

The first gift of slow to us will be the reminder of taking care of our bodies. The vehicle without which we couldn’t go forward. The second gift of slow is patience, that is what is really lacking in this new era. We are never bored.

We don’t even have the patience or, better said, the nerves of being bored.

On the train or bus, we don’t just sit and look outside or not do anything, we go through our phones. Instant gratifications keep us amused on our journey.

It is clear that rushing in doing anything creates risks of mistakes. The hastier we are the bigger the mistake. Instead if we slow down we reduce the risk of making big mistakes. That actually helps us save more time. Practice and experience has shown mankind that it is way easier and way more efficient to prevent the unwanted than to deal with it after it has happened. Smaller mistakes are of course inevitable, but they can help us to learn from them and 24

to prepare ourselves for preventing the bigger mistakes. On any path that we are there is a lesson for us to learn, and that doesn’t happen unless we give some time to allow things to sink in.

lives. If we realize that is more logical to go fast we go fast, and if we choose to go slow, we go slow. It’s important to not be taken away by the flow without being able to choose.

Slow makes room for so many things that we may probably miss out if we just rush towards our main goal. That is, when we set a goal for ourselves and we focus on it and we just want it so fast and immediately, we start obsessing about it. As if the goal has taken a life of it’s own. Of course it is the right thing to do to have goals and dreams and make priorities, but it doesn’t make sense to create imbalance in our lives with one overwhelming obsession.

Who knows how many things and people miss out on by doing so. (Kruger, 2014)

We need to remember that human beings are the only creatures that are born with the gift of “choice” and slow helps us practice to use this gift in the best way.

One may think that maybe it’s not right to be slow all the time. What if there is something that needs a quick reaction. Not always the world is waiting for us to take our time and be as slow as we want. What if someone is drowning in a pool and the life-guard just chooses to be slow, because Slow Movement. This of course is not what slow is promoting. It is understandable and logical that there are some actions that need to be done with no hesitation. But the same life-guard can choose to have a slow life as well. As we know the work of nobody is all that he or she has. So the same person can choose the slow life for example his reading practice. Slow is about the balance. It’s about being aware of the pace we choose to have to go forward with our 25

It is true that the brain works wonders in tension moments. Once emergency happens one can expect the almost impossible from a normal human being. A great example of that could be the mothers that with their instinct throw themselves into danger to save their child. But the same mind can also do so much more if given the chance to slow down from time to time.

Now imagine a doctor’s office. The waiting room is exploding. People have been waiting the whole day for their turn and they don’t even know how much longer they have to wait. Inside the doctor’s room, the doctor is visiting one of his patients. Well, at least this is what is supposed to be happening. The doctor himself seems to be the one that is more in need of some help. You can tell from his semi-open eyes and messy clothes that he hasn’t had enough sleep, or any kind of time for his own. Last night he had stayed in his office until past midnight visiting the patients.. This morning he was in the hospital to do 3 surgeries. Then he went to the day clinic to visit some other patients there,

then he went to the gym, and straight form there he has come back to the office to visit other patients. And all of this happens like a cycle. Evey. Day. Of course he cannot even focus on what the patient is saying. He heres the word ‘pain’ so he doubles the pain killers and just in case, he writes for some MRI and blood test. Then before even saying goodbye to the patient in his room, he calls the secretary to send in the next patient. Needless to say what kind of disasters this specific lifestyle is risking.

Shifting the mind into lower gear can bring better health, inner calm, enhanced concentration and the ability to think more creatively. The brain even has two modes of thinking: Slow Thinking and fast Thinking. Fast thinking is rational, analytical, linear and logical. It is the way we use our brain under pressure. Slow thinking instead is creative and intuitive. It is how the brain works when there is no pressure. This is when the ideas come to us at their own pace. Scans show that the two modes of the thinking produce different waves in the brain. (Claxton, 1997) The intelligent person knows when to let the mind wander and when to get it fixed on getting something done. In other words, when to think fast and when to think slow.

1 - 3. How can we apply slow to our lives?

The first thing to know is that it is not exactly the easiest thing to do.

Remember? We are dealing with addiction here. Going slow means going against not only ourselves, but also the rest of the world. According the Slow Movement, ‘slow is the Yin in a very Yang world.’ But we have to keep in mind that if we really want inner peace we need to be truly living in the present moment and that, takes a hard work and a strong will. The result is a happier and healthier life. Having goals is essential in life, but becoming so attached to them we lose our clear sight. We don’t see the beauty of life anymore. We are not happy because we believe that achieving our goals is what will bring us true happiness. We think if we stay happy and positive on the journey towards our purpose we are fooling ourselves. But we need that joy and hope in our lives to continue whatever we are doing. We need to chill a bit!

Relaxation is the most effective way of achieving Slow Thinking. Meditation is one way to train the mind to relax. It lowers the blood pressure and generates more of the slower waves in the brain. Not only it helps with the mindfulness, but it also affects the area of brain which is related to anxiety, fear and shock, making people less likely to lose control. Meditation is not a new word or a new practice. However it has a not very correct image in most people’s minds. Most people imagine bald monks sitting and singing “ommmmm” in a temple in the mountains once they here the word meditation.

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Although what those monks are doing is actually a kind of meditation, but this practice does is not limited to that. It is way more mainstream these days. So many “normal looking people” also practice it to bring more inner peace and happiness to their lives. So many services such as schools and hospitals and airports and even prisons have are added meditation rooms to their spaces.

(Honore, 2004) Although different kinds of meditation and going to retreat courses of a few days to arrive to a state of Zen do wonders in order to lead us towards a slow thinking and in general a slow lifestyle, being slow can be practiced also throughout a normal day. One doesn’t necessarily need to sit and meditate.

Focusing on being mindful of your thoughts when doing everyday tasks, any of the every day tasks, will help us to remain the calm and slow state when things get tough. One of the practices is the one of 3 seconds. Wait 3 seconds before taking any action. You are so hungry and you want to eat? Count 3 seconds and then start eating.You are in a hurry and you have to be somewhere? Sit in your car, wait 3 seconds before starting it up. And so on in all the other task.

You see something in a shop or Online and you want it so much, you feel like you cannot survive without it? Before pulling out your wallet or pressing the “pay with Pay-pal” button, think about it. Is it really that crucial to have it?

When you are on your journey to become slow, it seems as if the universe starts throwing stuff at you just to give you challenges. Life will be full of 27

distraction, dramas at school and relationships, negative thoughts of your own or other people, finding people that start mocking you for the path that you have chosen. See them as great opportunities to practice present moment awareness by being slow. Problems are there to help us grow. Knowing what may challenge us on our ways can help to overcome the obstacles better.

Keep in mind that the progress in becoming slow is really slow itself. You may want to give up because you lose your patience but that is again the best moment for you to prove yourself that you are doing this right. You see your achievements when you overcome tough situations. (Junttila, 2013)

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1 - 4. Slow Food As said in the previous section, the easiest way to apply slow way of living to our lives would be by practicing it in all our everyday tasks. Eating is definitely an act that is practiced by all the human beings all over the world a few times a day. Putting Slow together with Food would seem like a great way of practicing this lifestyle.

Just like in everything else, haste was entered into the eating habit of people during the Industrial Revolution, when the ‘time’ and ‘clock’ had got a new meaning and importance. Today we see that, that start has brought us to not devoting time at all to ‘properly sitting at a table and eating a well prepared food with friends and family’. What we often see, especially in the UK and the USA, is people eating while walking, standing, working, reading, driving, watching TV, scrolling on their phone, talking on the phone, eating sandwiches and snacks, “easy” things, you know. When families do eat together is also often at McDonald’s or other fast food restaurants. The acceleration in the food world is not only at its consumption moment, but also its preparation and its sale. So many scientific ways are found and invented to lower the costs, boost yields and make corpse grow as fast as possible. In nature it would take a pig five years to arrive to 130 pounds, which was time for it to be slaughtered.

With today’s technology it is possible to make a pig arrive to 220 pounds in less than 7 months.

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As our ancestors moved to cities from their homelands in the small towns and gave up working in field for getting a new job in the factories and to go with the flow of the modern world, they fell in love with the idea of fast food. The more processed, the more convenient, the better! It was so fashionable for that time to cook in the least time possible. There were restaurants that were preparing frozen food in the table side microwaves. This was the beginning of mass production, and what has brought us to the 90 cent hamburgers. Soon the convenience of fast food found a way to people’s homes.

In the mid 50s people didn’t need to go to a fast food restaurant to be ‘cool’.

Food retailers were selling almost ready food. Everywhere food came to be marketed less for its flavor and nutritional values and more for how little time it took to prepare. In the 1970s microwaves found their ways into people’s homes and made it possible to measure cooking time in seconds. (Schlosser, 2005) Although preparing and eating food has become fast ever since the 19th century, but not every nation has changed the same amount. Different people have different attitude towards food. If we want to know who is the winner of the fastest food culture, America is for sure wins the first price. They devote less time than anyone else to eating, which brings them to spending about an hour a day on preparing and eating food.They are also more likely to buy processed food and to dine alone. The second and the third prize go to, in order,

Canada and then The United Kingdom. In southern Europe though, good food is still seen as a cultural that cannot be easily neglected. Children are still born and raised in this culture. However, people, especially the younger generation have tendencies towards the Anglo Saxon speed of eating. They feel like this is the way to keep up with the most developed nations. As the request rises for faster solutions of food, fast food restaurants are stealing the market from the traditional laid back bistros. (Sage, 2002)

of mother nature is a hot topic in the past decades. Picking produce before it reaches full ripeness, shipping it across the planet in refrigerated containers and then ripening it artificially, Containing food in vacuumed cans and plastic containers, adding chemicals to plants in order to make the grow faster and many other practices that make food consumption very convenient, are actually damaging our bodies and are turning this world almost unlivable for the next generations. (Schlosser, 2005)

“The destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they feed themselves.”

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness,1886 It is so interesting how Brillat-Savarin was accurate about a situation that the nation is suffering from today, more than two hundred years ago. It is no secret to anyone what the consequences of feeding ourselves badly are. But our haste drives us towards it. Since the effects of it are not usually immediate, we neglect it, or forget it even. Obesity and E-coli poisoning from meat are two of the diseases to name.

As many of us are going with the flow of fast food and fast every thing and believing that the faster is definitely better because ‘consumerism’ has doomed us, there are some more awake people that are drawing back. They are slowing down. They have started a movement with a name that says it all: Slow Food. Italy is the birth place and the forefront of this movement. Eating good has always been part of Italy’s culture and they really hold on tight to it and they are really proud of it. Although these days we see younger people running around the big cities like Rome and Milan with their Big Macs in their hands, but that doesn’t mean that the Slow Food Movement must lose hope.

These young Italians were born in this culture and they have been raised with it.They probably need some reminder to go back to their healthy way of being of their fathers.

But the destructive effect of fat food is not limited to people’s health.

It has also terrible results on the environment. Sustainability and taking care

It all started in 1986, When McDonald’s opened a new branch beside the famous Spanish Steps in Rome. Now that was a far too harsh move for 30

such a delicate part of the city of Rome. To many of the locals this act was not acceptable at all. They couldn’t understand how that can even be OK! For what price? To hold back the fast food attack, Carlo Petrini, a culinary writer launched Slow Food Movement. As the name suggests, this movement is about everything that McDonald’s isn’t: fresh, local, seasonal produce; recipes handed down through the generations; sustainable farming; artisanal production. Slow Food is also a supporter of ‘eco - gastronomy’, which is the notion that eating well leads to protecting the environment. More important than that, this movement is about pleasure. Petrini believes that this is a great starting point for fighting our obsession with speed in many things we do in life. (Honore, 2004).

The Slow Food Manifesto, written poetically and with intelligence by Folco Portinari and signed in Paris in December 1989 by the founders of the movement, was the first chapter in the story of a way of thinking. The right to pleasure, the importance of consciously living life at the right pace, the value of cultural biodiversity—these are the issues at least two generations of Slow Food managers have been trained to work on. (Petrini, Scaffidi, 2016)

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Slow Food Manifesto take frenzy for efficiency.

Approved by delegates from Argentina, Austra, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States and Venezuela at the founding conference of the International Slow Food Movement for the Defense of and the Right to Pleasure at the Opera Comique in Paris on November 9, 1989.

“Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of in-

dustrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life

Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscov-

er the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.

In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only true progressive answer.

model.

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.

A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of the Fast Life.

That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than

demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than international exchange of experiences, knowledge, and projects?

Slow Food Guarantees a better future.

Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can

help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with a little snail as its symbol.� 1

Many suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mis-

1. Taken from the book Slow Food: The Case for Taste by Carlo Petrini, Trasnlated by William McCuaig, 2003

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As we can see from the manifesto, there is not much said about the pros of Slow Food and the cons of Fast Food, but it has a deeper message. It is discussing the pros of Slow Living and the cons, or better said, dangers of Fast Living: Homo sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction. As a matter of fact, the manifesto sees the problem of fast food as a result of a fast and industrial civilization: first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life.

There are also some acts that the Slow Food has put into action which has had serious impacts on the economy. Slow Food is on the pursue of revitalizing the artisanal foods that are on the way to extinction and helps them get back to the global market. In Italy for instance over 130 delicacies have been saved, including lentils from Abruzzi, Potatos from Liguria, the black celery of Trevi and many others. Also the pigs are being kept in a different way.

There are also some other products that they are trying to save, such as some diary products in Greece and a delicate goat’s cheese in France.

According to the movement’s official website, by the end of 2016 the it has had one hundred thousand members and over one million followers. In 2001, the New York Times Magazine named it one of the “80 ideas that shook the world (or at least jostled it a little)”. Although the firsts message of the movement is “becoming slow” and even the symbol of it is a little snail, but that does not mean that the members are lazy people who are running away from life’s responsibilities. They actually work so hard for their goals and put a lot of effort to have a great communication. Since education is key, apart from the dinners and workshops and school visits and other events that are held by the movement’s activists to promote benefits of taking our time over what we eat, Slow Food has also opened its own university which is called The University of Gastronomic Sciences, at Pollenzo, where they teach the science of food and its history and sensual character.

These heroic acts are not limited to Europe and they have made their way also to the united States. According to the official website of the Slow Food Movement there are more than nine thousand members of the movement which are Americans. They managed to save the Crest peach of the northern California. They have also replaced factory farmed bird with a tasty rare breed of turkey called the Naragansett, which was once the centerpiece of every American family’s Thanksgiving.

The special attention being paid to the way the food is prepared and trying to modify the food as little as possible and using them as nature prepares them, not only is healthier and better tasting for us, but it also clear that it helps improving the environment. It is clear that the methods used by many conventional farmers take a toll on the environment, polluting the water, killing off the plants and animals before the due time and above all exhausting the soil.

It may seem strange to say that Slow Food supports globalization, since it’s always talking about using the artisanal products and every country and region producing for its own. But for them what matters is that the artisanal products travel well. The Slow Food also has a market of International trade every two years, that is teh biannual of Salone del Gusto. It is held in the former Fiat factory in Turin and it attracts so many artisanal producers from different countries. This event not only is where people can go and taste the best of food products such as ham, wine, cheese, mustards, bread, chocolate and so on, but it also gives opportunity for some marketing to take place. Different artisans from different countries and also investors and business men can discuss their further cooperations and so on.

Thanks to Slow Food, many food makers that were starting to lose hope have started to be profitable again. Miller and Busch where the two beer makers that were dominating the market of the United States for many years. Today there are fifteen hundred craft breweries that produce and sell beer following Slow Food principles. Artisanal bakers are also becoming very welcomed from the people, since the bread they make is from stone-ground flour rather than the industrial equivalent which passes through high-speed rollers that destroy many of the existing nutrients. And of course, we see the renaissance of the traditional farmers’ markets, even in England and the United States, in towns and cities across the industrial world, and often not so far away from the large supermarkets. The markets give the opportunity to the artisans to sell their fruits and vegetables and cheese and whatever they pro-

duce directly to their customers. Although everything is biological, they cost even less than what they do in the supermarkets. And this is because one pays only the product in the markets, but in a super market you would have to pay off what has been paid for transportation, staff and storage and especially for advertisements. (Honore, 2004) Having access to Slow Food is not limited to buying food from the market. So many people even cultivate their own produce. Either in rental plots of land as we see many young British do, or even in small vases inside the house or on the balconies. Something that is very common among the Italians.

All of this is a result of wiser and smarter consumers. And this is exactly what is raising the game among people that work in the food marketing such as restaurants. The ones that want to stay ahead of the game use ingredients that are natural and biological, maybe bought from the local markets or maybe produced directly in their own back yard! And they make sure that their customers know this fact. Supermarkets even keep up with the game. We see often that they dedicate parts of their space for goods made by artisanal products.

Many may think that following Slow Food means spending a lot of money in posh restaurants or spending too much time on cooking, making it something only for very wealthy people that don’t even need to rush in their lives and to kill themselves working 8 hours per day. But the thing is that anyone 34

can start even by doing a few things. Like for example just choosing the market or the artisanal food in the supermarket is already a big step. It may cost a bit more in a supermarket to buy the non processed food, but that is the price for eating better and as a result, staying healthier, which saves a lot of money in the future. Also, cooking at home even with high quality ingredients is cheaper than eating outside or having food delivered, or even buying prepared food from the supermarket. Slow Food is realistic. The modern world simply does not allow many of us have a four course Italian gourmet meal three times a day. Taking fast approach towards food sometimes seems to be the only option. But even if we do a little is still better than nothing. Maybe we take a ready grilled chicken from the supermarket, but we can add a home made salad to it.

Something that may seem the hardest thing in the world some days, can work wonders. I am talking about cooking after coming home from a long day of work. Of course our body tells us to just grab the fastest and easiest thing and to just stuff our stomachs so we don’t go to bed hungry. But if we put some effort and we actually start cooking, even something simple, we will not only save money and eat healthy homemade food, but the act of cooking itself can be so relaxing and meditating, even. (Petrini 2006) The next step would be to set a table for eating. Instead of just staying in front of the TV or even in bed (!) on our phones, it is definitely much better to sit at a table and even better if we eat in company.

