From Trader Joe’s totes to Greggs jewellery, swag mania reveals how small businesses can promote their ‘brands’ – and how we use stuff to signal our tribe
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or all its many charms, Norwich tends to lag behind London on internet-buzzy trends (personally, I count that as among its charms), but it’s not always easy to pinpoint by exactly how long. So I was interested to spot, on a recent trip into the fine city, a woman carrying a Trader Joe’s-branded tote bag.
Trader Joe’s is a US supermarket; it does not operate in the UK, let alone East Anglia. And yet its merchandise – specifically this black-strapped, red-stamped but otherwise unremarkable tote bag – has been increasingly ubiquitous in London this year, as noted by the New York Times in July.
Three months to make it up to Norwich felt about right. But why, I wondered, was the arrival of the Trader Joe’s tote so inevitable in the first place? Tote bags used to generically signal eco-consciousness; now the message has become much more targeted and – naturally, given an online discourse obsessed with categorising people into types and tribes – fraught.
