erewhon is not the smoothie
i finally went to erewhon. and i didn’t buy the smoothie.
i ended up outside with natural wine, cheese, bread, mussels and my laptop instead. accidentally went euro.
which is strangely the thing that made me understand the place.
from the outside, erewhon is impossible to separate from the spectacle around it. the celebrity smoothies that cost more than a cocktail. a single strawberry for twenty dollars, flown in from kyoto. hoodies from a grocery store that resell on stockx. tourists making pilgrimages for sea moss.
i assumed that was the brand.
then you actually walk around the store, and underneath the hype there is something much more boring, and probably much harder to build.
taste. not in the literal sense. taste as a system of decisions.
someone decided which olive oil deserved to be there. which wine. which obscure little tin of fish. which strange health product you have never heard of but now assume must matter, because someone at erewhon gave it twelve inches of shelf space.
most grocery stores are built around abundance. seventeen versions of the same thing, and a shelf that asks you to figure it out yourself.
erewhon feels edited.
good editing removes the feeling that you are choosing from inventory and replaces it with the feeling that you are choosing from someone’s point of view.
the store has been around since 1966. it started as a tiny macrobiotic shop in boston, named after samuel butler’s 1872 novel, in which erewhon is an anagram of nowhere and a utopia that holds people responsible for their own health. for a grocery store that now sells wellness as a lifestyle, that is either coincidence or the least subtle foreshadowing in retail.
the version people photograph begins in 2011, when tony and josephine antoci bought what was by then a single remaining store on beverly boulevard.
josephine runs the buying, and still approves what goes on the shelf herself. non-organic sugar in an otherwise vegan snack is enough to get a product rejected, and plenty of founders reformulate rather than lose the placement.
repeat a point of view that consistently and the shelf itself becomes valuable.
a weird adaptogenic drink in a normal grocery store is a weird adaptogenic drink. the same bottle inside erewhon becomes something you feel you should probably know about.
stocking something turned into endorsement. that is an absurd amount of trust for a grocery store to hold.
it also explains the smoothie. i used to think the celebrity collaboration was the clever part of the business. now i think it is almost the opposite. hailey bieber put her name on a strawberry smoothie in 2022, the same year she launched rhode, and it worked because erewhon had already spent a decade establishing that things inside erewhon are worth caring about.
the collaboration borrows that credibility. she lends hers back. the customer rents both for the price of a smoothie.
traditional luxury requires ownership. the watch, the car, the bag, the membership.
erewhon made luxury consumable. twenty-something dollars, twenty minutes outside, then the cup goes in the garbage and you can do it again tomorrow.
the smoothie is not a beverage. it is an entry ticket.
the price works the same way. outrage is easy content, but it tells you immediately that this place runs on different rules, and the boundary it draws is cheap to cross. you do not need to shop there every week. you need the price of one drink.
the hoodie is the tell. nobody needs an erewhon hoodie to buy groceries. once someone walks around wearing the word across their chest, the store has escaped the store, and the customer has volunteered to become distribution.
i thought erewhon was exceptionally good at manufacturing hype around unnecessary things. it is.
but the unnecessary things are not what make it work. the boring ones do. the obsessive selection. the prepared food. the packaging. the consistency. the decision to say no.
erewhon is very good at making the unnecessary famous. its brand was built by making the necessary feel considered.
spectacle gets someone through the door once. taste makes them trust what they find when they get there.
the spectacle did not create the brand. the brand earned the right to create the spectacle.
anyway. the mussels were good.