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Although being a real follower of Slow Food is not so easy, exactly because of the nature of the twenty-first century, but the number followers and the people that actually practice it is increasing everyday. And that, is because of the nature of the human beings. We all want to be healthier and happier and we can be it when we eat well. That’s why people are ambitious to follow the movement, no matter how hard it may get sometimes.

“The pleasure of the table are for every man, of every land, of every place in history and society; they can be a part of all our other pleasures and they last the longest, to console us when we have outlived the rest.”

Brillat-Savarin, Physiology of Taste, 1825

Saturday Hay Market - A modest size outdoor food market that happens every Saturday at the heart of the Stockholm

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Slow Food International

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2.Yesterday of Shopping: Changing points throughout the history of trade

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Just like everything else that human beings have been doing for centuries, shopping also became hasty after the industrial revolution. In order to understand this changing point and its effects, we need to first analyze shopping’s history. We will see that shopping used to be slow, and by choosing to go slow again we are actually going back in history. Slow Shopping and Slow Living in general are the ”new olds”. New, because the man of today is more conscious and more caring, he is more educated and less ignorant. Old, because he already comes from a slow background. Bringing the knowledge of today and the slowness of yesterday together is what the slow philosophy, and from that, the “slow shopping” is all about. In the past, slow was not a choice. We were slower because we didn’t have the means to becoming faster. But now, we can consciously choose to be slow, although we have always the very welcoming option of being fast.

Historians agree in tracing the presence of places allocated to commercial activities in every period of history and they believe that the urban fabric is developed according to the amount and variety of commerce. It is no coincidence that the cities are developed in places in which it was easy to have commercial activities.

2 - 1. Before the 15th century In the ancient times, all different forms of trade were way smaller and more limited. Each family kept what ever they needed from their own products of hunting, fishing, agriculture, and from wrought iron, wood and pottery, and bartered what they had extra with whatever they were missing.The trade was taking place through markets which were almost always located outside of the city walls and near the gates of the city, or in large areas along the main roads.

During the Assyrian-Babylonian era, the market took place at the city gates, without any stable structures and with removable stalls.

In ancient Greece, the market was associated with the agorà which is a place where the streets of the city are converged, with some fixed temporary hut shaped structures which were reserved for sellers.

The first bottegas 1 were mostly quadrangular rooms made in arcades and designed to contain the merchandise that would have a possibility of exposition at the sales time. Afterwards they started appearing in the buildings that were surrounding agorà, and they started to be more specialized, such as perfumers, barbers, booksellers and so on. (Harrison, 1975) 1. The studio or workshop of a major artist in which other artists may participate in the execution of the projects or commissions of the major artist. (Merriam Webster)

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As the market was identified as agorĂ in Greece, it was identified as forum in the Roman society. A forum was a vast open space, where the so called tabernae were gathering. A taberna is the equivalent of an ancient bottega.

With the growth of the power and prestige of the Roman society, and soon the Roman empire, the monumental buildings eliminated primitive tabernae from the forum to give greater stateliness to the center of power, by combining them in different places of the city intended for specialized markets.

And this is how the foro vinarium (the wine forum), the foro piscarium (the fish forum), the foro suarium (the swine forum), and the fruits forum were born.

The tabernae, discovered at Ostia Antica, Pompeii, and Trajan’s Markets in Rome, were consist of a small room on a flat land with a great view on the street and a mezzanine which was accessed by a wooden staircase and from which a balcony was protruded.

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A model of the tabula of a taberna

Tabula of taberna in Pompeii, 79 AD

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Each taberna had a counter which was either made of wood or brick, and it was called tabula, which is where the name tabernae comes from.Tabula had an L shape with one side facing the street, and the other side was bent towards the inside, making a support for the customers. On the banks usually there were a few wholes with different dimensions and they were used for measuring the amount of the grains. The taberna was somewhat similar to the counter of a bar. People would come and stay there, chatting with each other and with the “shop keeper�. In 79 AD it was Pompeii’s most popular hang out, where locals would stop off to meet friends and partake in a snack of baked cheese smothered in honey. The longer side of the L being on the street side and closing the area of the taberna was showing the fact that the inner part was reserved to the sales man, the goods and some selected clients. The interior of the taberna was decorated with paintings relevant to the goods it was selling and this would do the communication part for them.

could hang out and stay there for something to eat or to drink with a friend, and also for the salesmen to have a rest from work.The shops in general, were elevated from the walkway, but part of their goods were still arriving to the street. The laboratory was generally equipped with a back room or a warehouse. The bazaar usually occupied one entire district of the city.

In the East, in ancient China, the market had no precise building characters and it was using the open space of the squares as its location to place its temporary shacks and street stalls. In the Islamic civilization however, there is a special place devoted to the market which is also handed down to the present day. They call it bazaar or souk, which is a collection of shops and workshops, grouped and categorized by the activity they perform or goods that they sell, linked together by a series of covered pathways. Only food shops were not grouped, but distributed in the various parts of the complex, so that people

The bottega in the medieval period and until the seventeenth century was not so much different from that of the Roman period. It was a workshop and a store at the same time, and it was also part of a house which was usually located on the upper floor. The opening towards the street was partially closed with a low wall topped with a sales counter that would arrive up to the windowsill level. Inside, there were some wooden shelves and some closet containers.The goods that could not be placed on the counter were suspended from the architrave or the entrance arch of the shop.To draw the attention

In the medieval era the site of the symbolic location of the market was represented by an uncovered piazza as a campus for the stalls. In special occasions the porches of private and public buildings and even churches were occupied by the stalls of the market. However, also in the western world there are examples of covered markets equivalent to the ones of the oriental civilization, for example, Les Hallas in Paris. In Italy though, the concept of the market as a building with fixed destination was not discovered until the late Renaissance. (Harrison, 1975)

of the passerby the seller, as well as shouting out what he was selling, he would also have to hang the goods and maybe the animals that were sold at his shop.

Only after the fifteenth century the openings started to be protected by glass, which could be easily maneuvered to put on or off depending on the season.

The shutters were divided into two parts: the lower opened at the same level of sales counter to make it even vaster, and the upper one instead could serve as a roof covering when bringing it up. Inside of the bottega, in addition to the laboratory, there was sometimes also a room with a parlor feature where customers were received to discuss the affairs of a certain level which could not take place on the street for security reasons. The type of medieval windows can still be admired along the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. Though with alterations due to the passing of the centuries. (Harrison, 1975)

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A model of the medieval bottega

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Medieval bottega in Ambruzzo, 1300

Street market, Pingyao, China, 12th century

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Bazaar, Isfahan, Iran,1580

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2 - 2. Rise of the bourgeoisie From the early 15th century,The bottega had a dramatic change when selling and trading shifted from the public street to the most comfortable places, inside; It outlined the difference between going shopping to meet and buy the basic things, to also going shopping only for having a walk and enjoying. (Magraw, 1986) The changing of the society and its manners resulted in changing the character of the bottega and shifting it towards the concept of a “modern shop” which was linked to the first signs of industrial civilization showing up.

The separation between the working place and the sales was helped by the gradual disappearance of the medieval corporations and the rise of the bourgeoisie. This new social class was increasingly seduced by the products offered by new technologies and imported from distant countries. With an increasing purchasing power, they contributed to the growth and to the development of retail spaces that began to populate the everyday places of social representation: the boulevards and large public streets and piazzas.

A society of the consumer which contributed to be the promoter of trade and at the same time consumer of the products placed on the market was being born. The bottega was also undertaken, therefore, there started to be some changes to their original plan: the openings on the street were larger 49

and closed with glass, the sale took place only on the inside, and the traditional medieval counter was eliminated. They were starting to look very similar to what we have as shops. Also specialized botteghe in luxury goods, such as textiles and jewelry were born. They were settled in the vicinity of the court or aristocratic buildings, and were frequented especially by the wealthy citizens and foreigners. The city attracted more and more people to them and they were becoming the customers of the botteghe.This is why it didn’t have much sense anymore for them to keep also their workshop function. The workshop was led out of the city and the store pointed its attention on how to attract customers inside; the goods were brought to light in the window to catch the attention of passers-by, thanks to the glass sheets produced in ever larger dimensions in order to be able to occupy the entire outer surface of the store, along with the use of internal artificial light. (Davis, 2006) By the early nineteenth century in Paris, in areas between the Palais Royal and Montmarte, the first passages couverts were born. They were covered galleries that housed shops, keeping them safe and away from the mud, the rain, the carriages with horses, and giving them a certain intimacy and tranquility, making it a shopping passage that is blended with fun activities and social and business relationships. Here the ladies and gentlemen could shop in a heated ambient and away from the streets’ noises. People passed the time to admire the windows, the decorations and all the new stuff that had just arrived from distant colonies.The passages were formed by covered corridors topped

with glass in iron frames, marble-covered walls and marble or mosaic floors.

The natural light from above bathed the hallway space that had opened stylish stores characterized by the gas lamps that created a glowing illumination on its both sides. The way people were buying goods was changed. It grew more and more to be an opportunity to stroll, to perform. They could see, but they could also be seen, and of course they could shop away from the crowd, and sheltered from the weather.

These passages were generally found in buildings close to the public roads. They used the old gates to the residential buildings as their entrances, embellished by the application of new decorations. Among the most interesting passages we can mention the Passage of the Panoramas, The Galerie Vivienne and Galerie VĂŠrododat. The Parisian model also spread to London where Burlingtone and Piccadilly Arcade were made. (Davis, 2006)

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Passages de Panoramas, Paris

Burlington Arcade, London

Galerie Vivienne, Paris

Piccadilly Arcade, London

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Turin is the Italian city that preserves the most historic shops. The concentration of these shops in some streets and squares of the city was due to some big urban transformations that occurred during the nineteenth century.

The most elegant shopping areas moved from the oldest part of the city along three main lines. During the he first half of the nineteenth century, when the regulation of clearing the roads from carts, racks and products was imposed, the shops were transformed from being laboratory and deposit to being the place for only sales purpose. Their new structures were in wood, marble, stucco and later, in iron and cast iron. Of course this set up of shopping areas had made the shopping activity less evident and visible in respect to the markets on the streets and in the piazzas.The shops cared a lot about their devantures, which was the point of transition between the outer public spaces and the private indoor, and also means of communication activity performed. The decorative elaborations on them were real works of art, as detailed as a sculpture, giving a very formal look to the shops. (Davis, 2006) The most prestigious shops were pharmacies who have preserved in some cases the original furniture including shelves, the counter and the equipment kit. These shops were generally divided into two main areas: the space for the sales with continuous cupboards on the walls closed with doors at the bottom and a shelf in the upper part, counter with shelving with porcelain or earthenware pots behind it, and the space on the back for the preparation of medicines.

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Confectioneries and pastries were generally organized with a sales plan on the sides of the room and closed windows to protect the goods on display.

The laboratory was located in the basement.

Food shops had their most important space in the kitchen where they were the foods were being prepared or cooked or conserved. The sales area was typically characterized by the use of the marble on the walls and also on almost all the surfaces for hygiene reasons.

The jewelers had very nice and very well maintained retail spaces. The furniture and the fabrics were of value and were creating the ambient similar to the lounges of the high society. Moreover, there were also some separate rooms in which one could shop in complete confidentiality. (Lucchetta, 2006)

Devanture of Stratta confectionery, Torino,19th Century

Regia farmacia XX settembre, Torino,19th Century 54

2 - 3. Industrialization takes over With the progress of industrialization, the number of different goods placed on the market was increasing and therefore there was the need for an appropriate space for the users’ purchases. Spaces that were even larger, and that were articulated on different levels, to also cater for the increase of the local rents.

In the mid-nineteenth century in Paris, a new typology of shop called the “novelty stores” arose, whose products were mainly women’s clothing and where the new term used to indicate that the products had to be frequently renewed.

What the “novelty stores” and the “department stores” had in common were the pursuit for more and more space for retail, the offer of products at low prices, the possibility for the customer to run independently around the retail spaces without necessarily buying anything, the promise of being able to change the purchased goods, and mainly the fixed price applied to the product. Moreover, the traditional relationship between the consumer and the seller had disappeared and the customer from that moment on could look, touch and try everything that was in exposition. (Davis, 2006) The new typology, the department store quickly spread around the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milano, Italy 55

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world: They rose in 1849 by opening Harrods and in 1875, Warehouses Liberty in London that were importing oriental products; in Paris, by opening Bon MarchÊ in 1852, Printemps in 1865, La Samaritaine in 1869 and Galeries Lafayette in 1895, in Moscow in 1893, by opening GUM. In Milan in 1877 a big department store called aux villes d’Italie was opened that was specialized in ready-made clothing. It was destroyed and closed down due to a fire accident and it was rebuilt and reborn in 1921 under the name La Rinascente.

These trade places were offering goods produced industrially on a large scale, accessible with low prices, for the new bourgeois class that was getting power on the social level. They were the upper middle class, however they could not afford the luxury shops, but they did not want to continue to shop in the local markets or bottegas either. These places used catchy advertising slogans that were precisely targeting this new emerging class. The creation of new bourgeoisie as the driving force behind the capitalist engine, particularly entrepreneurs who took risks to bring innovation to industries and the economy through the process of creative destruction. (Schumpeter, 2003) The stores began compete and to see who created the most original exposition arrangements and who was more persuasive on the customers.

The technology also contributed to the success of these commercial containers: the escalator, the hydraulic lift and electric lighting were key elements for the rise of the new retail spaces. With the emergence of the warehouses, the 57

passages lost their importance; new galleries were realized since the 1860: the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan and the Umberto I gallery in Naples are, in fact, characterized by very high ceilings which made them lose the intimate character that had characterized the Parisian galleries at the beginning of the century. (Lucchetta, 2006)

aux villes d’Italie, 1877, Milan

La Rinascente, 1921, Milan

2 - 4. Shopping Centers enter the game In the twenties of the twentieth century a new model of retail space started to spread which was the shopping center. It featured shops, restaurants and resting and leisure areas. This new typology seemed to be the combination of the typical traditional market of the city and the department store of the industrial age. The Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, built in 1924, can be considered the first example of this type. (Hine, 2003)

Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, 1924 59

The model owes much of its success to the fact that since the thirties the American families could make use of the refrigerator, which allowed them to be able to shop for several days and to do so less frequently. And not to mention the widespread use of the car for buying many things in each shopping session. Both of these new technologies and this new model was helping the citizens to save a lot of time, and that is all that they needed in that era. To save time. The increase in the traffic reduced the ability of windows to attract the passing of potential customers. Because this potential customer was too busy to look at the beautiful shop windows and get inspired, he had to run, get what he needed and get it over and done with all the shopping work. The suburban shopping center, the so-called mall, located at the outskirts of the cities in the low-cost areas, close to the main roads and arteries provided with spacious parking space, o was where all the shops were put. The window shops still didn’t give up to be beautiful and attractive and they again got a chance to play

Fun

Shopping

the role for which they were born. Not on the streets, but inside the shopping centers. As if someone had told them go be pretty somewhere else. With the expansion of the city in suburban residential areas after the Second World War, the mall replaced the main piazza of the city, becoming the meeting and gathering place of the city’s communities. (Hine, 2003) During the seventies the US model spread in all other industrialized countries and reached the highest level with the creation of restaurants, playgrounds, cinemas and other leisure and fun activities. Like this, the busy citizen that would go shopping every once in a while could also have some fun time.

Consumers were not going to the mall only to shop but also to see, like people once left their house and stood in the streets of the city center or in the piazza. With the difference that this “fun” was not as accessible. Kind of like a doping for fun. It reminds me of these futuristic stories that someone doesn’t eat or sleep for a certain period of time and then gets an energy infusion and again gains enough power to continue living without food or sleep for a while.

of old recovered buildings. For example a recent recovery intervention concerning the New York Central Station, has managed to insert more than 80 prestigious shops to the station.

The largest shopping center in the world was built in 1992 in Minneapolis, the Mall of America, with about 400 stores, 4 stores, 50 restaurants, 14 cinemas, 3 hotels, 8 night clubs, a golf course, a school and a church. In Europe they have also arisen similar structures, but in much smaller proportions. After the mid-seventies, after having saturated the suburban areas, shopping centers re-entered into the urban fabric in smaller spaces, often placed in the context

It is also interesting to mention the special case to Montreal where the municipality has developed the model of the shopping center below the street level and not on the surface, to face the harsh temperatures which the city is subject to for different months of the year. It has become the only place for social gathering. Montreal is considered the largest underground city in the world: it occupies 30 kilometers of tunnels connecting 10 underground 60

stations, with 2 railway stations, 2,000 stores, big hotels, cinemas, theaters and exhibition halls. Almost every commercial building has an underground space of one or two levels. The buildings are connected by a network of galleries through which it is possible to move for much of the city center without ever going outside.

Ray Oldenburg, urban sociologist, writes about the importance of informal gathering public places. In his book of The Grat Good Place, 1991, he demonstrates how and why these places are essential to a community and their public life. Later on he introduces a new term called “third places” in his book of Celebrating the Third Place”. (Project for public spaces, pss.org, Author: Project for Public Places) A “third place” is the public place on neutral ground where people can gather and interact. It is called so because it is in contrast with the terms “first place” which is ones home and “second place” which is ones work place.

As the Author quotes “Third places host the regular, voluntary, informal and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” A third place is where people can leave behind the concerns and the repetitive situation of home and work and simply enjoy the company around them and the surrounding space. The heart of each community’s social vitality is its third place, which is consist of the main streets of a city, pubs, cafes, shopping malls and stores or even post offices and … The quality of these spaces 61

depend on how they promote social equality by leveling the status of “guests”, creating habits of public association, and offering psychological support to the individuals and communities. (Oldenburg, 2000) “ Through a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.” (Oldenburg, Celebrating the third Place, 2000) A retail space can have the potential os vein a high quality third place in a city, especially is it is mixed with some other city functions. Now let’s see how this matter can help to improve a city.

