Ramp it Up! Keynote Speech
Missed Ramp it Up!? We can’t recreate our fabulous party but we can offer you the chance to read Allison Arieff’s keynote speech.
Allison Arieff is a former editor of Dwell magazine and the author of New York Time’s article “The future of manufacturing is local.”
If you’ve lived in the Bay Area for awhile as I have you’ve invariably crossed paths with any number of people who have jobs that mystify you. People who work for companies that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss as all the good URLS were taken, companies who do indecipherable things for unknown constituencies. Of course I’m absolutely over-generalizing though I will say I prefer growing vegetables in my own backyard to virtually growing them on the computer.
What’s far more intriguing to me is what we’re celebrating here tonight. Last month, I saw the writer Geoff Dyer, author of among other books, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and a book about not being able to write a book. Dyer lives in London but told the audience that it’s his life long dream to live in San Francisco. Why? Well, he loves the ‘anything goes idea’ here. That you can do whatever pleases you so long as it’s not bothering anyone else. But he especially likes that because it’s coupled with a tremendous amount of civic pride. That everyone here is committed to caring for the city and making it a better place, and that this is something evident even to an outsider. He loves that one can declare their love for the city and express their commitment to it by saying, ‘I’m going to make the best cupcake I can and that will be my contribution to the betterment of this place.’ This, he said, is the furthest thing possible from SF in the era of Dirty Harry and he imagines that if Dirty Harry were still around he’d in fact have a cupcake shop in the city. (Close enough, Clint settled in Carmel and went into the hospitality biz).
Bear with me here while I connect this to Bill McKibben’s thoughtful argument about the period he calls “After Growth.” You’ll find this in his book Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. His premise that we’ve all been too fixated on the idea that growth–any sort of growth–is the be all, end all, perfect goal. That if only there would be more money, more everything, we’d be OK. When if fact, growth hasn’t got us very far. Our increasing prosperity has managed to produce less free time, less satisfaction. We’ve become so fiercely individualistic, we don’t need each other for anything anymore. “We’re insulated from depending on those around us—which is at least as much a loss as a gain.”
Questioning growth for its own sake, realizing the importance of serving and being a part of one’s community, thinking sustainably about creation/production–these things have been neglected in our collective eye on the prize focus on growth at all costs. But SFMADE has drawn in a different sort. What we have here seems to me a group of business with a more McKibben-ish view on what success means: it’s not growth for growth’s sake, it’s for more layered than that. Am I filling a need? Providing value and joy? Am I part of the community I serve? Do I give back? SFMADE’s members seem to prove that one can do all these things and still grow and succeed.
Mission Food is releasing a new cookbook with McSweeney’s—there are two more local faves to namedrop—and in it there is a quote about branding and identity. Mission Food wasn’t like Coca Cola or Starbuck’s aiming for relentless consistency but in fact, its reverse. As they say in the book, “Mission Food constantly undermined its identity, which meant we ultimately backed into a more personal relationship by way of brand destabilization. Customers were buying the right to NOT be told what kind of customer they were.”
I’ll leave you with that. I think it’s an amazing thought. That success and growth isn’t about being all things to all people but maybe is about being an absolutely singular experience for just enough of them. I think that’s what’s happening here and I think it is awesome.
-Allison Arieff, May 25th 2011