There’s a sharp little French slang word, “Bobo.” It’s short for “Bourgeoise Boheme” i.e the lifestyle that combines both the sexy “bohemian” bit about art and culture and the even sexier “bourgeoisie” bit about money and social status, without one sacrificing the other.
Think the Left Bank in 1930s Paris, Chelsea in 1960s London, and for the last few decades, the West Village in New York City. Where one can hear bankers talking about Rothko over natural wine and artists talking about money, all at the same cocktail party. Très chic.
The West Village was where the equally bobo “Cupcake Craze” trend was spawned in the early 2000s, when the now-famous Magnolia Bakery hit the zeitgeist when it appeared in an episode of “Sex And The City,” inspiring a host of imitators nationwide.
A $4 Magnolia cupcake became a proxy for the bobo dream. Young modestly paid editors and account managers could signal the bobo lifestyle without having to rely on the trust fund. Brilliant, really.
But the thing with “belonging signals” is they depreciate when everyone can afford them. The value of the West Village is that there’s only one.
The latest casualty of this passing fad is Sprinkles Cupcakes, a Beverly Hills darling that became a favorite of Hollywood celebrities back in the early 2000’s. It . Itexpanded quickly, got bought out by a PE firm circa 2013, made its founder rich, then trundled along for a decade or so trying to keep the dream alive, and finally shuttered the business without warning on New Years Eve, much to the horror of its hundreds of suddenly unemployed staff.
The media is full of reports asking why the company went out of business. The general consensus seems to be, “Sad, but not surprised.” As long as the cupcake fad lasted, they had a good little business. But once the fad ran its course, it had nowhere else to go. Cupcakes are a nice treat, an occasional indulgence, but they’re not a daily must-have employee staple like coffee, sandwiches, or ,or cocktails. Plus the product they were selling was basically sugar, water and flour:, something easily replicated by competitors (which happened in droves). And being an “upscale” brand meant upscale rents and overheads, which made things even harder.
In other words, they were a company conceived and built for the good times, but they had no long term idea about how to survive the metaphorical winter. They had no resilience, no ability to adapt with the times.
Resilience is the boring but important stuff: how decisions get made when there’s no playbook, whether your team knows how to have hard conversations, if people can actually adapt or just talk about “agility” in decks.
The lesson here, we think, is not so much about cupcake retail or selling out to investors, but about making sure that the culture you build has resilience baked in. That your people are given the tools, norms and behaviors to make it through the down times as well.
If you want to last, build a culture that assumes the wave will break. Give your people the tools to build the next one themselves.
Otherwise you’re just riding somebody else’s wave.: Ironically, a very “Bobo” thing to do.
