Eschewing the podium in favor of a Lavolier and his rubber soles, Paco Underhill presented at Parson's as part of their Dept. of Design and Management Stephen Weiss Memorial Lecture Series. Underhill kicked off his talk by asking how many attendees had seen one of his presentations before (just a couple)--begging their forgiveness for any retreaded material. And, most certainly, what we had heard must've come out of his mouth oh, about 20 thousand times...but it was still great.

His title was "Why Merchants and Marketers are Nervous," but it was really a review and primer on retail ethnography with a dusting of trendspotting over top. There were recurrent references to gender division (almost to the point of making that its own lecture), with callouts to the fact that men design, own, and manage a huge majority of stores, though women shop in them; by 2010, the overwhelming majority of graduates from professional schools will be women; "I can walk in, look at the shelves, and tell you the 10% of Walmarts that are run by women;" 70% of American women are working outside the home--"is it any wonder that eating habits have changed?"

There was great trivia through the evening (we are typically on an average of 22 closed circuit systems between when we leave our house and arrive at work), and people were furiously taking notes--my neighbor was actually transcribing the thing on her Blackberry! At the end of the presentation, he showed some priceless ethographic video sequences from over the years, with a woman precariously hoisting up her 8-year-old son on her shoulders to reach an item high up on a store shelf, to another kid crawling under various changing room stalls looking for his mother, to a man being pack-muled with bags and packages from a 4-women "tribal group" while they went to the changing room, to a (hilarious) man looking around bewildered, lost, in a bigbox store.

Underhilll, the CEO of 25-year-old uber-consulting firm Envirosell (get it?) was profiled marvelously by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker back in 1996. Definitely you'll want to read that, and then see Underhill in a city near you. ('Course he's obviously already seen you...on some videotape in one of his offices.)

There was one absolutely key pieces of advice however, worth the whole evening: In the 20 years that Underhill has been visiting Parsons and giving guest crits, he always asks the same 2 questions: "Where are the people" and "What are they doing?" For designers shopping for inspiration last night, that was the best thing they could have walked out with.

More choice cuts: -At any given time, Underhill has 80 people on the floor of stores observing behavior -Two-thirds of what we buy is discretionary (not what we originally came into the store for) -The overwhelming majority of our shopping malls were constructed over 20 years ago, "and they were butt ugly when they first went up!" -61% of the amount of time we look at a menu board in a fast-food restaurant is after we've placed our order -Food and apparel have "lost wallet share" to technology (cellphones, internet bills, etc.) -Underhill's trying to convince cellphone retails to install mirrors in their stores, so that people can hold up the phone to their ear and "see how good they look with that phone" -All across the world, shopping cart usage is declining; more and more, we are coming into stores "mission-driven" -For mass stores, 10-15% of customers walk out the door with nothing. (They can't find what they came in for.) -The difference between "reported time" in a store (the amount of time people say they spent) and "actual time" (the real amount of time they spent) is often inflated by 50%. -Zara's typical replenishment cycle (getting merch "from factory to floor") is less than 7 days; for The Gap, it's 45 days. -The principal entryways into most malls is through the parking garage underneath, yet designers are always eager to show off their street-level entranceway renderings!

[thanks to Iku for the pics]