Welcome to The London Brief, a summer series by Future Commerce. 

This summer, we’re penning a twice-weekly series that distills the spectacle of London’s commerce scene: from the bustling independent outdoor markets of Portobello Road and Shepherd’s Bush, to bastions of retail at Harrods and Selfridges; to the growing Commerce technology sector—we’re giving futurists like you the inside scoop.

Volume 1: The Haberdashery

Old models never truly go away. They fall out of fashion, or fade to irrelevance. But they never truly leave. The old and the new: they co-exist, and they re-interpret and reinforce each other.

For my first issue of The London Brief, I’ll recall a buyer journey this week that took us from online to offline, from TikTok to pop-up shop, from indoor mall to outdoor vendor stall.

Our first weekend in town was warm and sunny, spent strolling along the shops along Portobello Road Market, mere steps outside of our flat in Notting Hill. My oldest daughter is the crafty sort, and kept a keen eye out for arts and crafts to occupy her time when the rain inevitably comes back to the UK.

My first instinct was to order what she wanted through Amazon. However, existing USA Amazon Prime members can’t order from the .co.uk site without signing up for Prime in the UK (or incurring international shipping charges and timelines).

So we began a local search for a ‘haberdashery’—a word that I only recently came to know—a “fabric, crochet, and knitting supply store.” This was the prime opportunity (pun intended) to pit Google Local against TikTok. Sadly, at least in London, TikTok creators have surprisingly little content about where to shop locally for these goods in-person, as most of the content creators focus on fabric shops over yarn and fiber art. More frustrating, Google Maps took us to two locations with out-of-date information. One wasn’t a retail store at all, it was a home-based address for an online business.

We eventually found ourselves on a Circle line train to Shepherds Bush Market—an outdoor market of independent vendors that has been in operation since 1914. The length of the market stretches below the rail lines above, between a historic textile district full of fabric shops and haberdasheries, and the glitzy Westfield indoor shopping mall to the north. 

She found a small shop that satisfied her needs, spending a great deal of time in their basement perusing zips, hooks, and skeins of yarn. She chose two complementary colors of yarn and a crochet hook. The shop took contactless payment through her debit card, paying via Zettle, a Paypal Company. To our collective surprise, the total transaction was only about £8 (when she reads this she’ll correct me, I’m sure). In fact, the transaction was about half as expensive as it would have been back home in the States.

Afterwards we strolled Shepherds Bush market, buying bits and bobs from vendors along the way. All save one took tap payment for transactions totalling as little as £1. More yarn was acquired for a mere £1.25.

Exiting the market we found ourselves at Westfield; more familiar territory to us Americans. Opened in 2008, Westfield London has all of the retail brands you may expect from A to Z: Aēsop to Zara. A £5 bowl of ramen at Japan Centre Ichiban later and we were back on the train home.

Our Monday journey is an allegory of the changes we’re currently experiencing in culture and in commerce:

• The old models never truly die. The outdoor market at Shepherds Bush is a literal bridge between bespoke specialty shops for trades and craftspeople and mass retail. In all cultural expressions—especially in commerce—we’re at once surrounded by analog and digital, old and new, ancient and future.
• Old mediums are augmented by new modalities. Our online searches were aides in our journey to find a haberdashery, but didn’t give us the full information we were looking for. “The youths use TikTok” isn’t a panacea for search, especially for specialty supplies; but neither was Google.
• Online platforms don’t always understand intent. It was the haberdashery shop owner that suggested we search for a “yarn store”—something that hadn’t occurred to any of us—which turned up a more appropriate (albeit much further) option.

On Wednesday, I gave a talk at Paypal UK Headquarters, where sixty-plus technologists gathered to hear about my thoughts on the future of multiplayer dynamics in commerce. After I recounted the haberdashery story, Zee, a new friend and an expert on Asian commerce, told me that this is precisely why the web is all but abandoned in China.

The failure of the ‘new’ model of Web-based information to stay current with the rapid changes (new vendors entering the market, old vendors closing up shop) is why consumers prefer chat and short form video. Specifically, chat provides a solution for a built-in distrust that pages on the web are old and out of date. The chat is a real-time means of validation that businesses are open, available, and transacting.

What’s more, Zee suggested that this type of distrust of the web is more pronounced than we realize, and many of us experience it every day—websites are snapshots of information that is inherently out of date. They misstate inventory, have inaccurate hours, and pricing accuracy is anything-but. I experienced this in the haberdashery research, as well.

“I wish that there were a better way to know if the information was really real,” my daughter remarked along the journey. This type of discontent may cause Gen Alpha to shift into new modalities like chat. In fact, Google Maps has a chat functionality right now, today, with local search listings for businesses that have opted-in. Many of the London-based businesses I’ve seen so far fail to use it, or don’t respond in a timely manner.

Chat won’t kill Amazon. TikTok won’t kill Google. AI won’t kill websites. All of the old models will still be here, and they complement the new. You’ve heard it said that “the future is always here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

But the inverse is also true: the past is always here, too. Despite all our best efforts to do away with it.

— Phillip

‍P.S. Media is undergoing modernization via independent creators on Substack. The commerce opportunity for the ‘solopreneurs’ who have gained audiences and authority through micromedia businesses is immense. This week on the podcast, Nilla Ali joins us to talk about this opportunity, and what she’s doing about it. Listen on Apple or Spotify.