About merchandise, sentimental value & the consumer journey of life.

Every year in November I feel a sting in my heart.

Because it’s around the time I sent all my earthly belongings to a storage facility for safekeep.

It was only supposed to be a few months.

Just until the practicalities of selling and buying apartments had fallen into place.

No biggie.

Yesterday it was seven years since I saw everything I owned drive away in a truck to the warehouse.

Which means it’s been six years, ten months and two weeks since the entire storage facility burned to the soot-stained ground.

“So You Really Lost Everything?”

No.

I still owned a computer, three bags of clothes, two books, and some musical equipment.

I was crashing at a friend’s place and brought the bare necessities:

Clothes to wear and guitars to write sad songs about heartbreak and the reason I was moving in the first place.

Two books I was hoping to read, and a laptop for work and watching lonely porn.

How much do you need for a few months of nomad living?

Seven years later I still haven’t finished Infinite Jest.

A month and a half had passed when I was going for a shawarma and picked up a letter from the mailbox on my way out.

The letter concerned a fire I knew nothing about and brought good news that no lives had been lost.

Unfortunately, all stored merchandise had perished in the flames.

I think I blacked out briefly.

Because when I looked up from the letter, I saw the worried faces of my shawarma guy and two cooks who’d been called to the front by something.

I must have expressed my feelings out loud — and not as calmly as now.

“What Was The Lesson?”

Humans love it when there’s a lesson to be learned from soul-crushing disaster.

But it’s not always the wisdom you expect. Nor the one you want.

I found that a surprising number of people blurt out: “I wish all my sh*t burned” when confronted with trauma and the brutal nature of bad luck.

It’s okay.

Your mirror neurons start firing, your empathy is engaging, it feels unpleasant and the brain is racing for a way out.

There’s a theory that drowning people see their lives pass before them because their instinct brain is unsuccessfully trying to find a solution and shoots out at random, hoping that the logical brain can sort it.

If you’ve never met someone who lost everything, a half-assed joke can simply be a last resort to awkwardly express sympathy.

Though — if you are like most people — you might ask something like:

“Was The Important Stuff Inside You All Along?”

Gods no!

There’s a feel-good story about being set free once you realize that your identity isn’t tied to your possessions.

And maybe it isn’t.

But your memories are.

The “important stuff” was my f*cking stuff!

Furniture, photo albums, 500 books, and my grandmother’s porcelain.

Handwritten love letters from a time when people still wrote by hand.

The lesson was that my favorite book isn’t some great work by this or that author.

It was the particular edition of a so-and-so novel I had bought at the Parisian bookstore a decade earlier, where Joyce and Hemingway hung out a century prior.

It was the cheap paperback that right away would return me to old Whitman’s shop with the taste of dust and history on my tongue.

Not expensive. Maybe not even good. Yet invaluable.

The important stuff is the old band T-shirt you still like to wear on Sundays if you’re so inclined.

Maybe it doesn’t fit as well anymore — not body, not self-image — but you remember the night of the concert and all the times you wore it; an amalgamation that makes it ever so magical.

Appreciate your possessions.

They are pathways to memories that allow you to revisit yourself.

Younger, more innocent, and full of hopes and dreams — if only for a moment.

“Are You Sure This Is About Advertising?”

Yes.

Because stuff isn’t just stuff. It’s a shortcut to your life.

It’s a chapter in your mental memoir — and not always a good one.

Creative marketing and smart UX can help consumers and end-users fill their diaries with happier anecdotes.

They’ll probably write better reviews too.

The way we meet the object means as much as the object itself.

Push something the wrong way, and you’ll convert a sale but lose a customer.

Find the most beautiful truth, and you’ll not only fulfill your quarterly goals but build your brand.

It’s the creative imperative to design better journeys and experiences around commerce to enrich consumer lives. You know… Human lives.

If we’re selling cars — even the gasoline ones — we owe it to each other to make the new-car-smell last a lifetime.

I realize this is a fairly uncontroversial ideal for a creative — wanting to build better for the future.

Most good ad-people I know feel strongly about long-term solutions over short-sighted fixes.

But I don’t know too many people who had their branding beliefs burned into their being like a scarlet letter.

“Is There A Silver Lining?”

I still remember how clear the air tasted the day after I got the news.

Crisp and cold like never before.

Sometimes I try to visualize my old bookshelves to recall where I read something.

It’s getting harder with each passing November.

Yet I remember the day after the fire as clearly as the air.

It’s a strange feeling to have no physical representations of your memories.

To have fading mental images instead of actual photo albums.

Now there’s a line from Emily Dickinson where something else used to be:

As freezing persons recollect the snow.

First chill. Then stupor. Then the letting go.

What Losing Everything In A Fire Taught Me About Advertising