Josh, In Search of Cool

DenverPost.com: Picky, picky, Josh Spear. He’s the prince of particular, the satrap of selection, the chief of choosing, this 21-year-old occasional University of Colorado undergraduate with a unique passion for the things that please him. When Spear likes something, he posts it on his popular blog, joshspear.com.
What happens next? The thing gets noticed.
About 5,000 people a day come to the blog for his daily take on cool, and they’ll sometimes buy the fishbowl or vintage graffiti tie, or get involved in that effort to save a soon-to-be-destroyed modern house.
The recipients of Spear buzz dig the attention, and the sales.
“Things have been snowballing, and Josh has helped getting the word out,” says Denver artist Jason Thielke, who was able to leave his day job as a clothing designer after Spear posted images of, and enthusiasms about, Thielke’s drawings. Now, Thielke’s booked through 2006, with art openings around the country and design work for individual clients.
Others preen for Spear’s affections, sending him e-mail after e-mail at all hours, all day: “Check out our new digital chopsticks, Josh!”; “Josh, you’ve GOT to post these Norwegian T-shirts we found!”; “Hey, Josh. What do you think of our new designer sneaker store in Seattle?”
In the teeming jungle of the blogosphere, most participants range somewhere between drops of dew and army ants – little noticed, soon to disappear. Spear lounges high on a branch, waving his spotted tail: a leopard.
“I did one of the hardest branding initiatives in the world – branding yourself,” he says after lunch, during an interview in the plain, two-bedroom condo he shares with a roommate in downtown Boulder, where the living room serves as his office. “And I’m still doing it.”
“Cool-hunting” and “trend-spotting” have been categories of corporate work for decades. The suits want to know what those young people are doing and thinking; they hire trend-spotting “experts”; the experts talk to the kids on the street and draft lengthy reports; and the companies, armed with the reports, try to appeal to their youthful market.
That model is unraveling. So companies increasingly are turning to bloggers like Spear for what they hope are glimpses inside the collective brain of their most maddening demographic: Young Unimpressed Hip America.
“At this point, the data shows that when people are asked, ‘Who do you trust?’ what they say is, ‘People like me,”‘ says Jennifer McClure, a longtime public relations executive who now is executive director of the Society for New Communications Research, a think tank focused on new media and communications. “That means they are trusting people like Josh much more than any formal advertising or marketing message getting pushed to them. That’s the phenomenon he is enjoying right now.”
Brand Josh [DenverPost.com]
Josh Spear – http://www.joshspear.com
We talked to Josh, and he gave an update on his creative consulting company which appears to be doing very well. In his own words: “The consulting is amazing. I’ve had to do basically no selling, people are just coming out of the wood work to me left and right… agencies, big fortune 500 brands, small startups, brand managers etc. I’m able to really make it a select clientle.
What I really boast is working 1 on 1 with people in strategy, and my honest opinion about their brand and products and where they’re going. I can’t play the age card forever, but at 21 I offer a young, fresh perspective to these companies that’s authentic, and not some regurgitated focus group.