Response 01
Response 01
I decided to look into my backpack that I’ve been using for the past five years. It only purpose is to carry books and to and from school. At first glance materials seem to be made of decent quality, the stitching looks pretty durable and there seems to be some leather pieces. There are some clever compartments but nothing unusual for a school bag. The backpack is soft, still smells like leather, functionally designed and stylish.
I decided to research the “Mark New York” backpack a little more and found that this company was founded in 1982. The tags say that it’s made out of calf waxed cotton, polyester, leather, and “made in China”. To be fair, for a brand that seems to be focusing on “luxury” items, having your product not made where it was designed shows some of the values of the company. For example, that might lead consumers to think that the company is greedy. Consumers might think they’re trying minimize production costs as much as possible in order to see the highest returns. There’s nothing wrong with that, however when you have designer products and your competing with the big designer names, cutting on labor costs for some consumers devalues the brand.
The audience for these types of items might me those who are concerned with brand image. Our culture has popularized backpacks as fashionable tool instead of a functional one. It's a common practice in our society to choose an accessory that sacrifices functionality for style. We value material objects so much that we use them to describe who we are. In essence we brand ourselves with logos and those logos visually communicate stuff about you.
Another aspect I noticed was that the logo for the brand on the outside of the backpack is fairly subtle. It’s just the name of the brand “Mark New York” and the name of the designer “Andrew Marc” embraided onto a leather rectangle. Sure, this gives the backpack a clean look and visually doesn’t interrupt with the design of bag, however; from an advertising perspective this doesn’t make much sense because others won’t know what it is, which means less sales for them. Once you open the backpack you see a big graphical image that reveals the brand name and designer.
