The Digital Showroom

Selling Luxury From Anywhere Online

My mother can judge a bolt of cloth by rubbing the corner of it between her finger and thumb, and the maddening thing is that she can genuinely do it.

There's a fabric merchant, who must be knocking 300 by now, in Mumbai my family used for years, a man of quite heroic patience, and the ritual never varied. She'd take the corner, rub, hold it up to the light, hand it back, and deliver the verdict. He gave up disagreeing with her fairly early on.

So naturally I copied her. By about eleven I had the whole performance, the rub, the light, the considered pause, and not the faintest idea what I was feeling. The merchant would nod along gravely and then look at my mother.

Which is roughly where I stayed. Twenty odd years later I dismissed a bolt as far too coarse for a shirt, then admired the same bolt rather warmly some weeks after he happened to mention it had newly come in from Coimbatore.

I bought six yards of it. My mother, who missed nothing, said nothing at all, which was worse.

It's called need for touch, and it splits in two. There's instrumental touch, which is handling something to find out a fact you actually need, how solid the clasp is, how the weight sits in the hand.

And there's autotelic touch, which is handling something because handling it is lovely, and which carries no information whatsoever.

Her hands were gathering evidence, mine were simply enjoying themselves.

Most of what goes on in a shop is my version masquerading as hers, and the actual deciding was being done somewhere else entirely, by a man telling me where the cotton had come from and that it would make lovely shirts, just to trust him.

He was correct by the way.

So when someone tells me they can't sell online because the client can't feel or touch the product, I think they've misread what's gone missing. It isn't the cloth.

It's the merchant and that's a role that can be filled by lots of other things.

This week's newsletter episode is on exactly this, selling seriously expensive things to people who'll never set foot in a shop. Link in the comments.
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