There are some cities that are considered almost ideal in sense of their urban planning, such as Bogota’, Paris,Vancouver and Copenhagen. Many other cities that want to improve, borrow ideas from these cities. However they all usually face a mutual problem. This problem on one side is a failure to maximize utility, and on the other side is the inequality that exists in the cities. This problem usually comes from the city having a sprawl condition. In a sprawl, rich public spaces, leisure time and safe streets are not accessible to people that live far from denser, more connected places. the property values are very high in the denser inner areas, and this matter simply excludes millions of people.

Dispersal and segregated functions are the big obstacles to solving these issues in the sprawl cities.

These cities are so pedestrian friendly that obesity is turning out to be an issue in them. Sometimes even if one drives for for hours and not quite feel like he has arrived somewhere. In other words, these cities are full of “empty spaces”. (Tachieva, 2010) The new house buyers who are the new generation of these cities’ citizens and especially the new immigrants are not at all enthusiastic about the unpleasant situation of these endless auto commutes.

“The party is over for the sprawl, the market is changing and young people and old people are demanding something different.

They want lively sophisticated places where they can walk and where they can still have freedom beyond the age of eighty.”

Galina Tachieva, The Sprawl Repair Manual, 2010 Galina Tachieva, Architect and Urban Planner and an expert in sustainable urbanism, urban development and sprawl repair, has introduced some prescriptions in her book of The Sprawl Repair Manual, 2010: Business parks can be fixed by inserting streets and shops onto their tarmacs. Huge unfordable houses can be divided into smaller apartments. Disconnected tangles can

be made walkable by strategic grafting of new roads and lanes between them.

Gas stations can be humanized by wrapping their parking lots in new streetfront businesses. And …

Part of these suggestions may seem unreal or not doable, but also part of them have already come to life. One of the easiest and most doable things is including shops and retail spaces to the housing areas and their open public areas. Adding shops does not necessarily mean that people have to shop.They just help making a public space more pleasant. (Montgomery, 2013) The case of Lakewood (Southwest of Denver) could be a good example here. The project was about development on a former site of a vast mall surrounded by parking on 104 acres. At the beginning of the 21st century, this rather old 20th century mall, then known as Villa Italia, had lost almost all its customers to bigger and newer malls on the urban periphery. A suggestion to solve this issue was turning the super block site into a big-box power center.

But what people of Lakewood wanted was a downtown.

The city eventually worked with a developer to turn the super block into 23 smaller blocks.These blocks were very well connected to the network of the surrounding neighborhoods, combining shopping and other open and closed public spaces with the offices and housing. (Combining the first and second and third places of Oldenburg.)

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Existing larger buildings and parking structures were wrapped with small street fronting retail spaces, keeping streets active and slow, as Jahn Gehl, the Urban Planner of Copenhagen, had counseled. The site was anchored by a block size town green and a central plaza where people came to hangout without any need to shop. More than fifteen hundred people live in good quality apartments above stores, or in lofts pr houses built up against the street.

It is important to take into consideration that a meaningful sprawl repair, such as the Lakewood Towne Center example is very different from a main street imitating faux downtowns. The true repair addresses the systematic problem of sprawl and not only the aesthetic aspects. They don’t turn the malls inside-out just because the shops make the streets look more attractive and as a result to gain more buyers for the shops. By strategically mixing shopping and other public spaces and housing and working spaces, the people can be given the opportunity to walk if they wish. It creates a critical mass of demand for transit and comfortable places to wait for it. It links streets to surrounding networks, making walking easier and extending tendrils of easier living, good health, sociability and connectivity. (Montgomery, 2013)

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Villa Italia Mall in Lakewood, Colorado, July 1970

Villa Italia Mall in Lakewood, Colorado, July 1970

Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado, July 2014

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3. Shopping Today

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3 - 1. Concept matters

settings to the product etiquettes.

The new concept of point of sale was born in the eighties. This type of retail space needed to communicate in an appropriate way one brand and its products. Then the concept stores start spreading. The concept store is the definition of a store that its design has a specific concept behind it. That is, beauty and basic functionality are not the only things that matter anymore.

Once the design of a store was simply a matter of aesthetics, the exclusive domain of an architect, which was to define the shapes, the colors and the most evocative and engaging setting. Today it was not possible to talk about a store design as a simple architectural exercise, where the equipments and the finishes are sufficient for the construction of a total work. The store is one of the final channels of communication and of the marketing of the companies, which is an important point of contact between the companies and the consumers.

Designing an environment for the sale is now part of business and marketing objectives and to arrive at a definition of a project idea that is a combination of architecture, design, lighting, materials and exhibition techniques, and not to mention the use of technology and the care and attention for the details.

The high competitiveness, the market and the continuous need for innovation, force people who work in this field to be constantly looking for innovative solutions in order to always propose new techniques and new materials. The goal is to seduce the consumer, to make the sales work, to take care of all aspects, from most general ones to the very particular ones; from the window

The case of the fashion industry in this respect is particularly significant.

Ever since the late eighties, the big fashion houses have decided to ask architects to create their spaces for them in a way to expand the image of their brands and to create an effective scenario for it. The first episodes of this type of collaboration were: Esprit chain with Sottsass, Citterio and Foster, who each invented a point of sale with an identity and a look different from the other; Marni with Future System, which instead have taken care of the image in a way that the same typology could be used either within a department store or a point of sale. Calvin Klein with Pawson is also an other example.

The fashion skyscrapers, are the new realization of the great architects of our time, and that means that the fashion world has become the main patron of the “trendy buildings�, with a series of consequences also on the retail space. And it is not even just a make up for the interior: the shop has become the house, and the department store, the palace, thus, this is turning the great designers in the role of the 21st century’s patrons of arts.

There are many examples that can be cited to explain this new philosophy and at the same time the store design strategy: Kazuyo Sejima and Nishizawa have designed Ruye the Dior store in Tokyo; Massimiliano Fuksas is the author of Empori Armani in Hong Kong and Shanghai; Tokyo Itoha designed 66

the skyscraper for the Tod’s in Tokyo; Asymptote have designed the flagship store of Carlos Miele in New York. For Maison Hermès in Tokyo, Renzo Piano designed a glazed tower of glass blocks, which houses the boutique on the first five floors, a museum, a space for temporary exhibitions and a workshop for craftsmen. The store of Issey Miyake in New York was designed by Frank O. Gehry and Gordon Kipping; the point of sale is arranged on three floors and is characterized by the presence of an element of strong visual impact: a sort of wave in the titanium film, developing from the basement, below the staircase, it comes from the ceiling and ends its movement at the cash counter, by framing it.

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Calvin Klein, John Pawson, 1995, New York

Maison Hermès, Renzo Piano, 2001, Tokyo

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One of the most interesting examples that has brought this , let’s say, new rage of shopping to a whole an other level is probably The Epicenter of New York Prada is designed by Rem Koolhaas. It is an entertainment place or, as the designer himself prefers to call it, “a conceptual showcase for transmitting future directions”.The shop has been reinvented as a stage-like space, in which products and customers are part of a single play: shopping. The double-height open space is convertible into an auditorium through a platform that is controlled mechanically and the hailstorms that lead to the basement. The space is conceived as a laboratory for experimenting with new forms of interaction with customers: the steps may be the best place to display shoes, but where you can also sit down to attend the events.

As for the more specifically commercial functions of the store, there are two elements that address this issue in the most interesting way. 1. Suspended display elements and 2. Technological dressing rooms. The first one is consist of a series of aluminum mesh cages that come down from the ceiling and are internally equipped with hook’-shaped elements for hanging items of clothing, and also a place for hosting the mannequins or shelves for fashion accessories;.

These display elements are fixed to motorized rails and can be moved back and forth or hidden in the back of the store so as to open and free the space according to the needs and demands of the proposed events. The dressing rooms are, however, proposed as transparent glass cubes, that once occupied they become opaque by becoming polarized. Also instead of the traditional 69

mirror, they have an LCD screen that displays the figure of the visitor from different angles. If the customers want, the images can be electronically stored to be used in their future purchases.

Epicenter Prada, Rem Koolhaas, New York, 2001

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Unlike the previously mentioned cases, where the fashion house has turned to world-renowned architects, the Maison Louis Vuitton has instead created an internal architectural firm led by Eric Carlson and Peter Mariano as to pursue the program for the creation of the various points of sale, in particular the main one in Paris at Champs Elysees.

way to allow maximum flexibility and to allow to change it depending on the season and the effect that needs to be obtained on the clients. The space is a cutting edge for the integration of contemporary art that become an integral part of the architectural organism, which is exposed on permanent displays in specific areas of the retail space.

The 1931 building that houses the new flagship store of the Parisian house has been completely renovated in order to realize a concept store in an elegant and modern way that continues the promenade inside the store. The showcase is separated from the interior with a curtain formed by a giant gold dyed knitted steel, that reproduces the brand’s monogram in a modular way. The mesh continually returns inside the store, embellished with glass inserts, ceramics and colored crystals of Bohemia according to the importance of the spaces. Once inside, the entrance area is facing a series of terraces, which differ for each particular arrangement which are all always surprising for their richness of features and details. The architectural design has literally emptied the building to make way for a circulation system which is divided into four levels. Wood, leather, stainless steel, along with refined finishes that make explicit reference to the long tradition of craftsmanship of the house, characterize the interior design.

A particularly impressive compartment of the store is its escalator that leads from the ground floor directly to the highest level of the store.The Danish artist Eliasson has conceived it as a dark and soundproofed space, isolated from the rest of the store, with images projected on its walls. Once you are in the Atrium, you see the staircase dedicated to the bags and the travel cases, topped by a dome of 20 meters high, from which an infinite amount of shiny steel rods hang.

The system of the exposition of the products is designed in a

At the check out lane you can understand the reason for such spectacu-

With opening of this showroom the end of old-style boutique has decreed.Those boutiques in which no one entered by a sort of fear, the fear of being blocked by a salesman. Here the people enter also out of curiosity, to observe closely the great trunks, the new ones and the history of the collection, to meet the fashion personages, to see how a shop is transformed into a sort of museum, where, however, it is not forbidden to touch what is exposed.

lar opulence. Even those who before entering, you would never have ventured in buying a Louis Vuitton product are also waiting to pay for glasses, key chains, wallets, and other less expensive products.Thus we can see how this move has lead to the democratization of luxury, with great satisfaction of the company.

Maison Louis Vuitton, Rome, 2007

Maison Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2005

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The growing success of the big names in fashion, since the eighties, has caused the prestige to move away from the department stores and made them go into crisis as a commercial type. Many had closed or were merged to malls. Today however, we are seeing a revival of department stores, which are often associated with urban renewal.

The Future System in Birmingham designed the Delfridges department store.

It is an instantly recognizable building that, because of its shape, a giant blue bubble studded with aluminum discs, stops and attracts the curious gaze of the visitor. In general, the department store has showcases that are real works of art; inside you can find everything from clothes to jewelers, from toys to food, and you can access them at all times, as the new philosophy asks to keep open 7 days out of 7 days.

Apart from the stores that belong to the fashion’s big names, many of the mass market chain stores also started following the new rage of concept and flagship stores, to keep up with the new language of shopping in the 20th and the 21st century.

La Rinascente, Milan 73

A good example could be Zara Flagship store in Milan (Corso Vittorio Emanuele), Italy. This was the first Zara store launched in Italy and since its grand opening in April 2002, it is one of the most visited stores in Milan. The structure which is hosting this store is a 4000 sqm space from the 30s used to be a theater and then the “Astra” Cinema for many years. The inviting double staircase entrance featuring marble, brass historical mosaics and an exceptional gold cupola presenting an impressive Murano chandelier on the ceiling was kept from the historical settings, which has always been a base for the outstanding design of the “welcoming scenario” of the store.

Starting from February of 2017, Matteo Thun + Partners is in charge of the design of the new concept of the entrance, which is using the theme “theater” to represent the culture of Milan. The modular dynamic structure acts as an entrance gate that welcomes the customers towards the inside of the store. In the metaphor that he tries to create, the mannequins on the structure are the actors and the customers are the audience. In this case the stage is dedicated to the cloths on the mannequins. (retail design blog, 2017)

3 - 2. Outlet stores Although in the 1980’s and the 1990’s the outlets have had the biggest growth, but their history dates back to more than 100 years ago. Apparel and shoe factory stores in the USA, mainly on the East Coast, started to offer extra or damaged products with a lower price to their employees. After some time they also started to sell to the non employees too, and this is where is all got started. The location of these “outlets” was on the grounds of the factory of their production. Until about the 1970’s, outlet stores were places to sell excess or damaged products, in isolated single-store locations.

The first multi-store outlet, which is very similar to what we have today, opened in 1974 in Reading, Pennsylvania, by Vanity Fair. The increase in awareness and desirability of designer labels but also quality and value by more and more people has caused the improvement and the appreciation of outlet stores increase ever since. After the 1990’s more and more “in season” merchandise is found in the outlets and today some brands produce some products that can only be found in the outlet store of that brand. (Coughlan, Soberman, 2004)

Zara Flagship Store, Matteo Thun + Partners, Milan, 2017

Today, outlet malls are typically opened with 10,000 - 20,000 sqm and they also expand through time. For example BAA McArthurGlen which is the leading outlet mall developer in Europe has expanded its complex in 74

Serravalle and has recently expanded with a further 40 new stores, building on its position as one of Europe’s largest luxury designer outlet. The expansion will add a further 12,500m² of retail space in two phases (3,500 sqm + 9,000 sqm) to bring the total to 51,500 sqm. Daniela Bricola, McArthurGlen Centre Manager, Serravalle Designer Outlet, says: “Serravalle Designer Outlet has become an international tourist destination. With this new investment, we will be creating an even higher level of excellence, just 50 minutes from the global city of Milan, and offering the over five million customers who visit the centre each year an even greater choice of the most loved names in fashion.”

(McArthurGlen Group, 2015)

McArthurGlen Designer Outlet, Serravalle, Italy, 2015 75

3 - 3. Online Shopping Online shopping is probably the newest form of shopping that is being used by people. Although it’s history goes back to 1979, when Videotex, Michael Aldrich in the UK came up with the concept of “teleshopping” which is equivalent to today’s online shopping. It definitely revolutionized the way business happens today. But at the beginning, teleshopping or online shopping belonged only to business to business transactions and people were not using it on a daily basis for personal use. In 1987, Swerg which was a community of software developers launched an online market so they could sell their informatics products. And this was the first time an industry was directly selling to people via an online account. In 1995 Amazon.com started selling everything online. eBay also started onlne auctions. But still, online shopping was not so common. And it didn’t become so until the past 10 or 20 years. In 2002 that PayPal the company which offered an alternative through internet to cash or check payment was acquired by eBay and from then on, online shopping started to become more and more popular, until now that it is being used like never before. Online shopping developed with B2B as well as with B2C since everybody is on internet, and development is going on each and every second for grabbing a better share of the market. Almost all the brands now give the opportunity to shop their products online. Even super markets. This has mad shopping fast and easy. Making the famous statement of “shopping is my cardio” have no sense anymore. (Taylor, 2013)

3 - 4. Marketing today As you can see, we have come a long way on the path of trade and marketing. Who would have ever known how the street market would turn into a huge shopping mall with technology everywhere. Once, if it was too hot, or too cold, raining or snowing, maybe there would be less people shopping on the streets. But shopping centers and also all other types of stores have solved that issue. America (and not only) has been “Malled.”The “air-conditioned, sanitized, standardized” shopping malls “have become the new Main Streets of America” (Consumer Reports, 1986). A few decades after, great philosophies and concepts came behind the design of the retail spaces and created eye catching and breath taking concept stores. And eventually, the pleasure of having something brand new came to a point of being only one “click” away.

But have we really solved the problem of world’s consumption? Is this all that all this world needed to “improve” its consumption or in better words shopping habits? Consumerism has reached its peak in the last decade, and retail spaces have fueled it a lot. Making everything so available and easy to acquire, without even giving people time to think about what they are purchasing. “It’s too easy and cheap to have it, so why not?” This has become the main logic behind every person’s shopping task. And it has become so logical that they don’t even reconsider it. These days people mainly buy, because they can. They can afford it. Time-wise and money-wise. Time-wise because

they can do it online, and money-wise because there is the cheap version of everything. You can’t afford that designer bag? No problem, China has already solved your problem. And who cares if it is 100% in plastic. And this is exactly when consumerism takes over control.Turning people into consumers instead of costumers. (Meo, Ostidich, 2008) Ever since 2008 - 2010, researchers have noticed a change in people’s shopping behaviors. They seem wiser and more caring about their consumption and its consequences. It looks like consumerism is out of fashion nowadays. What could be the reason? International situation? Is it China’s fault? Is it because of overrated oil or is there a political propaganda going on? Well the answer to all of them is negative.The main reason is a general and widespread wisdom and knowledge among the people, who we could once call consumers. And this is absolutely a good thing and a positive step forward. Only those who believed in an infinite economic growth in expanding markets and in insatiable consumers should get worried. And if consumerism is in crisis, marketing is not in a better position; together they have produced their own antibodies.

They have created monsters in their own home: creatures who now turn against them and ask not to be called consumers anymore, but to be treated as persons. And it really is an ugly word for a human being. As if you refer to a thing and not to a person when you say consumer. It sounds really offensive.

The consumerist reasoning implies that consumption is what makes us 76

happy and possession is what is good for human beings, but people have arrived to a point to believe that, that is not true.They have realized that it is also possible to be happy without buying, and that fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) happiness is not always something shiny and new that can be bought from an elegant store. In fact, it is the marketing mechanism that has created the frustration of need, and the desire to buy the products that are perceived as unreachable. That is exactly what has made the people that are now aware of these marketing traps.There are even some people that theorize an inverse relationship between quality of life and consumerism.That is, where the impact of consumerism results in a departure from the human and spiritual sphere because of the predominant importance of physical materials.

