Remember Tiffany's runup to Xmas with the $1000 tin can and the $9000 ball of yarn? It was a pretty shrewd bit of marketing.
The "Everyday Objects" line included a bunch of minutely less risible products, inasmuch as a $375 ice-cream scoop and a $450 ruler are at least useful for scooping ice-cream and measuring things, rather than being mere positional goods. These items — whose fame was fueled by the outraged stories about $9000 yarn — have now sold out, while the eyepopping, ridiculous tin cans (doubtless never manufactured in any great number) languish on warehouse shelves, having successfully completed the jobs of luring in customers for gifts whose recipients might actually use them.
It's a shrewd weaponization of outrage over the super-rich, a commercial mutation of the Milo Yiannopoulos strategy: when your audience is too thinly spread to be reached economically, use your opponents as amplifiers by saying things that so enrage them that they repeat them, eventually bringing them to the attention of the thinly spread minority who will welcome them.
Both luxury products — part of the company's recently introduced Everyday Objects collection and priced at $375 and $450 respectively — are currently displayed as sold-out online, joining more traditional paperweights and small storage items, according to a check of Tiffany's website. Most of the sought-after gifts are priced at less than $900, while the collection's highest-priced objects, including a woven sterling bird's nest selling for $10,000, remain in stock.
Tiffany's Holiday Shoppers Snapped Up $450 Rulers, $375 Scoops [Emma Ockerman/Bloomberg]
(via Naked Capitalism)
