When creative entrepreneurs address wants rather than needs, capitalism can become a lot more colourful

Some businesses don’t need to be explained. A bakery sells bread because people are hungry. A plumber fixes pipes because people would rather not have water on their floor. You never have to look at these kinds of businesses and ask why they exist, because the obvious problem existed first and then the business arrived to solve it. The logic highway is unobstructed. 

And then there are businesses that make you stop and read the description of a product or service twice. Those ones where a challenge seems to have been invented purely so that someone could charge to solve it. These kinds of businesses prompt the same two questions every time: how is this even a thing, and how on earth is someone making money from it?

The short answer is capitalism, and the levels of creativity it can inspire in people who need money to survive (aka all of us). 

Some people collect sightings of rare birds. I prefer to collect sightings of strange businesses. I’ll share a few of my favourites with you in this article – but first I want to explain why we live in a world where these businesses have an opportunity to exist at all. 

What happens when we run out of things to need

In 1998, two writers named Joseph Pine and James Gilmore published an idea in the Harvard Business Review (later expanded into a book) that gives us a useful way to think about economic history. They argued that economies climb a kind of ladder over time, and that each rung sells something less tangible than the one below it.

The bottom rung of the ladder represents commodities, the raw materials of an agrarian economy – things like grain and coffee beans and timber. The next rung up is goods – the physical products that the industrial age learned to manufacture at scale. Above that sits services, where you pay someone to do something for you rather than buying a thing outright. And at the very top sits the experience economy, where what you are really paying for is how something makes you feel, and the memory you walk away with.

Their favourite illustration is the birthday cake. First we had the agrarian version, where you bought flour and eggs and butter as commodities and baked the thing yourself. Then the industrial version, where you bought a boxed cake mix that only required you to add water and stir. Then the service version, where a bakery made the cake for you. And finally the experience version, where you outsource the whole party to a venue that charges a premium and the cake becomes an add-on.

Same occasion, climbing abstraction (and price).

When mass production arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, factories could suddenly make far more of everything than anyone actually needed. The economist Thorstein Veblen (who later lent his name to Veblen goods) was among the first to notice the problem this created for business: how do you stop production from outrunning what the market can profitably absorb?

The scarce resource was no longer the goods, but the desire to buy them.

Welcome to a world in which entrepreneurs create demand rather than address it.

Glitterbombing: revenge, packaged and posted

In January 2015, a 22-year-old Australian named Mathew Carpenter set up a website called Ship Your Enemies Glitter. The pitch was exactly as advertised: you supplied $10 and the address of someone you disliked, and the site posted them a normal-looking envelope designed to spill glitter everywhere the moment it was opened. 

Carpenter’s inspiration for this was the glitter-dusted cards that he received from family and friends on his birthday every year. He hated the way that fallen glitter would work itself into every corner and crevice and become impossible to remove, and he wanted the rest of the world to share his pain.

Carpenter’s site reportedly drew over a million visits and was mentioned across social media hundreds of thousands of times within its first day. It promptly buckled under the traffic. Carpenter, apparently horrified by his own success, publicly begged people to stop buying “this horrible glitter product”, and put the business up for sale on the auction site Flippa. It sold within weeks, reportedly for around $85,000.

The idea was so simple and so impossible to protect that it spawned a small ecosystem of imitators who will gladly package and sell irritation on your behalf. The original site is still trading today under new ownership and still describing itself as the first of its kind. 

Rent-a-Mourner: grief, by the hour

In January 2012, a man named Ian Robertson set up a company in Braintree, Essex, called Rent-a-Mourner. For a fee of around £45, the company would send professional actors to attend a funeral and behave as though they had known the deceased, filling out a thin crowd and lifting the apparent popularity of the person being buried.

The actors were thoroughly briefed beforehand. They were given the story of the deceased, including their achievements and their failures, so they could move among the real mourners and talk with confidence about a person they had never met. Robertson was upfront that the idea was borrowed rather than invented, pointing to long-standing traditions of paid mourning in China and the Middle East, where hired grievers have been part of funeral custom for a very long time. Modern capitalism is often based on taking old ideas to new places.

Within its first year, the company reported taking more than fifty bookings and turning down around sixty more because the funerals were too far away.

Rent-a-Mourner closed in March 2019. The stated reason was not lack of demand – which the company said had actually been climbing – but the difficulty of scaling a business like this across an entire country while keeping prices low. The idea outlived the company, though, and professional mourning in Britain continued afterward on a more informal, freelance footing. 

Digital detox: paying to be separated from the thing you bought

The concept of digital detox didn’t exist when Pine and Gilmore were writing their economic ladder. If it did, they probably would have added a special rung for it, maybe after experiences.

The final rung would represent the antidote to everything the previous economy sold you. Even deprivation can be sold. 

A digital detox is a retreat where you hand over your phone and/or your laptop and spend a stretch of time deliberately unplugged, usually somewhere green and quiet, and for a hefty fee. The emblem of the movement was Camp Grounded, which was founded by Levi Felix through his company Digital Detox in California in 2013. 

Felix wound up in hospital after a period of high-stress overwork. He took time off to travel and recover, and came back convinced that other people needed permission to switch off too. Camp Grounded was the realisation of his vision. It was built to look like the summer camp of your childhood, with a strict no-phones policy, no work talk, no real names, and activities ranging from archery to typewriter workshops to bonfire singalongs. Reports from the mid-2010s put the price of a weekend at $570. Campers came from dozens of states and several countries to pay to have their phones taken away.

The original Camp Grounded went quiet after its founder died. In the meantime, the industry it represented became huge. The wider digital-detox tourism market is now measured in the billions of dollars, with forecasters projecting rapid growth over the coming decade, though the exact figures vary enormously between market-research firms and are best treated as ballpark rather than gospel. An entire, well-funded industry now exists to sell you the experience of spending a few days away from the products that another industry worked very hard to make irresistible.

When life is good, businesses get weird

Revenge pranks by mail, hired grief, a paid holiday from your own phone. None of these businesses sound like they should be able to pay a living wage, nevermind spawn an industry.

But look again at the ladder from the beginning of this piece and they seem less absurd. We live in a system based around the need for endless growth. Having satisfied our genuine needs and then our comfortable wants, entrepreneurs keep climbing into thinner and stranger air. We start to redesign the leftovers of human experience into neatly tiered packages.

Seen that way, Rent-a-Mourner or the digital detox aren’t silly glitches in capitalism. This is capitalism and human creativity doing exactly what it was built to do, having evolved with our shift from needs to wants.

What will the top rung of the ladder dish up next?

About the author: Dominique Olivier

Dominique Olivier uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.

Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.

She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.

You can learn more about her work at dominiqueolivier.com and she can be reached on LinkedIn here.