But also the assumption of “consumerism is equal to progress� is not so wrong. It’s just that it is extended beyond the individual sphere and it is more about the social one. Consumption in this case has a positive value because it encourages the production, and it helps the economy grow, and therefore, it brings wealth to all (which may easily go to waste by buying too much!). (Meo, 2008)

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“Consuming is not the essence of life as it used to be in the recent years. We are born as persons and we die as persons.

We are men, women, we build families, we destroy them, we live, we die. No one is born a consumer. But people also have needs to be met. Knowing that we have to communicate with people and not with ‘things’ implies a vision of man focused on relationships, rather than on its individualistic dimension, on its local dimension rather than its global one.”

Daniela Ostidich, Carlo Meo, Come acquistano gli italiani, 2008

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But again, consumption in order to stay positive even on a social level, needs a healthy balance. Because, in addition to the negative influences of excessive consumerism on the individual, the “social vision� of the consumerism can also omit the negative effects of the process such as pollution, environmental degradation, exploitation of human resources and so on. Up to a point that today a deep discussion is undergoing which is questioning the validity of some indicators such as the GDP1 that measures the state of health in a country. Also the concept of quality of life of an individual is being replicated at a country level, which is an other sign that the production-consumption mechanism is starting to creak.

That said, the point is not to demonize consumerism and marketing, but instead, it is to explain why they are in crisis. And the first answer would be: consumerism does not solve man’s problems, and the man now knows this as a fact. Understanding why people do not consume anymore or consume way less than before is a starting point to understand what can be the future of marketing and what companies must do to survive with this situation. The consumer is like a string puppet that is playing a show. A show that is called shopping. The strings of the puppet are in the hands of the marketing companies, making people act in their orders. People have always been considered like that. A target to which you could shoot and they would never reacted.

They would never die or escape. They were like fools sitting in front of the television. They would see an advertisement, fall in love with the brands, run 81

to the store and buy the products. (Ostidich, 2008) From here comes the idea of the passive consumer, a consumer-thing, similar to the products that he buys. And from here comes the supposed omnipotence of the brand in front of an unconscious and influenced consumer.

This is where the dominance of the means over the aims was born; the marketing tools prevail the goals, and anyway the consumer is helpless. And this is how when the companies face the difficulties think that the only way out is to invest in their instruments, to do more advertising and to do more promotions. While what they have to do is to actually understand their costumers as persons and to reconsider and review their strategies. A similar attitude to that of tennis or golf players that continue to change their rackets and bats thinking about improving their game, while the solution is just to learn how to play. (Ostidich 2008) Playing the old marketing game means to analyze the consumer in a laboratory and treat him as a guinea pig and to impose their ways and strategies in the form or their marketing and products on the people. Playing the new marketing instead, means to chase the consumer in the stores and on the street, watching him all the time, try to dialogue with him, and to use new tools and change their products in oder to get in the game and keep up with it all the time.

The problem is that companies today have neither the physical - to continue with the sports metaphor - nor in the technical equipment to play another sport: Companies take decisions individually, in a way that it has the lowest risk for themselves, where the office culture is greater than that of going to know the consumer through direct contact with them, and where the marketing is struggling with the sales, and the sales is struggling with the purchases. (Meo, 2008) The big companies are often the most inadequate ones to practice the new game. There is no coincidence that today the best companies in the world are the ones that do distributions by having direct contact with their costumers, and some of the most successful brands are companies that did not exist 10 years ago. However, what completely new is the consumer’s consideration: active, unpredictable, inconsistent. A monster or just a man?

That is just a man with all his problems. But some companies still insist on not accepting that. There is even a new trend fashionable in the recent years that tends to transfer the blame of the marketing crisis on the consumer. Saying that he is has become unreliable, moody, and crazy in some way. And they believe that they need to fix this creature by putting him back in the line. They get confused. What has happened that the consumer is acting differently. The passive consumer cannot free himself from the chains. Could it be the crisis?

So they just assume that it is just a matter of time that the consumers go back to how they were. But it will not happen. The puppet has cut the strings!

The passive consumer of yesterday is now an active costumer. Because he has become and expert shopper now. He is smart and educated and knows what he can afford and what he can’t. And more important than that he knows what he needs and what he doesn’t. He is also starting to be aware of the consequences of his consumption.

Having a group of active, smart shoppers to deal with, brings up the need of getting to know them better, and according to that we can come up with different shopping typologies. One type of shopping is not enough to satisfy everyone, since people are different and they need to be treated differently.

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3 - 5. User Analysis - Shopping Map In order to be able to analyze the experiential world of the customers, there is no better way than to directly ask them about their experience. After all the design is for them, so they are for sure the best discriminators. The Shopping map is an annual report of users’ analysis that its preparation is consist of different stages: briefing and preparing the interviewers, data control for their processing through statistical programs such as SPSS and a final report.

Shopping Map - Consumers Observatory 2016 is a study undertaken by Marketing & Trade S.r.l.48, which analyzes the evolution of the purchasing behavior of the Italians. Marketing & Trade S.r.l. was founded in 1993 as a laboratory of ideas and strategic solutions for the distribution industry.Thanks to over twenty years of experience in the retail and consumer behavior, they have managed to integrate more quantitative data to qualitative improvements. They integrate the supervision of the consumer trends and the future purchase with a deep understanding of the operating mechanisms of the retail spaces, and then the ability to conceive and design them. In this section I will present the research describing the various sections that compose it, and then I will explain how I will know who are going to be the potential users of my design project.

Shopping Map traces the patterns of the Italian shoppers and identifies the types of buying behavior, their attitudes towards different brands, promo83

tions, quality and even sustainability and the different forms of communication during a shopping process. It Also associates the most frequented format of shopping and the preferred retailer with each model of consumption, to help us guess the weakness and the strength of each type of shopping typology according to different users.

Shopping Map pays a lot of attention to changes, innovation and to new aspects that the world of purchase suggests This is why the innovative data in the previous imprints are also present in this one. Since we are studying an ever developing market which is capable of changing very quickly, it is necessary to adapt to the changes and also to observe very small differences to identify and analyze a substantial metamorphosis consumption. In fact, we cannot deny the importance of staying updated in order to not stay behind, and to better understand how to work and how to act in the world of shopping.

Exactly for these reasons Shopping Map is not limited to the data of the evaluation of the shops and the retailers. Despite their importance, they do not simply create groups who act and behave in the same way towards shopping; and they do not simply investigate everything that goes beyond the mass market of the large scale retailers. Shopping Map reworks all this information, which is always present in the report, by looking at the users in an innovative way.

The conceptual maps are in the presentation of the six Italian shopper clusters and the outcomes of the retailers, in a way to manage to represent the connecting link between what the shoppers think and how the marketing agencies and brands act. This allows us to understand the reasons why the two do not “dialogue” most of the times. The identification of the six Italian profiles that correspond to the same consumption patterns remains essential in the core of our theoretical and methodological research. The chosen retailers from different clusters have been studied together with their strengths and weaknesses. In addition, the variables affecting the consumption were examined with continuous observations and reviews, to redefine and improve the items so that they can achieve greater significance in distinguishing the consumers’ attitudes.

The 6 new Italian clusters of the Shopping Map of 2016 are: 1. I Territoriali (The Territorials) 2. I-Family (The Family) 3. Esausti (The Exhausted) 4. Wow Shop 5. Hasta il consumo siempre (Hooray, Consumption forever) 6. Ok il prezzo è giusto. (Ok, the price is right)

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We will see that For each profile a detailed description of consumption attitudes is provided: perceptions; motivations of shopping; retailers and channels of reference; new directions of consumption / frequency of visits to the city centers; sociodemographic details.

In order to identify these clusters of consumers in a complex panorama of our contemporary society, it Marketing and Trade S.r.l has done1157 face to face interviews in the months of February and March of 2016, in nine Italian cities: Turin, Milan, Padua / Mestre, Bologna, Ancona, Rome , Naples, Bari, Catania. Moreover, in order to have a diverse variety of users, within these cities, the interviews were taken place in six different locations of survey: • Shopping centers • Neighborhood supermarkets • Specialized retailers • Historic centers, and streets dedicated to shopping • Discount stores • Street markets

3 - 5 -1.The Study Objects (The Factors of behavior towards shopping) In order to understand the different consumer behaviors of Italians through a questionnaire designed ad hoc, eight possible factors that influence the buying process have been investigated. The factors and the items that are analyzed and selected are the ones that were most significant in discriminating different consumption patterns.

1. New channels : This factor has to do with the frequency of the visits of the users, weather physically or virtually, weather in alternative channels or the mass distributions. Considering this factor is maybe not a novelty in itself, but it is the first time that it clearly emerges as a separate factor from some other ones that may also be correlated to it, such as experience, innovation, etc.This helps us to indicate how now this factor is conceived as a possibility of choice by all of the Italian clusters, both from those who choose to frequent these channels and also from those who instead reject them.

Representative items of this factor:

“I appreciate the communication via internet or via mail. I use it for my 85

shoppings and I share my findings with friends and family.”

“I like shopping through shopping groups, such as Groupon, Let’s Bonus, Groupalia”

media.”

“For my shoppings I also inform myself from the internet and social

“The shops for me are like a big window where I look at the products and sometimes even try them and then I buy them online.”

“I like going to vintage and used and second hand shops.”

ing. Therefore, regarding the experience in shopping, innovation needs to be obtained to not only the products, but also the design of the retail spaces and the different shopping formats.

Representative items of this factor:

“Going to the stores and to the shopping centers for me is a way to enjoy myself and my free time, even if I don’t necessarily buy something.”

“For me a shop is a beautiful, exciting and engaging space.”

“Shopping for me means dedication time to myself: it is a way to gratify myself, even with very little things.”

2. Experience: It is a factor related to emotionality and the inherent pleasure in buying that includes attention towards fashion, the aspect of social values and identification, pursue of gratification in shopping and being sensitive and attentive towards the brands. It defines an activity that becomes an expression of one’s self and of his desire to reward and gratify himself. In this edition of shopping map, innovation is no longer linked only to the hedonistic aspects and the beauty and aesthetic aspects of shopping, but is turns out to be a common denominator of all the different factors of attitude towards the act of purchas-

“I like going to shops that offer new and innovative commercial ideas.” “ When I go shopping I get attracted to the new products on the shelves”

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3. Personnel: The factor that identifies a trend towards “assisted shopping” with a focus whether on the technical / formal aspects such as competence, professional aspects and the ability to give information, or on purely relational aspects such as human interactions, and also personalization of the service.

In addition there is an overlap with the theme of communication (in store but not only).

Representative items of this factor:

“When I go to the stores the human relationships with the personnel is really important to me.”

“For me, the personnel is a fundamental source of information for me.”

“Sellers must show concern for my tastes and they must be able to follow each customer in a personalized way.”

“For me, a store is a beautiful, exciting, engaging place.”

“I do not pay much attention to the price itself: the important thing is that there is quality and that the purchase is as personalized as possible.”

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4. Quality-ethics-Security: This factor insists on not only on the quality of the product, which is a must and each product necessarily needs to be provided with both quality and freshness, but also identifies an ethical approach towards the purchase. In this factor we find the tendency to buy in compliance the environment and people and with adequate attention paid to safety and origin of the products.

Representative items of this factor:

“Quality of the Product is everything.”

“I am careful to buy things produced respecting the environment and people - The safety and the control of the products are the two most important aspects to consider in purchasing.”

SAY

NO! TO

CHILD LABOR

“When I shop I look for brands that reflect my way of being and the way I see the world.”

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5. Solution:

6. Functionality:

This is a new factor emerged this year. In fact the offer of commerce is so broad and confusing which makes it complicated but very important for the retailers to have the ability to solve the problems and make life easier for their customers.

This approach covers both the non-investors - whether emotionally or in terms of time - in the buying process and those who prefer comfort and efficiency of quick solutions towards intelligent choices. In this edition of Shopping Map, comfort binds to functionality both in terms of physical comfort (proximity, flexible hours) or intellectually (ease of reading the assortments and the solutions offered). The convenience, therefore, must be read as a functional service that can give added value.

Representative items of this factor:

Representative items of this factor:

“When I go shopping I always look for products that solve my problems and simplify my life.”

“I prefer the shops that make me save time.”

“I prefer that there are a few brands but really good ones, so it can easily choose.” (This opinion has paraphrased the book of The Paradox of Choice by the American psychologist Barry Schwartz in one sentence, 2004)

“Buying a product means responding to a need: it is a tool and that’s about it.”

“Shopping is a waste of time, I dedicate as little time as possible to it.”

Happiness

“I look at the comfort aspect: a shop for me has to be close to home and with flexible hours.”

7. Convenience: Choices

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“For me the store is just a container of products and I do not pay much attention to how it is done.”

In this factor falls an attitude towards the price that is determined

as convenience. This refers to aspects such as sensitivity towards discounts, searching for sales, and preference for saving.

Representative items of this factor:

“I keep in mind the ads I see on TV when I happen to go shopping.”

“To me, services (post-purchase assistance, home delivery ...) are key to deciding whether to buy a product or not. I’d prefer that shops that communicate with me in a less generic and a more personalized manner.”

“I usually buy products that are on sale or that have a promotion.”

“I am the kind of person who waits for the sales to buy something.”

“I prefer less promotions, but having low prices every day.”

8. Communication: This factor indicates a consumer approach, considering him as a receiver of the communication. Compared to the “Personnel” factor, here we are referring primarily to the passive forms of communication, that is the one-way and the more traditional form of media, such as leaflets, billboards, TV, radio and ...

This factor contemplates the influence of advertising, the attention paid to the leaflets and the desire for a more personalized communication.

Representative items of this factor:

“I usually read the leaflets that the stores send in order to orient myself in my future purchases.”

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3 - 5 -2.The Six clusters:

The following part is referred to the detailed presentation of each cluster, through a persona, which will describe the perceptions and the attitudes towards each group and channel and favorite brands, and also attitude towards the crisis, not to mention the socio-demographic profiling.

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Marco, representative of I territoriali

Michela, representative of I Wow Shop

Rossi Family, representative of I Family

Marta, representative of Hasta, il consumo siempre

Paolo, representative of Gli Esausti

Angela, representative of Ok, Il prezzo è giusto

Cluster ONE - I Territoriali Years of experience in the world of shopping, enormous confidence in their choices and focus on the direct relationships are the three main characteristics that distinguish this cluster. The relationship with the merchants is essential, so as to ensure the quality of the products and to encourage a certain behavior of consumption. A behavior that they are used to. They do not like changes and are looking for quality and safety, but in a simple and convenient way.

They shop in specialized stores and the word of the personnel is worth much more than advertising they see on television or tips for shopping on leaflets that they may receive in their mailbox or on the streets. To dialogue with them means to listen to them in order to understand their true needs and advise them in the simplest way possible. The trust in the seller is an important discriminator for their choices. The retailers that they believe in and in which they have utmost trust must necessarily prepare their staff to talk sincerely with them. Makings connections and relations with them means to offer them value and quality. However without accentuating too much on the quality of the products but focusing more on the relationship and trust.

An expert cluster as the Territoriali with such clear ideas has also strong and selected reference points. The convenience and the discovery of new channels are not taken into account in the format of the assessments and products. Even the possibility of experimenting has not an important role for this cluster.The age required experience has brought this cluster to select their 93

channels and favorite retailers and to always rely on them. Once they have found their equilibrium they tend to not to let go of it.

Purchase Channels: The supermarket, local shops and the street markets are the choices in the food area for the Territoriali: comfortable, functional and fast, safe for daily purchases and adapted to their needs. And also because all these options guarantee direct human interactions with the sellers in a familiar and secure ambient for them. All these features are reflected, of course, on the products that they sell, and therefore, they guide the cluster’s choices.

They definitely distrust discount stores and shopping centers being too chaotic and dispersive for them.

Retailers of Reference: Since last year, this cluster has characterized itself by a rather discontinuous attendance to the sales points. Their trust is not easy to gain, and this explains the low frequency of the various sectors in respect to the total average of the Italians.

The most popular category is the supermarket where NaturasĂŹ is the one that proves guarantor of quality and safety the most. For the category hypermarkets, IperCoop and Carrefour are the preferred ones. For the discount stores however, LD Market and Eurospin are the preferred ones, although as

mentioned before, they try to avoid discount stores as much as they can. For catering and restaurants, Old Wild West gets the first place and Panino Giusto gets to be the second favorite.

Apple Store for electronics, Nike Store for sport and Disney Store for children. The latter sector is actually one of the few sectors that has had attendance more than the total average.

Ikea and Leroy Merlin are the preferred retailers for furniture shopping, the Feltrinelli for culture and leisure, and Calzedonia / Intimissimi for underwear. As for clothing H&M is in the first place, and right after that are La Rinascente and Coin. Then Deichmann for shoes, Sephora for perfumery, Salmoiraghi & Viganò for the optical and UCI for cinema.

94

Marco 66 years old, Genova Retired architect

95

“ I usually shop from specialiazed stores, like for example bread from the bakery, meat from the butcher shop and ... When I go to a store, I also care about the interaction I have with the sales person, that’s why I go to the same places, becaue I know the people. I trust what they tell me about their products and when they recommend me something.�

68%

57%

96

+4

+4

+3

+3

+1 Experience

New channels

Convenience Personnel

Functionality

Quali-eth-sicurity

Communication -1

-4 -5

Diagram of Factors - I Terrirtoriali 97

Solution

+5 +4

I make purchases in more specialized shops: bread from bakery, the meat from the butcher

When I go in the store the human interaction with the staff is also important to me

+4

Going to stores and shopping centers is a great way to have fun during my free time even if I don’t buy anything.

