In From the Cool

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The post-cool huntresses unleash a killer database

DeeDee Gordon and Sharon Lee know what’s up. They know what cool kids are listening to (Slipknot, Jurassic 5), what they’re wearing (aviator glasses, low-slung jeans) and even what’s floating around their hipster heads (paganism is cool right now, alienation is always cool).

DeeDee and Sharon have made careers helping corporations that court the youth market avoid looking like clueless dorks. They met while scouting sneaker designs at a shoe show in Las Vegas, then teamed up to create the L Report, a quarterly journal that tracked the preferences, purchases and hangouts of young trend-setters. Subscribers paid $20,000 a year for the benefit of knowing the precise moment when Hush Puppies or goatees or Tai-Bo or were cool, and when those very same things flagged you as hopelessly out-of-touch.

Their talent tracking such a slippery subject resulted in a movie deal, a rash of imitators and even a new addition to the English lexicon: coolhunting. As in, “DeeDee went coolhunting in Tokyo and spotted a kid wearing shower sandals.”

But these days, the mere mention of coolhunting prompts the rolling of eyes. Leave it to the original coolhunters to declare that coolhunting is uncool. They’re over it.

“After we got all that attention, a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon,” says Sharon. “People were popping up all over saying, ‘I’m cool! I know all about these things! It’s all about butterflies!’”

And if there’s one thing DeeDee and Sharon would be pleased to avoid, it’s squabbling with other self-anointed arbiters of cool over the new Limp Biscuit CD or hoochie mama pumps. “When you go down that path, it turns really frivolous really fast,” Sharon says. All of which explains why DeeDee and Sharon sound as sober as tax accountants when the topic turns to Look-Look, the market research firm they opened last year. (They won’t name names, but studios, car manufacturers and cosmetic companies among their 30 clients.) The company is designed, says DeeDee, as “a Reuters of youth culture,” helping corporate clients learn about and fit in with the coolie crowd ages 14-30. To get an accurate picture of this swelling demographic – which boasted $130 billion in purchasing power last year – DeeDee and Sharon holed up for a year to build a web-based system that allows corporate clients to interface with the nation’s hipster elite in real time.

It’s a system that DeeDee describes as nothing less than a machine that can calculate cool. They start with a network of 10,000 respondents recruited for their tastemaking cred –fashionistas, ravers, skatepunks and other trendsetters whose tastes today will supposedly spill over to the average Gap shopper tomorrow. Participants are ranked in a sort of Mary Kay pyramid, earning money and prizes by continually rating and responding to bands, brands or whatever. Their opinions are collected and sorted in an online database that corporations pay a base fee of $20,000 a year to access.

Say a record company exec wants to check the coolness quotient of a new CD’s cover art. Rather than taking the traditional route—rounding up teens in suburban malls or mailing out bundles of multiple-choice questionnaires—clients can schedule an online forum with Look-Look’s entire database, or zero in on a target audience as limited as, say, Latino girls in major markets who bought the latest Christina Aguillara CD.

“It’s really fast and relatively cheap,” says DeeDee. “You don’t have to recruit anyone, you don’t have to rent any space and you don’t have to wait weeks to get your answers.”

By digitizing the process of market research, Sharon and DeeDee hope to get away from what they call “old-school ways of looking at humans.” The traditional approach is not only slower and costlier, says Sharon; it encourages dumbed-down campaigns that only serve to make kids snicker with superiority.

“You end up with all these commercials with snowboarders jumping out of airplanes and shit like that,” says DeeDee. “Or else kids saying, you know, ‘That’s dope!’ or ‘Awesome!’ Kids see right through that.”

Competitors doubt the depth or reliability of Look-Look’s web-obsessed system. “If you’re doing a quick quantitative survey, that might be fine,” says Danielle Craven, research manager for the Illinois market research firm Teen Research Unlimited. “But there’s no replacement for sitting down with kids, establishing some trust and asking them questions face to face. In-person contact is how you get to the core of an issue.”

DeeDee and Sharon counter that they get better responses because of the frequency of their contact, enabling them to detect trends or fads that might otherwise fly below the radar. A year ago, as goth and metal acts were overtaking the charts, DeeDee and Sharon detected a passionate fringe movement around twee English folkies like Nick Drake and Belle & Sebastian. Recently they’ve warned retailers that young tastemakers are flocking to 99 Cent Stores, which have captured their hearts by stocking such hidden treasures as Jar Jar Binks underwear or “I love Jesus” hair clips.

Gathering such intelligence has meant obsessing a lot less over conventionally mod stuff like Japanese animation or French rappers and a lot more over efficient business models and database retrieval techniques. In her coolhunting days, DeeDee was known for her yellow Trans Am and flamboyant hairstyles that changed color every few weeks. Now she tools around town in a late-model Caddilac, while her hair has settled into a plain-girl brown. About the only thing out of the ordinary in their offices is the yapping of DeeDee’s miniature poodle Hot Lady. “Everything we’ve been doing on the back end is not sexy at all,” admits DeeDee. “We’re too busy right now to worry about being cool.”