Usually I read the flyers that the shops send me, in order to orient and prepare myself for my upcoming shopping.

When I go shopping I keep in mind the ads I see on TV.

The personnel is a fundamental source of information when I have to buy something

-4 -5

-5

Diagram of Behaviors - I Territoriali 98

Cluster TWO - I Family

they use it wither for shopping directly online, or to get informed about their further shopping that they would do in the stores.

The I Family is the prototype of the modern family: Eclectic, attentive, informed and innovative. Young families who want to keep up with the times, but without neglecting the quality and safety.Virtual or physical does not make much difference for their shopping path, the important thing that the purpose justifies the means. They have an innovative spirit and this explains their positive attitude towards the renovations in general.

They are by far the most advanced cluster and the young age, the high level of education and also the satisfactory economic performance create a perfect mix that allows them to leverage innovation through smart use of the novelties and opportunities.

For this cluster convenience has a sense, but only up to a certain point. They wouldn’t sacrifice a new experience to get more convenience.

It is important to note that for them, unlike many other Italian groups of shoppers, this pursue of novelty is not hiding a substantial snobbery, but what they are actually trying to get out of it is actually a not only satisfying shopping experience in the sense of finding what they were looking for, but also a gratifying shopping experience. In the end, they will always choose the brands that knows them and can identify them and that actually values their way of being.

It is not easy, for the retailers, to talk to them. Expectations are really high, and their desire to discover new experiences all the time may negatively affect their relationship with the companies. In fact the companies and the retailers must be able to satisfy The Family cluster, otherwise they lose them immediately. This cluster can easily know which reference is capable of actually offering them the value that they want and above all is trying to come up with a clear, simple and effective solution, every, time!

The I Family have a positive approach towards innovation and this allows them to better interpret the world of modern retailing.

The continuous pursue of experiences, the ability to experience modern channels, and openness towards the new allows them to be optimistic about the modern distribution. They appreciate the communication on the web and 99

Purchase Channels: For food, shopping centers are no longer the favorite, however for nonfood purchases they remain as the chosen channel. Daily shopping has made the local supermarket the preferred channel for the food. Also, The Family, as they have also demonstrated in the past, do not despise the street market, especially for the diversification of products and the ability to take into account the price-quality ratio of different banquets.

Retailers of Reference: The Family being young and with a positive approach towards shopping, have a higher average of attendance in almost all the sectors. The favorite

among the supermarkets is the Famila, followed by Esselunga, Sidis and The Gigante. Coop, despite being the most frequented is not among the favorite channels. Iper (Finiper) remains the favorite for the hypermarket and the Penny Market for the discount store. Molfetta wins on outlets and it is also the absolute favorite of the cluster. Old Wild West stands for restaurants and catering, Mediaworld for electronics, Decathlon for sports and Disney Store for children. Leroy Merlin is the favorite for furniture, Feltrinelli for culture, Oysho for underwear although Calzedonia / Intimissimi remains the most frequented.

La Rinascente and Bershka for clothing, Deichmann for footwear, L’Erbolario is the favorite channel of perfumery, Salmoiraghi & Viganò favorite for optics, UCI the most frequented and the most appreciated for the cinema.

100

Rossi Family 37 %

- Erica, 35 years old, Designer - Lorenzo, 37 years old, Lawyer - Andrea, 6 years old, Student

69 %

48 %

101

MARKET

“ I care a lot about the communication online and I use it for my shoppings. The shops for me are like a big window, where I see and choose what I will later buy online. The price for me is not the first thing that matters. What really matters the most is the quality, and the possibility of personalizing what is mine. I Love shopping on the shopping groups such as Groupon. When I want to choose a retailer, I try to choose one that recognizes me and what I want and that gives me value.�

ALIMENTARY

SHOPPING MALL

NON ALIMENTARY 102

+4 +3

+4 +3

+3 +2

Experience

New channels

Personnel

Functionality

Quali-eth-sicurity

Diagram of Factors - I Family 103

+2

Convenience

Communication

+2

Solution

+4

+4

+4 +3

I appreciate web communication, I use it for shopping and to share my findings

Stores for me are like a big shopping window where I can look and then buy online

I do not care much about the price itself: the important thing is that the product is as much personalized as possible

+3

I like shopping through purchasing groups (es. Groupon, Let’s bonus, Groupalia)

I choose brands in which I identify myself and that brings quality

Diagram of Behaviors - I Family 104

Cluster THREE - Gli Esausti A new-old model of consumption. New, because it is presented for the first time this year, enhancing the functional aspect of shopping. Old, for two reasons: the first reason is that the average age of the shoppers belonging to this cluster is medium-high, and the second reason is because we already knew this group of shoppers. In fact some are survivors from old clusters that have lived the world of consumption by dint through disillusionment and this suffering has made weakened them. Others, however, come from current clusters like, Ok il prezzo è giusto, that with their age increasing and their income decreasing, they tend to buy as little as they can and as quickly as possible and just to meet their necessities. Shopping is not a moment of joy for them, nor an experience or learning, but only a necessary activity without any affectation towards innovation.The exit direction of this cluster from the crisis of consumerism is simply denying it.

Functionality, convenience and solution seem to be the reference points used by this model of consumption to make their choices. The experience seems to be something unknown, and new utopia channels and helping personnel are options that they would avoid. Neither experience nor quality but only the essential! The safety of the products, their quality and even the ethics of consumption can not and must not persuade them from the more comfortable and more functional decision. For the Gli Esausti the store is just a container of products and anything that could improve the shopping experience, from the layout to the facilities, they are just useless ornaments that distract them from the simple and pure buying. Comfort and functionality are the masters.

The closeness to their homes and the flexibility of the times are the only rea105

sons to choose a retailer over another. In short, for them a store does not have to be a beautiful exciting and engaging place, and shopping to them in general is a waste of time, they have to devote as little time as possible.

Purchase Channels: Their lack of dedication to the consuming leads to the fact that the discount, a low experimental format and in the same time more functional, are preferred by the “Esausti” for food shopping. Especially if they are close to where they live. Besides, their long and flexible hours allow them not to devote too much time. In addition, the local market is a favourite channel. This is certainly, because inside these markets there are many products of different kind and easily affordable. This would allow to those who are exhausted from shopping to buy without wasting time and money. Even for the non-food genre, the street markets seem to be the favourite channels. All the choices of this consumption pattern revolve around functionality, convenience and instant solution.

The shopping centres, actually, as far as they are not taken into consideration for the food, for non-food purchases, they can be an excellent choice: different types of shops, low prices and different solver options that allow this format to be chosen.

Retailers of Reference: Frequentations of the retailers for “Esausti” are all below average compared to the sample, except for the discount. The regular attendance of this

format (i.e. discount) perfectly describes what the consumption is for this cluster. For the super channel, they choose “Esselunga” meanwhile between the hypermarkets the choice goes for “IperCoop”. “LiDL” is by far the favourite and the most popular for discount. Instead, in respect to the outlet, the choice falls on Sicily Outlet Village and this is especially due to reasons of geographical origin. In the catering sector, they tend to appreciate “Panino Giusto”, “Apple” for electronics, “Nike Store” for sport, “Disney Store” for the children and Zara Home regarding the furnishing. They prefer “Feltrinelli” in the culture industry, “Calzedonia” / “Intimissimi” for the lingerie, although the last is frequented in lower terms. “Zara” is the chosen retailer regarding the clothing and “Deichmann” for footwear and accessories. They tend to go very little in perfume shops; nevertheless, the favourite retailer in this field is “Limoni”. Finally, regarding optics and cinema they prefer “Avanzi” and “UCI” respectively in comparison to ”Salmoiraghi & Viganò” and “The Space”.

106

Paolo 52 years old, Napoli Teacher

107

“For me a shop is just like the container of the products and I don’t really care about how it is done. What I actually care about is the commodity. For me it’s important that the shop I go to is close to where I live and that it has a flexible schedule. Shopping in general for me is a complete waste of time and I try to dedicate as little time as possible to it.”

64%

56%

108

+2

+2

+1 Experience

New channels

Personnel

Quali-eth-sicurity

Solution Convenience

Functionality

Communication -1

-2 -3

-3

-5

Diagram of Factors - Gli Esausti 109

+5 When I go shopping, I look for the brands that reflect my way of being and my way of looking at the world.

+4 +3

For me the shop is only a container of products, I do not take into account its design.

I look for comodity: for me the shop should be close to home and with flexible opening hours.

Shopping is a waste of time, I would dedicate to it less time possible.

For me the shop is a beatiful place, exciting, involving.

-3

The quality is what matters.

-3 -4

Diagram of Behaviors - Gli Esausti 110

Cluster FOUR - The Wow Shop The representatives of this cluster are first than anything else shoppers.

For them buying is a lifestyle and a way to introduce themselves to the world.

They belong to youth generation with middle-high education, ready to face the new challenges that the world of consumption raise against them. The world of consumption for them is to be lived in full, and never passing up any opportunity to do so. This cluster takes advantage of all the stimuli that consumption offers in order to turn them into pleasure.Their constant pursuit of innovation, the desire to experiment new ways and the perennial research for stimuli brought this cluster to exalt the e-commerce more than any other consuming model. This, however, inevitably decreased the importance that the experience had in the past. The new “Wow Shop” always want to innovate and still. Inveterate experimenters of the latest news, driven by the goal of surprise and being surprised, to get their hands first on the latest products and solutions. All consumer experiences must be of some quality, whether regarding the product or the services.

In this edition, more than in others, the factor that distinguishes the consumption behavior of this cluster is connected to innovation. The new makes consumer experience unique and innovative. They are looking for the latest proposals, they want to be the first to experience new channels and try new ideas. Quality is always a strong discriminating factor, the pursuit of innovation must be justified by the possibility of being able to experience the new channels, new services and new products. In addition the consumer experience translates into innovation and getting inspired.

111

The e-commerce and the virtual world have overshadowed the physical aspect of the experience. Internet and social networks support more and more this cluster at all times, before and after their purchase: they are informed before buying and they trust online communication a lot more than the old and tiring “below the line” communication system. As for the physical experience in real environments the Wow Shop attend shops that, of course, propose new and innovative ideas to the market. This year they are even more careful to buy things produced respecting the environment and people.

Purchase Channels: The shopping centers is the preferred format for food and non-food purchases. This is a proof of how this cluster is trying to keep itself up to date, by choosing this very shopping model that is always moving towards innovative patterns. After the shopping centers, they rely on their neighborhood’s supermarkets for food shopping.These supermarkets are always trying to personalize their offer according to the huge databases at their disposal. As well as a year ago, the neighborhood’s supermarkets are turning into the “lovely” shops.The ones that are capable of capturing the attention of those in need of constant stimuli, such as light, color and music. For non-food purchases, however, the Wow Shop could not help but get excited about the virtual channels.

These, in fact, together with the specialized shops are the only ones capable of offering customization, innovation and quality at the same time.

Retailers of Reference: The Wow Shop are having frequentation values above the average of the sample for many of the channels. Especially for sports and restaurants.

The low frequentations of the discount stores are justified by having little to no innovations in their srtors and shopping systems. For supermarkets they prefer U2, and followed by that Esselunga, which is however the most frequented one. For Hypermarkets they choose IperSimply and IperCoop and for discount stores they choose Penny Market and Eurospin albeit with very few frequentations. As for outlet, the preferred one is absolutely Serravalle.

Mc Donald’s and Old Wild West are the favorite restaurants, and followed by them there are Grom and Rosso Pomodoro. Only Apple Store could be the preferred retailer for electronics. Decathlon in the field of sports and Prenatal for children. Ikea and Zara Home are the retailers of reference for furniture, Gamestop for leisure, and Sailmoraghi & Viganò for optics. Then focusing on the world of pure shopping as their natural habitat, Calzedonia / Intimissimi are preferred for lingerie, Zara and Coin for clothing, for footwear Deichmann, Erbolario and Sephora for perfumery and UCI for cinemas.

112

Michela 38 years old, Florence Financial analyst

NEW CHANNELS

EXPERIENCE

80%

INNOVATION

113

“For me shops are like heaven on Earth! I enjoy shopping so much, I could shop all the time and I never get tired of it. In whichever context I enter, want it be a cinema or an airport, I look for something to buy. I care a lot about how the shops are done as well and I appreciate and prefer the ones that have an innovative way of offering. I want to be amused. I’m always looking for new and innovative channel.�

114

+5 +4

+4 +3

Personnel Experience

Functionality

New channels

Convenience

Communication

Quali-eth-sicurity

Solution -1

-2

-2

Diagram of Factors - I Wow Shop 115

+2

+4 +3

When I go shopping, for me it is important also the interaction with shoopkeepers

+2

For my purchases I do get informations also form internet and social network

I like to go in shops that propose innovative and new commericial ideas

I pay attention in buying products that are made in respect of people and environmnet

-2

For me the shop is only a product container, I do not care about its design.

Usually i read the flyers that shops send me in order to get some orientation

-2

-4

Diagram of Behaviors - I Wow Shop 116

Cluster FIVE - Hasta, il consumo siempre Even in the last edition we noted how this pattern of consumption has not suffered the crisis at all. It is composed largely of people who work as managers or freelancers who are not afraid to spend too much. Their economic resources allows them to purchase when and how they want. They love to shop, and they use indiscriminately on and offline channels; They are consumers who do not disappoint the market because they really buy unconditionally and they shop like no tomorrow. They love to shop online and they inform themselves more than ever on the social networks. Their shopping desires are always dictated by the pleasure of doing it regardless of the expenses.

Shopping, gratification and delight are synonyms to this cluster. They are trying in every way to shop always and everywhere. This attitude inevitably is at the expense of savings and functionality. Sales and promotions are not at all covered in their consumption choices and functionality, comfort and the solution are absolutely not taken into account either. The new and innovative channels inevitably want to define the factors that mark this consumption pattern. Communication is fundamental, both the online and the traditional one. This year more than ever, they gives importance to the staff, but not so much as a link between them and the shop attending but more as a guarantor of ease of shopping and customization. Obviously, due to better economic performance than other clusters, they do not pay much attention to the price and they pursue personalized shopping experiences.This pursuit has led them to use e-commerce in all their purchases.

117

Purchase Channels: They enjoy shopping and they live it as a gratifying moment. As also noted in previous editions the Hasta il Consumo Siempre in many aspects are similar to the Wow Shop. what differentiates the two clusters is the attention towards quality, safety and ethicality.The Wow Shop have an eye on the quality of products and services while the Hasta il Consumo Siempre are dependent and addicted to consumption, for them it is almost a craze, and if this sometimes leads to decrease in the quality, they really don’t care much.

Just like the Wow Shop, they too prefer the shopping centers for both the food and the non food shopping. Of course. No other format reflects the consumerist spirit of this cluster but the shopping center is the format that.

But they are the first to bring food to online shopping; again a proof that they always and anyway want to shop, and the new channels allow them to do so in all sectors and for all product categories.

Retailers of Reference: The Hasta il Consumo Siempre in average attend all the retailer formats, but especially outlets and the lingerie stores are the most frequented ones. Among the supermarkets they prefer NaturasĂŹ, Picard and Esselunga, but the most frequented one is Coop. They attend more hypermarkets than supermarkets. the favorite hypermarket is IperCoop. As discount store, this cluster chooses Penny Market and LD / MD Market, although with really low frequentations. As for outlet, they choose Vicolungo and Sicilia Outlet Village.

Panino Giusto is the first choice for restaurants, Apple Store is inevitably the favorite retailer for the electronics sector. Then, Decathlon is the favorite one for sports, Prenatal for childcare, Ikea for furniture and Gamestop for culture / leisure.

118

Marta

360° experience

32 years old, Varese Freelancer

52%

44%

119

“I really appreciate the communication that exists about the new products online, I inform myself all the time about what’s new and then buy them. I really don’t care about the price and I’m more concerned about the quality of what I buy and that I want whatever I buy to be as personalized as possible. I really enjoy shopping and whenever I see something new I feel like I need to have it.”

120

+3 +2 +1

+1 Functionality

Experience

New channels

Quali-eth-sicurity

Convenience

Personnel

Solution Communication

-1

-4

-4 -5

Diagram of Factors - Hasta il Consumo Siempre 121

+3

+1

I appreciate web communication, I use it for shopping and to share my findings

Stores for me are like a big shopping window where I can look and then buy online

For me the shop is a beatiful place, exciting, involving.

+1

I do not care much about the price itself: the important thing is that the product is as much personalized as possible

When I go shopping, I look for the brands that reflect my way of being and my way of looking at the world.

The quality is what matters.

-3 -4

-4

Diagram of Behaviors - Hasta il Consumo Siempre 122

Cluster SIX - OK, Il prezzo è giusto Ok il prezzo e giusto is a cluster that from 2013 on has always been a model of consumption that can change or evolve, but can not disappear.

Shopping remains an act that is part of the social routine of this cluster; This cluster argues that the discounts and the promotions can also be a fuel that feed shopping, but they can not be the only solution for the future: instead, the every day low price is a feasible option, even better if they also guarantee a minimum quality and easily readable shops. However, in this edition there is a difference. The cluster doubles, or better said, it gets divided into two layers.

On one side we find the layer composed of young consumers, who do not yet have the financial ability to pursue their tastes and passions. Employees and students seeking to enter the world of consumption, they want to begin to be protagonists but the economic part condemns them. On the other side there is the older layer, the one we already knew. Housewives and pensioners, who in one way or another, consume the bare minimum. Convenience remains the decisive factor, but more as the consequence of low economic resources and for an ideological choice. The convenience could not have been the decisive factor. What changes is the motivation that lies behind the process of approaching convenience. In fact, while the older part of the cluster tends to have a low amount of consumption, the younger part would like, however, to consume much more. The quality, safety and ethics in the products remain important although to a lesser extent in respect to the past.

What has changed more, compared to the previous editions, is the pursuit of information. In the past leaflets and television were the preferred channels for 123

obtaining as more information as possible. This year instead it is preferred to go in person in the stores to observe and navigate, and then sometimes even shop elsewhere. In fact, the visits to the stores are functional appreciations of purchase suggestions that would potentially take place when the sales and promotions start.This means that a kind of rewarding experience also belongs to this consumption pattern, as in seeking fair prices goes round and round in shopping centers and other formats as a way to have fun during free time, even without buying.

Purchase Channels: Like every year, Ok il prezzo e giusto creates some obstacles that makes it difficult to understand and get to know them for the ones that study them.

Observing their behavior, their motivations and the attention they have for convenience, makes us assume that their preferred format would be the discount stores. Instead, like every year, this cluster confuses us. The favorite format for food shopping is the supermarket, and our feeling is always that this cluster goes round and round the various retailers until they find the right product at the right price. All the different supermarket brands are in average frequented equal by this cluster. After the supermarkets, the favorite formats are the malls and then the historical centers. As for the non-food shopping the preferred format is the shopping center, and followed by that are the shops of the historic center and the specialized stores.

Retailers of Reference: Supermarkets, clothing stores and sports stores in average are well-frequented areas. The other sectors are all, or nearly all, frequented less than

the sample average. Among the supermarkets Ok il prezzo è giusto prefer Esselunga, it has always been considered the most economical format. For hypermarkets they prefer Metro, and followed by that, IperCoop. Among the discount stores the first choice falls to LD Market and then Penny Market and Lidll. the latter remains the most popular one. The most preferred outlet store is Fidenza although with low attendance. Not surprisingly, the favorite restaurant among this cluster is McDonald’s . For the electronics industry it is Apple Store and for sports Nike Store, in these areas young people make the difference. For the childcare sector, the older ones choose Prenatal and Chicco. Leroy Merlin and Ikea are the preferred brands for furniture, Feltrinelli is the favorite for culture and leisure, then, Calzedonia / Intimissimi is in the first place for lingerie and underwear, Rinascente and Zara for clothing, followed by Coin and Oviesse. For footwear the preference is Pittarosso, for perfumery it is Sephora, for optics, Avanzi and finally for cinema and leisure, UCI.

124

Angela

traditional channels abbandoned

42 years old, Milan Administration Personnel

income Ok il prezzo è giusto

30 125

60

age

70%

“I am the typical person that always waits for the sales and promotions to shop. Going to the shopping centers and stores is a way for me to pass my free time and enjoy myself; even when I don’t even buy anything.”

126

+5

+1 New channels

Personnel

Functionality

Experience

0

Communication

Solution

Quali-eth-sicurity Convenience -1

-3 -4

-4

Diagram of Factors - OK, Il prezzo è giusto 127

-4

+5

+3

I am the typical person that waits for the sales to go shopping

Usually I buy products that are in discount or in promotion

+3

I do not care usually about the price itself: the important thing is that there is quality and that the purchase is as much personalized as possible

I usually shop at specialize stores: the bread from the bakery, the meat from the butcher

Sevices are fundamental for deciding to buy a product

Going into stores and shopping malls is more like having fun during my spare time even if i do not purchase -4

-4 -5

Diagram of Behaviors ‘ OK, Il prezzo è giusto 128

3 - 6. Comparisons and conclusions By carefully observing and interpreting the data, it emerges quite clearly that the modern distribution has begun to respond to the requests for innovation that come from their users who are trying to meet their needs. Also we see that especially in the non-food trade, the real and the virtual shopping increasingly integrate and complement each other.

As for the food shopping, the supermarkets resists the attacks of new distribution formats and they remain the favorite channel among the shoppers.

But it is not the same for the shopping centers. Although they may stay the favorite format for non food shopping for so many of the users, but for the food expenditure, they give way to the street markets, discount stores and the historic centers. The researches of different shopping functional aspects can explain why the historical centers and the discount stores are increasing their effectiveness.

Furthermore, there is a return to the shopping at specialized areas for non-food shopping. As it often happens, in the consumer’s choices real social issue and an ongoing pursue of innovation, quality and ethics are reflected.This explains the use of specialized formats that until a year ago were still resisting the new trends. As much as the big shopping centers were open towards all sorts of innovations, the little city center boutiques wanted to remain the same and to not change anything.

129

Finally, we can not fail to point out how e-commerce in just one year has more than doubled the data in its favor. The virtual world is becoming more and more closer to physical one in the process of shopping. Showrooming and webrooming, especially the most innovative ones, now have become the new consumers’ daily bread. Only illiterate people because of culture barriers, or sometimes too old or too young shoppers, are left out of this rave.

From all this we come to the conclusion that what combines the effectiveness of old and new channels is the search for a series of profitable relationships and satisfying interactions that today’s consumers look for in their distribution channels. Integrating online and offline is the natural evolution of retailing of today.

Since the consumption pattern in always changing, in order to identify a possible evolution, it is essential to recall the shopping maps of the previous years.

The attitude has a crucial role in the process of consumers’ purchasing.

In fact, each certain kind of attitude is born from searching for information and evaluation of alternatives. For this reason studying the various factors, which represent different shades of attitude, enables us to create and analyze multiple concrete consumer models.

Shopping Map has made it clear that today, innovation, quality and ethics are much more discriminating factors for the choice of buying than promotions and low prices. The consumer society has begun to realize what are the prospects it faces: less economic and natural resources, less superficiality in behavior and awareness and responsibility. This consciousness leads to emerging of new shopping attitudes. An attitude that is no longer limited to some tactics for survival, but the hiring of new behaviors that allow one to enjoy fully the occasion in an also positive, fun and entertaining way.

venience or effectiveness. They have only got to focuses on the best bidder to supply their needs.

The novelty of this edition is the “solution” factor. The wide range of offers confounds the shoppers who are willing to accept quick and effective solutions. The solutions may or may not be innovative, the important thing is that they are adequate and and that they diminish the difficulties that certain shoppers may experience during the customer journey.

Functionality and comfort no longer have a negative correlation. A service, an innovation, or anything to offer the users a convenient and effectively solution is welcome. The consumers of today, as mentioned before, are aware of the reality they are experiencing. This attitude also explains the certain channels’ of choice. Obviously this does not apply to those who love shopping, and thus can not share this attitude. They shop without including hedonistic and aesthetic aspects of consumption. Also it does not apply to those who are so careful about the price and cannot permit themselves to think of con130

The frequentness of shoppers in food shopping 2014 39,3 %

2015 33,5 %

2016

32,0 % 28,0 %

26,5 %

24,1 %

16,4 %

17,4 %

12,2 %

16,9 % 12,3 %

11,1 %

11,0 %

13,4 %

5,5 %

Neighborhood supermarket 131

Shopping center

Street market

Discount stores

Historic center shops

The frequentness of shoppers in non-food shopping

2014

47,6 % 39,4 %

2015

42,6 %

2016

24,2 %

24,2 % 18,6 %

22,6 % 18,4 %

16,5 %

13,5 %

12,4 % 9,1 %

7,6 % 3%

Shopping Center

Specialized Stores

Historic center shops

Street markets

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4. Shopping Tomorrow ? : Slow Shopping

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4 - 1. A conclusion In this book, we have read about the Philosophy of Slow. We saw that the world in its nature actually used to be slow and after the industrial age, everything started to become faster and faster. Instead of technology following people to help them, people had to keep up with the pace of the new technologies in order to be “up to date” and “accepted” in their new societies. Up to a point that being fast started to become out of control and the industrial age started to show us its negative side. There was when philosophers and socialists suggested becoming slow consciously. Consciously, because that is exactly the difference of being Slow today in the new age and being slow in the past. In the past, when we were slow, it was not a matter of choice. We were slow because we didn’t have the means to be fast. But today, although we can be fast, we may consciously choose to slow down.

We also read about the Slow Food movement and what it talks about.

Reading the manifesto of this movement teaches us that it is more to this movement than to just eating slowly or eating food that has been processed in a slow way. It shows us a way of thinking and through that a way of living.

An other important message of the Slow Food movement and in general, The Philosophy of Slow is that, although if the national and international institutions that actually have the power of changing things in a faster and

more effective way would decide to move on the path of this mentality, the societies would fall on this line almost automatically. But it would probably be very unlikely that they would do so. The fast industrial, consumerist world has too much “instant” financial benefits for so many that they wouldn’t prefer to change. After all, this is one of the main reasons we have come this far with being fast and being trustworthy consumerists. However there are some that believe that this situation is coming to an end. Vivian Westwood, a great British fashion designer and businesswoman said in an interview with Deborah Orr at Chelsea Old Town Hall in October 2014 as part of Guardian Live that:

“For some reason suddenly I realize only this year that people are using the word ‘capitalism’. All the time I never thought using capitalism because we were so frightened mentioning capitalism ten years ago. People would just see you as an extremist or a Marxist, but I’m not. Russel Branch said the other day, we can only solve the problem of the environment when we dismantle capitalism. So this is the enemy, and the point is that it is the end of capitalism because the fossil fuel is running out.”

She also noted that to her the solution is in this motto: “Buy less, choose well and make it last.”

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I personally hope that she is right. But even if not, we should not underestimate the power of individuals. Having more conscious and educated consumers is going to put a great impact on the over all issue. If we want to make a change we have to start from changing ourselves.

As a representative project for this study topic I have chosen the design of a clothing store, which will also include shoes and other accessories. The project will be creating a clear guideline and a manifesto that can be applied to any store that would want to use the concept of my store. If the Slow Food movement was against fast food restaurants and specifically Mc Donald’s, my Slow Shopping movement is against the fast fashion industry such as Zara, H&M, Bershka and so on.

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4 - 2. Fast Fashion It all started from the beginning of the 21st century when brands had started to have an increasing interest in having more and more profits and they started looking for new ways to answer this urge. Since the late 90s, globalization had grown rapidly and this very matter was helping the mid price brands to find a way to have cheaper manufacture of their products. They would send the material to some developing, poor countries where (labor and not job) was costing a little fraction of what it would cost in Europe.

The supermarket chains where the first retailers to have lines of low cost clothing. In the beginning they had maybe simple t-shirts and underwear, but soon they moved on to having also “high fashion” items with very low costs.

And therefore high street brands were coming under an increasing pressure of these supermarket chains. It was starting to be really difficult for them to compete. The supermarkets could keep their prices really low in respect to the specialized clothing stores. The street brands had to com up with a solution. How could they compete with such low prices? The answer seemed simple: high quantity, low creativity, and cheap workers. (Cline, 2014) What really affects the price is the fact that these brands apply the principle of economy of scale: large volumes at low cost. “They work like a supermarket. Their leverage is the great traffic of merchandise that allows them

to keep the final number on the price tag low. And these savings that they get by buying 1000 instead of 100 is reflected on the entire value chain: from purchasing the fabric to transport. In case the order exceeds certain amounts of production, they apply additional discounts on their products.

Still, to make sure that a tank top does not cost more than 2 euro and 50 cents, they skip one (according to them) not important step, and that is, the creative phase that raises the costs. For them this phase is something that the other side leads to delays and inefficiencies which weighs on the production process and then on the final price. These chains instead work with a business model which merely interpret established trends without inventing anything new.

Ultimately to condition the price even more, they choose countries for their productions in which the labor cost is very low. Also in the sales points they use outsourced staff or otherwise a limited number of them. Usually less than what we expect in traditional stores.The staff serves in fact only to move the merchandise that arrives every 48 hours. They do not serve the customers. Often these employees are also poorly paid and this also contributes to keeping the level of the final cost low. (Saviolo, 2016) Let’s analyze these acceleration factors deeper. As we probably know, traditionally, most fashion labels have produced two main collections a year.

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One has been the spring-summer collection, which is the collection selected for the warmer seasons and the fall-winter collection which is the one of the colder seasons. Today however, the trends change much more quickly than the traditional way. And this is only because they can actually accelerate the production operation. First a few fashion companies developed the system of segmenting their supply chain, by manufacturing the basic items in the far east and manufacturing of the high fashion items in Europe. For example, Armani has different lines. The highest one is Giorgio Armani, after that is Armani Collezioni, and then there are Emporio Armani, Armani Jeans and Armani Exchange. The Giorgio Armani and Armani Collezioni garments are all made in Italy, but some of the items of the lower level lines, that is, Emporio Armani, Armani Jeans and Armani Exchange are made in other countries such as China or Bangladesh.

This system had many benefits. Firstly it decreased their financial outlay on forward orders. It also made it possible for them to make decisions about the fashion items of the future season much later. They didn’t need to start planning six months earlier anymore. They would decide today, and it would be ready in a time period as short as two weeks! This added flexibility and ensured they were able to react to the market quickly and deliver ‘on-trend’ items within their stores. Soon many other fashion companies. With the help of new technologies, different parts of the supply chain could get linked together, allowing a “just in time”manufacturing that has now developed to a 139

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stage where they are able to turn a garment around from sketch to shop floor as quick as two weeks. Consumers, being consumers, drowning in their capitalist consumerist worlds reacted positively to this system, making it so difficult for the fashion brands to not want to dive into it too.

But not everybody is happy about this situation. Many actually suffer it more than we can imagine. The factory workers, far from the shiny, fancy stores in the West, are under a lot of pressure. They have ridiculous deadlines.

Once their deadlines were long up to 5 or 6 months. Then they got short for as long as three months. Today they have to prepare three times more products in only 45 days!

“Instead of 40,000 garments being manufactured across four styles for 20 weeks at a rate of 500 per styles per week… all that is firm is the first five weeks across four styles at 500 style per week.This is a commitment to 10,000 garments. The remaining 30,000 is unknown. Nor is there any promise of how many styles and at what manufacturing rate per week.” (Just Style (2006) Purchasing trends in the fashion industry) The Clean Clothes Campaign describe similar instances with garment workers in China: “We have endless overtime in the peak season and we sit working non-stop for 13 to 14 hours a day. It’s like this every day – we sew and sew without a break until our arms feel sore and stiff.”

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The harm doesn’t finish here. The increase in the amount of clothes people consume has irreversible consequences on the environment we live in. The life cycle of cheap clothing is very short, making people need to buy clothing more often, and throw away the old ones. Although some fast fashion companies have tried to figure out a way for this created waste, but we are still not sure if their way is effective enough. For instance H&M started advertising bringing old clothes to get some bonus for buying new articles from them, claiming that they would recycle the old garments. But the main issue is the material that many of the cheaper objects are made of. Synthetic (man-made fiber) products will not decompose, while woolen garments that do decompose, produce methane, which contributes to global warming, which is a serious issue for our Planet. (TNS Worldpanel (2006) Fashion Focus issue 29) The chemicals on the clothing can also create hazardous conditions for our bodies. According to the Center for Environmental Health, Charlotte Russe, Wet Seal, Forever21 and other popular fast-fashion chains are still selling lead-contaminated purses, belts and shoes above the legal amount, years after signing a settlement agreeing to limit the use of heavy metals in their products.

An article in The New York Times says the Center for Environmental Health is focusing on reducing the lead content in products marketed to young women because lead accumulation in bones can be released during pregnancy, potentially harming both mother and fetus. Lead exposure has also been linked to higher rates of infertility in women and increased risks of heart attacks, strokes

and high blood pressure. Many scientists agree there is no “safe” level of lead exposure for anyone.

The lead contamination is all in addition to the pesticides, insecticides, formaldehyde, flame-retardants and other known carcinogens that reside on the clothes we wear.

It is easier to have control over the chemical composition of the garments that are produced in Europe. There are associations that are in charge and have almost full control over all products produced in Europe. However, this control is not applied in may of the countries where the productions of even European brands take place. There is always an issue of transparency when the products are made in other countries. (Whitehead, 2014) The cost of all of these harms is written on a hidden price tag, which today more and more people are interested about. They understand that a change in the fashion industry, so that our social behaviors such as shopping and wanting to stay fashionable is not in contrast with the mental and physical health of the people of the world and our planet. This is the main concern of the “Slow Fashion Movement” that is also inspired by the Slow Food Movement and it is opposing Fast Fashion, or as they call it, “McFashion”. The founder of this movement is Kate Fletcher that introduced this movement in 2007.

(Cataldi, Dickson, Grover, 2016) 142

4 - 3. How to become a better shopper Although there are some brands that are known for acquiring the fast fashion system (such as H&M, Bershka, Zara and so on), but unfortunately, becoming a conscious and better user is not as easy as avoiding these specific brands and simply spending more money for what we want to buy (the Armani case). Also, is it true that becoming a better shopper is something luxurious and fancy and not everyone can allow themselves to improve their shopping habits? Not necessarily.

Probably the easiest and the cheapest way towards being a better shopper is education. And i am not talking about the fashion institution and fashion school education. Although those are very important, but here I am referring to the general public awareness. People need to be informed about the harms of fast fashion and they need to know about sustainability and how it is related to their shopping habits. This is the only way they will be willing to support the sustainable standards, regulations, and labeling initiatives. The use of sustainable and ethical materials in this context can be defined as socially and environmentally responsible.

People need to be aware of the tricks of the fashion industry that is trying to be seductive and is trying to turn them into “buying machines”. One of their tricks is to make people feel they are out of trend constantly. Ever 143

since 2014, almost every week a new trend comes out and gets injected to people through fashion industries’ best friend, the social media and their different types of advertisements. The goal of fast fashion is for consumers to buy as many garments as possible, as quickly as possible. Zara for pioneering the fast-fashion concept with new deliveries to its stores coming in twice per week. At the time of writing, she says H&M and Forever21 both get daily shipments of new styles, while Topshop introduces 400 styles a week on its website. (Cline, 2014) With new trends coming out as fast as one week, it is normal that someone may feel that the garment bought last month is so out of fashion today. The fashion industries’ fuel is the way their users act. They keep asking for more so they produce more.They produce more, and this way they make people want more. The only way that this maleficent cycle can be broken is the awareness of people. Once they don’t get fooled anymore, the cycle starts getting weaker and weaker until it eventually breaks.

An other trick that these industries use is making the users believe that the clothing is designed to fall apart. Since the fast fashion model is dependent on the consumers’ desire for new clothing to wear, they make their products in a way that they fall apart in one wash. In this way, it will be instinctive for their users to continue buying. And it is needless to mention again how harmful the thrown away pieces are for the environment, especially if they have chemicals in their materials.

Many of us, especially women, fall so easily for the shiny stones and beadings on the clothing. While there are machines that can apply sequins and beading that look like handiwork, they are very expensive and must be purchased by the garment factory. However, it is highly unlikely that an overseas factory would invest in the equipment, particularly if the clothing being made is for a value-driven fast-fashion label. Millions of desperate home-workers are hidden in some of the poorest regions of the world, “hunched over, stitching and embroidering the contents of the global wardrobe ... in slums where a whole family can live in a single room. (Seige, 2014) A wise, bright shopper will never fall for these tricks. But for a shopper to become informed, it is necessary that he spends some time evaluating and analyzing what he needs to buy or not to buy. In a tense, fast, ambient full of products of impulse, it will be very difficult for him to see fully.

By slow shopping we express the importance of knowing what the shoppers are buying. Slowness in shopping gives way for more transparency.

Brands need to be able to communicate with their costumers in an honest way. The costumer has the right to know where the article is made from, how it is made, who has made it, what it is made from and so on. And this is the only way he can decide whether to buy something or not. They should never be pushed or manipulated into purchasing anything. A shop with a good design can make this transparency happen in the best way.

It’s definite that the world will become faster and faster everyday. Maybe this solution cannot to be applied to every shop or every concept of life for everyone in one day. But introducing it will help people to, at least think about it. It will create and awareness. It is not like fast foods don’t exist anymore or people have stopped using them for good. But the slow food movement has definitely created an awareness that once didn’t exist.

The transparency and the awareness must be available to people. Internet and the social media can play a great deal in this matter. And then it has to continue into the points of sales.The points of sales have to have a vast knowledge about their different users, with of course a great attention towards the millennials, who are going to make the future of the our world. For instance, they have to take into consideration that according to different studies, 89% of the millennials want personalization when they visit stores, but only 8% see it from the retailers today. (Seige, 2014)

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4 - 4. How to make better (slower) shops?

1. Construction of the shop:

In order to invite people to actually use the Slow Shop system we need to make it interesting and enjoyable. A good overall experience can be the key! A retailer’s Experience Signature lies at the heart of why we choose one store over an other. It is the reason retailers become known for and the reason users come back for more. A good design has the power of delivering its message to its users, without forcing it.

If a structure is hosting products that have really high standards when it comes to their materials and design, it has no choice but to also follow some strict rules in its design and the materials used in its construction. There must be no questions left in its sustainability level and it has to actually be an example for the visitors. Again depending on where in the world the shop is situated, the materials may vary. It is however always important to use the local materials and also to develop traditional crafts or involve neighborhood communities in the construction process. The construction is done according to the Slow Architecture, which is an architecture that is created gradually and organically, as opposed to building it quickly for short-term goals and it is often combined with an ecological, environmentally sustainable approach.1 When we talk about sustainability in Slow Architecture we are talking about more than energy efficiency and environmentally friendly use of materials. It requires an attitude that emanates from the realization that nature is not our enemy and not just there to exploit, but that man is part of the same nature.

Then in this case, for example the pre-made modules that help you build a structure in no time are not used. An other idea could be, instead of making a new construction, to use an already built one and adapting it to the new function and design. The use of the characteristics of the existing will help to maintain a strong bond between a building, its environment and the society.

The use of the context will make it possible to maintain local the traditions

As the Slow Manifesto says “ Slow can manifest itself in any design, object, space or image. It is an endless idea.You can make your own in any way you want to.” As an interior designer I would like to introduce some design strategies and guidelines as for how the interior of a slow shop could look like and could function. Keep in mind that some of these specific design elements may differ depending on each designer’s preferences. And this is of course because different people may feel calm and relaxed in different kinds of spaces.

For example, one person may thrive in a minimalist space while another may feel that a sparsely decorated room is sterile. (Simmons, 2015).The first step in creating a room that is Slow and relaxing is to choose a style. Then the design of the interior can be personalized with the tools and suggestions that are in the following part.

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1. http://www.slowarchitecture.eu

in the building process and it also creates unique images. The main purpose is not always to preserve history, but to give new developments a place in a continuous proceeding process.

A great example of using an old structure for creating a new shop would be “Delishoes Tiramisù”. It is a shoe store / bakery that is situated in Brera zone of Milan, Italy. The store is integrated into a part of a former medieval cloister.

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Delishoes Tiramis첫, M&T, survey images, Milan, Italy, 2015

Delishoes Tiramis첫, M&T, exterior, Milan, Italy, 2015

Delishoes Tiramis첫, M&T, exterior, Milan, Italy, 2015

Delishoes Tiramis첫, M&T, interior, Milan, Italy, 2015

2. Interior design of the shop: The interior of the Slow Shop, just like its exterior structure and also the products it sells, must follow the slow rules in its design. It also has to be a place that makes its users feel calm and relaxed, it needs to express the message of slowing down to them. Choosing the right design elements will help translating the concept of Slow into an interior design. Atmosphere is the affective evaluation of the environment and it gives information about the expected effect of the built environment. Apart from the products sold in a store, users’ reactions and behaviors to stores’ atmospheres are shaped largely by the design of the interiors. Elements such as color, light, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, acoustics and all related sub-service systems result in the users’ comfort, satisfaction and how they feel over all. According to Kotler (1973) the atmosphere of the place can be even more influential than the product itself in a retail space. He believed that the we will always have a five dimensional experience in each space based on our five senses. This leads the designers to use the all the space identity elements such as furnishing and finishing design, music, scent, physical attractiveness, communication and even employee appearance to transfer the message of the space to its visitors.

(Kutlu, Manav, 2013)

consider how we connect with others, places that surround us and of course ourselves and what all of these things actually mean to us. Let’s go through some elements that can help us create a slow interior for the Slow Shop.

(Williams, 2015)

a. Material: Just like the material choice of the construction of the shop, it is important that we choose local materials over materials that need to be imported to the site of the shop, and also to choose materials that are more sustainable and maintainable and that have the minimum level of harm on the environment. Based on the choices that the location will give, the designer will have to choose the materials that are adequate for a clothing store and that match with each other in the best way and that create a welcoming and pleasant environment. In order to maintain the Slow mood, it is suggested to use shiny and reflecting materials as few as possible. The Opaque materials create a more calm space by absorbing the light. (Kutlu, Manav, 2013)

As mentioned before, Slow Living lets us take a few steps back and start to soak in and really enjoy life more slowly, and to start to absorb and 148

Kayanoya Shop, Kengo Kuma, Tokyo, Japan, 2012

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Unusual Store, Luigi Velante, Isernia, Italy, 2011

Old Faithful Shop, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2016

b. Colors: Color impacts people on an emotional, psychological and physical level, and this is why it is so important to choose the right color to create the calm and slow ambient we are going for in our shop. Cooling colors like green and blue can have a calming effect, and warm colors are welcoming and make people want to stay a little longer. It is important to avoid strong bright colors, such as a strong red or orange or even strong bright cool colors such as blue and green. The best way would be to keep the colors on a more neutral level.

Here are some examples of the colors that could be used to create a calm relaxing stay that is welcoming and makes us want to spend time in. What is common among these colors is that they are all “earthy� and colors that by recalling nature they induce a sense of relaxation and calmness. Chromatic harmony between the various elements is very important, as well as the visual continuity between walls, furniture and floors.

White: You can hardly make a mistake with white. White symbolizes clarity and freshness. It is the right color to be surrounded with in times of stress, to get clarity of your thoughts. When space is mono-chromatically white, the objects look like the are floating, giving the feeling of being frozen in time. Also all the colors show themselves better on white. The risk of having a white interior is having not always a clean white color. If the color gets dirty, it can cause exactly the opposite effect.

Christopher Kane, London, UK, by John Pawson, 2015

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Blue: This color is probably the first color that comes in mind when talking about relaxing colors.

“There is something in the color blue that triggers a relaxation response. It makes me feel as if I’m floating in a boat, looking up at the sky. Everything about it speaks of a gentle, tranquil, Zen state of mind.”

Pink: The softness of a light pink is really relaxing and the touch of red

in it helps it to make a place warm and cheerful. It matches very well with other relaxing cool tone colors such as an olive green or a soft navy blue. As Interior Designer Brett Beldock, says, “it’s gentle, clean and optimistic, a fresh way of being Zen.”

Leatrice Eiseman, Color - Messages & Meanings, 2006

Gnomo, Masquespacio,Valencia, Spain, 2010

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Ginger & Smart, Flack Studio, Gold Coast, Australia, 2016

Gray: Very similar to white, gray is a neutral color that also matches easily with other colors. Different shades of gray help creating depth in the space. For example, in order to give the feeling of having a higher ceiling, it is suggested to use darker shades on the floor, lighter on the walls and having the finish of the ceiling in the lightest shade. Gray is a calm color in general. Having it in the interiors brings the calmness and stillness of the nature’s big and strong rocks.

Beige: This color is one of the most soothing and calming colors, without it being boring, because of the warmness that it has. Designer Erin Martin believes that “[beige] has medicinal calming qualities.� It makes the people in the space feel more refreshed and energetic. This color like other neutral colors mentioned before can be combined beautifully with other colors.

Acne Studios, Sophie Hicks, Seoul, Korea, 2015

Bottega Veneta, Tomas Maier, Beverly Hills, LA, USA 2016

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Brown: It is a color that we see a lot in nature. It is the color of soil and the ground. Having it in an interior makes the users feel like they are embraced by mother nature. They feel the security and safety of a warm cozy place. It is a color that makes you want to stay. In many cultures, such as the indigenous people, the temples are in this color because they believe it makes them feel more connected to God and to Earth. Since it is a strong color, often even one element in this color leaves its trace in the whole space. (Scott, 2009)

Victoria Beckham Shop, Farshid Moussavi, London, 2014 153

Sketchers TR Casual Showroom, Zemberek Design, Istanbul, 2016

Green: Green is the color that is exactly in the middle of the spectrum. This is why it has coolness and warmness at the same time. It is the color that takes people to nature and gives the environment a calm and fresh touch. It is the color that is used in spaces that people need calmness the most. Such as operation rooms and many doctors’ offices. When accentuated with white, it works wonders. (Kaufman, 2010)

CĂŠline, Eric Carlson, Paris , France, 2004

c. Light: In the previous part we introduced some colors that applying them

in the space could help obtaining the relaxed and Slow environment we were looking for. However, we have to keep in mind that the experience of color depends on the intensity of light and the way it is reflected from a surface.

Without studying the light of an interior, it is hardly possible to get the right effect we need from the colors.

For the general lighting of the space, since there is a strong relation between the Slow philosophy and the nature, the best solution would be the natural light. So it is highly suggested that the structure has big windows (vertical or even ceiling openings) to use the natural light of the day to its maximum.

Instead for the parts that maybe are not getting enough natural light, or after the day light is gone, it is necessary to provide artificial lighting. Artificial lights have different color temperatures that are measured with degrees Kelvin(° K) and refers to the various colors that light can have. This variable is the most important one to be considered in order to create a specific mood in the space. The lower the temperature, the warmer is the light. As it is guessable from the name, the warmer light is used to create warm and comfortable atmosphere. Since comfort and calmness are important to us in the concept of the Slow Shop, the warm light would be our preferred choice. Especially if we are using only cool tone colors in the design of the interior, warm light helps to warm up the space and make it more pleasant. (Kutlu, Manav, 2013)

pending on the colors and the design of the rest of the shop, these lights can also come to use. For instance, if the colors used in the design are too warm, the colder light can help to balance the general feeling of the atmosphere.

Apart from the general lighting of the store that is needed for setting a certain mood and for giving enough light for the customers to move around in comfort, there is also the necessity of a more focused lighting design, for areas of the store that need more lighting. For example the light that is focusing on the products, the light in the fitting rooms and close to the mirrors, or maybe on some communication panels or decoration inside the store, and so on. At retail lighting design, it is important to note that each product shall be visualized at its true color. Therefore the lighting on the products must have a high color rendering index (CRI). The Color Rendering Index (CRI) is a scale from 0 to 100 percent indicating how accurate a “given” light source is at rendering color when compared to a “reference” light source. The higher the CRI, the better the color rendering ability.1 In a clothing and shoes store, it is important that the lighting accurately display the colors, textures and overall design and that the items are fully illuminated, casting no shadows or glares. (Blitzer, 2016) Since the products and their layout do not change often in a Slow Shop and they tend to keep their position for longer periods of time, it is not necessary to use modular and movable lighting systems. They can find their place in the store and they can be fixed in their position.

The neutral and cold lights are usually used in more formal places such as offices, conference rooms, schools, or in industrial premises. However, de1. International Electronical Comission - http://www.iec.ch

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d. Furniture: In the Slow Shop furniture plays a very important role. We want people to feel calm and comfortable. As calm and comfortable as they would feel at home. Each of us every morning wakes up, gets ready in no time, rushes out to work, and then, finally we come back to the Slow and calm comfort of our homes. It feels like as if the world suddenly stops. We can stay without doing anything. We can stretch our legs and relax. In the design of any Slow environment, we are trying to achieve an atmosphere that creates the feeling similar to the one that a person gets in the comfort of his home. For example.

Muxin – a design and research studio based in Shanghai “transplanted” the elements of the slower residence space into a faster office space. They decided to decided to bring the warm feelings of the home into an office environment in the hope of creating a slower pace for employees. To make this workspace feel more cozy, Muxin looked to the decor and the furniture of homes and combined warm materials with leafy green plants. (Morby, 2016)

Muxin office, Muxin architects, Shanghai, China, 2016

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The example of Muxing can also be applicable to the Slow Shop. Inside a Slow Shop customers find comfortable places to sit down and to relax. There are tables of one, two and tables for bigger groups of people.The seating areas are not too close to each other so that customers can have their personal comfort space. The general mood of the seating area is the one of a lounge.

That is, low tables with comfortable couches.

Also in the choice of the furniture it is important to go for local products that are also produced in a sustainable way and that they have a long durability and high maintainability. We need to remember that each part of the Shop needs to be a representation of the concept. It has to help to transfer the message that is behind the philosophy of its concept. There is actually a Slow Furniture Movement going on. In September of 2011, a British Journalist called Melanie Cable-Alexander established this movement. She has been a supporter of the Slow Food Movement and she has got her inspiration from there. Her idea is to apply the messages of Slow Food to a design context and, in doing so, raise awareness. Just as Slow Food was against Mac Donald’s and wanted to prevent the tradition of food being forgotten, The slow Furniture is a way of preserving the traditional skills which are in danger of dying out, thanks to a lust for fast, flat-packed cheap furniture. It is needless to say how harmful excess use of materials such as wood is for nature. Slow Furniture firms such as Slow Wood of Italy are always aware to use only renewable, wood species. Slow Wood promotes the use of solid wood and only uses finishing products when strictly necessary.

Furniture designed by Slow Wood, Italy, 2015

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e. Plants: Keeping plants in any environment greatly reduces a person’s stress levels. Natural aesthetic beauty is soothing to people, and keeping ornamental flowers around is an excellent way to lower levels of stress and anxiety.

People who keep flowers in their home feel happier, less stressed, and more relaxed. Since we are planning to create a relaxed and calming and also happy environment, we can benefit from using different kinds of plants. It is however important to note that we should not be using flowers with strong colors.

Ornamental plants affect the levels of compassion that people feel for others. Studies have shown that people who spend more time around plants are much more likely to try and help others, and often have more advanced social relationships. This point is also very important for us. One of the most crucial messages of Slow Shopping is to buy responsibly. If people actually care that maybe there are some people suffering in an other corner of the world to make them beautiful -but cheap- clothing, they wouldn’t accept to buy it.

They will realize that their trendiness is not worth someone’s unhappiness.

(Barret, Lewis, Haviland-Jones, 2005)

Helmut Lang, Standard Architecture, LA, USA, 2016

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f. Music: Since from a long time music has been a companion to people’s

everyday lives. Today especially, it is one of the most popular leisure activities.

Music can have a profound effect on both the emotions and the body. Faster music can make you feel more alert and concentrate better. Upbeat music can make you feel more optimistic and positive about life. A slower tempo however, can quiet your mind and relax your muscles, making you feel soothed while releasing the stress of the day, which is exactly the mood we are trying to create in our Slow Shop. Any sort of music with a slower tempo could work. I would also suggest that since we are focusing on using the local design and the local products, it would be also interesting to use the traditional and local music of where the shop is situated. I believe if there is the possibility to have live music, the effect could be emphasized.

An other suggestion would be having the sounds of nature. It can be either a mixture with the music or even the sounds on their own. In this was we can induce the calmness of a forest with the wind blowing through the leaves or the birds singing or even the rain inside our environment. (Sacks, 2006)

Helmut Lang, Standard Eataly, Milan, Architecture, Italy, 2014LA, USA, 2016

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g. Scent: As we said also before, a good interior design must involve as many

as our senses as possible to have its full potential. We already discussed the Sight (vision), hearing (audition), and touch (somatosensation) and how we can involve them into the design of an interior. An now we want to discuss smell (olfaction) which plays a very important role in how a person perceives a space. Among the senses, smell is the one that has the most powerful link to the feelings and emotions because it is processed in the Olfactory cortex of the brain’s limbic system, the most ancient and primitive part of the brain, close to the area in which emotions, memories, and feelings are stored. This is why selecting a scent that best matches your space is just as important as hand picking furniture or art, or choosing the right colors and materials.

Slow Shop we are trying to create a relaxing and calming ambient and this is the main purpose to take into consideration in every step of the design.

(Angeli, 2016)

There are also certain fragrances that are believed to intrigue our minds and feelings in certain ways. Fragrances containing thyme, pine, and sweet marjoram are believed to have the ability to stimulate conversation; this is why they are often found in living rooms, where people are most likely to socialize. Lavender scent is believed to be relaxing and calming. When choosing the right scent however, it is important to take into consideration the whole design and especially the colors already used. For example the nice scent of cherries is more effective when it is used together with the red color.

Many retail designers try to choose a scent or have it designed specifically fro their store and their brand. The scent helps them create a brand identity that helps them a lot in their marketing. Studies have shown that nice smells make people happy and when they are happy they tend to buy more.

Of course “selling more� is not exactly the main goal in the Slow Shop. In the 159

Lavender has one of the most calming and relaxing scents.

3. Products: All the products that are on sale in the shop are produced locally. They are of quality and of materials that are sustainable and durable. It is necessary that all the steps of the production, from preparing the raw material to the manufacture, depositing and bringing the final products to the sales point are in complete transparency. t is crucial that in all these steps the quality, the ethics and the security have been fundamental, not only for the final customers, but also for the workers and the staff, and even for the environment and nature. After all it is not only us humans that are suffering the extremely fast life, Mother Nature is devastated too.

The products will be changing two times per year. Once for the spring - summer collection and once for the fall - winter collection. Since the products are made in a Slow way, from each piece, there is only a few and once it finishes, it may not get back in stock. Therefore, in the store there would not be a mass of products (something you would expect in stores such as H&M or Zara), but a few of each piece.

Beige, Nendo, Tokyo, Japan, 2014

H&M store, North Charleston, S.C, USA, 2014

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4. Communication: The main objective of the Slow Shop is the message that it is trying to transfer. With the help of a good relevant design, we can translate this message into an interior and also the choice of the material. However, if we use direct communication inside or outside the store we can make sure that the message is transfered as much as possible.

The best companion of the fast world we live in is the technology. It is thanks to the new technology that our lives have become so fast. However, this does not mean that now that we want to practice a Slow life we need to abandon completely technology and whatever that is related to it. As we said also before, being Slow does not mean being stuck in the past, or being always lazy and late. It is about “tempo giusto�. We cannot neglect that technology has had its positive effects in our lives too. For example, someone that is staying away from his or her family may use Skype or other applications to catch up with them. We just need to make sure that we are not taken away with it. We need to have control over ourselves and what we use.

A great way to have communication out of the store is using the internet and specifically the social media. We need to make people know that such a shop exists, and we need to also explain the concept and the mentality behind it. This will for sure help so much to spread the news.

As for the communication inside the store, we can choose different ways to explain what we sell. For instance we can have a whole explanation of 161

all the steps of the production of each product. It can be written on a totem next to the product, on a badge attached to it, or we can even prepare a QR for each product and people can use it to read everything they need to know about that product on-line.

In the end the form of the communication depends on the general design of the whole shop. We just need to make sure that we transfer everything the customers need to know.

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Slow Shop Prototype In order to give an idea of how a Slow Shop could look like, I have created a prototype of the interior design of a Slow Shop. I have applied all the factors that I mentioned earlier in this chapter, and since a local design is fundamental in any Slow design, I have considered Milan to be the location of this store.

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Here is the main entrance of the Store. From the first impression we see that it is an apparel store. Other things that we can notice at first is the fact that we are definitely not dealing with a mass production type of store with a mass exposition. The number of choices are actually really low.

The next thing that stands out is the use of big plants that are spread around different corners and parts of the shop. It is called the “Elephant ear� plant. This was my way of bringing nature to the inside of the space. Also not to mention that the green color of them creates a relaxing environment.

All the stands for exposing the products are fixed, since this is not the kind of store that keeps changing its interior often. The main materials are marble (white and brown) since Italy has on e of the best marbles mines in the world, and copper, since it’s red undertone color gives an overall warmth to the space. For the floor I have used parquet with natural wood texture that i have chosen from Cadorin Group s.r.l that has highly sustainable, traceable and legal wood.

An other thing that would catch the attention of the visitors is the grand piano that is placed in the window of the shop. There is going to be live music in the store so that visitors can actually sit down and enjoy the music and the ambient.

In order to give a finish touch the slow relaxing ambient I have thought of using a lavender scent from the brand Oikos Fragrances.

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Shoes area As said also before, in order to Slow down, we need first to be able to calm down. In whatever we need to do we need to feel relaxed so we can take our time as we please.

When trying on shoes we have to put our body into a rather vulnerable position: sitting down and bending over to take off the current shoes and then try on the new ones. If someone is trying on shes in a middle of a crowded place where people keep passing by, it is very probable that he gets uncomfortable. He may even consider buying without going through the trouble of trying, or even forget about buying new shoes,.

In this store, I have considered a semi-closed space for trying on shoes.

This place is not completely disconnected from the rest of the store, exactly because it is semi-closed, but it creates a more intimate and private space.

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Fitting rooms The particularity of the fitting rooms area is the choice of the colors.

Inside the fitting rooms the chosen color for the walls is a dark blue, while the color chosen for the walls of the same area, but outside of the cabins is a light pink. Having these two contrasting colors gives the opportunity to the users to see themselves with the clothes they are trying on with both a dark background and with a light background.

Both the cabins and the area outside of the cabins are equipped with couches, making it comfortable for both the person that is trying on clothes and the other ones waiting outside. The pavement is covered with fitted carpet, giving the space a cozy, warm and comfortable feeling.

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1 5

2

6

3

4

11

7 8

13

12

10

9

1. Chaise-lounge - Source: Living Divani 2. Parquet - Source: Cadorin Group s.r.l 3. Pink wall color - Source: Rosin Colori 4. White spa stones: Italpietra 5. Fitted carpet - Source: Luini S.p.A 6.Single couch - Source: Plinio il Giovane 7. Brown marble - Source: Salvatori 8. Copper - Source: KME Italy S.p.A 9. White marble - Source: Salvatori 10. Low round table: Moroso 11. Plant: Elephant ears plant 12. Low rectangular table - Source: Zanotta 13. Double couch - Source: Zanotta

Communication Communication in a Slow Shop is very important. The products that are sold in this type of store have special characteristics that need to be communicated the the customers. As said befrore transparency is key in a Slow Shop. Customers have to know exactly every step of the production, from the raw materials that have been used to compose the ingredients of each product, up until the point where they were made, packed, transfered and exposed in the store.

The communication system that I have chosen is the QR code. Basically, each garment will have a QR code attached to it. Customers can read the code with their phones and get all the information they need. They can also sit down and read.

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Payment methods There are two different ways of payment methods. One way is the classic way, There is a check out desk almost at the end of the shop, where a personnel will help teh customers pay for the products they have bought.

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The other way of doing the payment, is actually a more relaxed solution. There would be no need to stand behind the casheer’s desk to make a payment. The customer can sit in one of teh sitting areas of the store, and a personnel would arrive to ask them if they are willing to make a payment. Just like in a restaurant, where the personnel brings the bill. One can pay either with a card or by cash.

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4-6. User Analysis for the Slow Shop As mentioned before, all the people in the world are different from one an other. They like different things and they also need different things. Therefore a designer can never design something, whatever that he is designing, that is suitable for absolutely everyone. So is the Slow Shopping. With all the benefits that it has, there may be some people that can be potential users for this shop and become the number one fan of it, some people may find it less suitable and some people may not like it at all.

Since I have had a user analysis on the Italian shoppers, and I have also introduced the 6 clusters of the Italian shoppers, I would like to see which of these clusters could be potential users of the Slow Shop. To do so, I have first made a diagram of the factors and the behaviors of an imaginary Slow Shop user, then I have compared the diagram of factors the Slow Shop user with the diagram of factors of the 6 clusters.

From the diagram of factors of the Slow Shop user we can see that this user is the one that cares a lot about new experiences and new channels. He does care about the personnel and their help but he doesn’t want them to be too much pushy with their. Quality, ethics and security couldn’t be more important. He doesn’t pay much attention to the convenience of the products, as much as he does about knowing the true price of each product. He believes that if a product has a too low price on its price tag, it means that someone else, somewhere else and somehow else is paying or has paid for it.

He considers also the invisible tag. Communication plays a big role in the case 179

of the Slow Shop, because it is all about the users knowing about the products and being aware of how their act of shopping is affecting or has affected the world, including the nature and other people. Solution has the value of zero on this graph and this is because the Slow Shop doesn’t necessarily give a specific solution to a problem of the user, but it doesn’t make things more complicated either.

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+5

+5

+5

+3 +2 +1 Convenience Experience

New channels

Personnel

Functionality

Quali-eth-sicurity

Communication

-1

Diagram of Factors - Slow Shopping

181

0 Solution

+5

+5

+4

For me the shop is only a container of products, I do not take into account its design

For me the shop is a beatiful place, exciting, involving.

When I go shopping, I look for the brands that reflect my way of being and my way of looking at the world.

Stores for me are like a big shopping window where I can look and then buy online.

Shopping is a waste of time, I would dedicate to it less time possible.

Going to stores and shopping centers is a great way to have fun during my free time even if I don’t buy anything.

-3

Diagram of Behaviors - Slow-5Shopping

-5

182

+5 +4

WOW SHOP

Slow Shop Diagram

+3

TERRITORIALI

+2 +5

I - FAMILY

+1 +4

WOW SHOP

0 +3

TERRITORIALI

-1 +2

ESAUSTI I - FAMILY

-2 +1 -30

OK IL PREZZO E’ GIUSTO

-4 -1

HASTA ESAUSTIIL CONSUMO SIEMPRE

-5 -2 -3

OK IL PREZZO E’ GIUSTO

-4

HASTA IL CONSUMO SIEMPRE

-5 Experience

New channels

Personnel

Functionality

Quali-eth-sicurity

Convenience

Communication

Solution

Diagram of Factors - Slow Shopping in comparison to other clusters 183 Experience

New channels

Studying the potential users of the Slow Shopping System

Personnel

Functionality

Quali-eth-sicurity

Convenience

Communication

Solution

Comparison of the factors diagram of each cluster with the one of slow shopping 184

Comparison with Wow Shop

Comparison with Ok, Il Prezzo è giusto

Comparison with Hasta il consumo Siempre

Comparison with I Family

Comparison with I territoriali

Comparison with Gli Esausti

As we can see from the diagrams, the cluster I Family is the one that is more likely going to use and enjoy the Slow Shopping system and the clusters Ok Il Prezzo è Giusto and Gli Esausti are the ones that are going to be the least interested in this new system. Exactly because they do not care much about “novelty” and also many other factors that are important in the Slow Shopping system, such as quality, ethics and security. They also always prefer to pay less, so even if there is a good reason behind a slightly higher price, they tend to not go for it.

The interesting part for me in this comparison is how interested the cluster “I Territoriali” could be in this new system. The only part that is on the opposite side with the Slow Shopping is the fact that they prefer to stick to the retailers that they knew from before, because of the secure feeling and trust that they have in them and their personnel that they probably know for a longer time. Maybe a good communication could also make them want to at least try the new system.

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List of Images and Diagrams

List of Images

A model of the medieval bottega - Source: www.data.abuledu.org - p. 45

Coco Chanel - Source: www.glamourdaze.com

Medieval bottega in Ambruzzo, 1300 - Source: www.emaze.com - p. 45

Snail - Source: www.whittyplcguy.blogspot.it - p.8

Street market, Pingyao, China, 12th century - Source: www.downtheroad.org - p.46

Michael Jackson - Source: www.clipartfox.com - p.14 Two shells - Source: www.bijouxcherie.com - p.16 Clock Tower - Source: https://galandelag.wordpress.com - p.19 Buddha - Source: http://www.buddha-heads.com - p. 28 Snail Slow Food - Source: www.slowfood.com - p. 31 Saturday Hay Market - A modest size outdoor food market that happens every Saturday at the heart of the Stockholm - Source: www.thekitchn.com - p.

36 Slow Food International - Source: www.slowfood.com - p. 37 Tabula of taberna in Pompeii, 79 AD - Source: www. placeandsee.com - p. 42 A model of the tabula of a taberna - Source: www.nuke.cralabi.it - p. 42

Bazaar, Isfahan, Iran,1580 - Source: www.keywordsuggest.org - p. 47 Passage De Panorama, Paris, France - Source: www.vzagranke.ru - p. 51 Burlington Arcade, London, England - Source: http://www.searlecanada.org - p.

51 Galerie Vivienne, Paris, France - Source: www.camarademocratica.blogspot.it - p. 52 Devanture of Stratta confectionery, Torino, Italy,19th Century - Source: www. museotorino.it - p. 52 Regia farmacia XX settembre, Torino, Italy,19th Century - Source: www.museotorino.it - p. 54 Devanture of Stratta confectionery, Torino,19th Century - p. 54 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milano, Italy - Source: www.manuelamiracul.com 194

p. 56 Aux villes d’Italie, 1877, Milan - Source: www.monitoremilanese.com - p. 58 La Rinascente, 1921, Milan - Source: www.hiveminer.com - p. 58

La Rinascente, Milano - Source: www.cesar.it - p.73

Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, 1924 - Source: www.tylertopics.com - p. 59

Zara Flagship Store, Matteo Thun + Partners, Milan, 2017 - Source: www. retaildesignblog.com - p. 74

Villa Italia Mall in Lakewood, Colorado, July 1970 - Source: www.imfromdenver. com - p. 64

McArthurGlen Designer Outlet, Serravalle, Italy, 2015 - Source: www.threalestate.com - p. 75

Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado, July 2014 - Source: www.denveralist.cityvoter. com - p. 64

People - Source: www.wellnessworkshub.com - p. 08

Calvin Klein, John Pawson, 1995, New York - Source: www.aguabomba.cl - p. 68 Maison Hermès, Renzo Piano, 2001, Tokyo - Source: www.corineleblanc.com p. 68 Sections of Epicenter Prada, Rem Koolhaas, New York, 2001 - Source: www. oma.eu - p. 70

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Maison Louis Vuitton, exterior, Paris, 2005 - Source: http://www.cbdarch.com - p. 72

Puppet - Source: www.gettyimages.it - p. 83 Personnel at the shop - Source: www.visitfrisco.com/listing/nordstrom/462/ - p.

87 Say no to child labor - Source: www.thestar.com - p. 88 Hanging Clothes - Source: www.reachparadise.com - p. 137

Epicenter Prada, Rem Koolhaas, New York, 2001 - Source: www.oma.eu - p. 72

Armani price tags - Source: www.ebay.com - p. 140

Maison Louis Vuitton, Rome, 2007 - Source: www.skyscrapercity.com - p. 72

Slow Fashion symbol - Source: www.enlacedourado.com.br - p. 142

Delishoes Tiramisù, M&T, exterior, Milan, Italy, 2015 - Source: www.blog.iodonna.it- p.147

Victoria Beckham Shop, Farshid Moussavi, London, 2014 - Source: www.fashionista.com - p. 153

Kayanoya Shop, Kengo Kuma, Tokyo, Japan, 2012 - Source: http://www.keyword-suggestions.com - p. 149

Céline, Eric Carlson, Paris , France, 2004 - Source: www.fortags.com - p. 153

Unusual Store, Luigi Velante, Isernia, Italy, 2011- Source: www.archdaily.com p.149 Old Faithful Shop, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2016 - Source: www.oldfaithfulshop. com - p. 149 Christopher Kane, London, UK, by John Pawson, 2015 - Source: www.christopherkane.com - p. 150 Gnomo, Masquespacio, Valencia, Spain, 2010 - Source: www.behance.net - p.

151 Ginger & Smart, Flack Studio, Gold Coast, Australia, 2016 - Source: www. specifier.com.au - p. 151 Acne Studios, Sophie Hicks, Seoul, Korea, 2015 - Source: www.3noviceseurope.wordpress.com - p. 152 Bottega Veneta, Tomas Maier, Beverly Hills, LA, USA 2016 - Source: www. projects.archiexpo.es - p. 152

Muxin office, Muxin architects, Shanghai, China, 2016 - Source: www.dezeen. com - p. 155 Furniture designed by Slow Wood, Italy, 2015 - Source: www.slideshare.net - p.

156 Helmut Lang, Standard Architecture, LA, USA, 2016 - Source: http://www.orwellscorner.com - p. 157 Eataly, Milan, Italy, 2014 - Source: www. superfuture.com - p. 158 Lavender has one of the most calming and relaxing scents. - Source: http:// www.worldlifestyle.com - p. 159 Beige, Nendo, Tokyo, Japan, 2014 - Source: www. 3noviceseurope.wordpress. com - p. 160 H&M store, North Charleston, S.C, USA, 2014 - Source: www. http://abcnews4.com - p. 160

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List of Charts and diagrams:

Chart of The frequentness of shoppers in food shopping - p. 131

I Territoriali: Diagram of factors - p. 97

Chart of The frequentness of shoppers in non-food shopping - p. 132

I Territoriali: Diagram of behaviors - p. 98

Diagram of factors - Slow Shopping - p. 181

I Family: Diagram of factors - p. 103

Diagram of Behaviors - Slow Shopping - p. 182

I Family: Diagram of behaviors - p. 104

Diagram of factors - Slow Shopping in comparison to other clusters - p. 183

Gli Esausti: Diagram of factors - p. 109

Comparison of the factors diagram of each cluster with teh one of each cluster - p. 184

Gli Esausti: Diagram of behaviors - p. 110 I Wow Shop: Diagram of factors - p. 115 I Wow Shop: Diagram of Behaviors - p. 116 Hasta il Consumo Siempre: Diagram of Factors - p. 121 Hasta il Consumo Siempre: Diagram of behaviors - p. 122 Ok il prezzo è giusto: Diagram of factors - p. 127 Ok il prezzo è giusto: Diagram of behaviors - p. 128

197