How Siberian Refrigerator Doors and a Saudi Arabian Mall Created a Revolutionary Website for Russian Women
Picture a map of the globe, and you’ll notice that your perception of the world revolves entirely around where in the world you live. You can’t help it, and neither can I. It’s automatic. The map of the universe you and I draw, with us inside it, creates an unconscious navigational system, a behavioral GPS, that we follow every day. Our internal map dictates whether we sleep on the right or the left side of the bed at night. It determines where we position ourselves when we walk down the street with a friend or partner. Do we walk to their right, or on their left, nearer to the curb or to the buildings? On a larger cultural level, where we live also determines our timeliness. For example, in Australia, you can be assured that your guests will show up thirty minutes late, often with friends in tow that they haven’t told you about. In Switzerland, guests are always on time, and if they plan on being five minutes late, they will let you know. Japanese guests will show up a half hour before they are supposed to, and in Israel, they will be forty-five minutes late.
Our internal maps even determine how we season our food.
Across many parts of the Western world, salt and pepper shakers take up a prominent space on kitchen and dining room tables. As everyone knows, most are uniform in appearance: three pinprick holes on the saltshaker, and a single one atop the pepper. If you live in Asia, however, the number of holes is reversed, with three on the pepper shaker and one on the saltshaker, thanks to the popularity of pepper in Asian countries and the cultural preference for soy sauce.
This observation, and others I’ve put down into a journal over the years, have made me acutely aware of the placement of objects inside and outside homes. Gardens talk. Footpaths talk. Balconies talk. Mailboxes talk. Needless to say, walls talk. My mission is to decipher what the paved stones and the peonies and the artwork and the stone figurines are telling me about their owners. Why is that painting or poster hung here and not there? What about the owl figurine, the collection of medals, or dolls, or stuffed donkeys, or the wall dedicated to ancestral photos?
We leave these clues to our identities out in plain sight, but they’re universal, and in a digital era, they’re also indelible. One phenomenon I’ve noticed brings together the two.
A decade or so ago, when smartphones and tablets achieved mass penetration, it became obvious that men and women over the age of 40 found it challenging to use touch screens. They were used to bearing down on typewriter keys, depressing On and Off buttons, pulling levers and turning knobs. They came of age in a time that required a heavier touch, sometimes a fierce grip. Today, of course, touch is more often than not glancing and ghostly. In airports across the world, one or two generations of men and women stand around helplessly before the touch screen kiosks, not altogether sure of how they work or which key to press. Meanwhile, the five-year-old child beside them navigates the screen with a virtuoso’s ease. By studying the number of fingerprinted smudge marks on a phone or tablet screen, it’s easy to determine the approximate age of its owner.
The shift from knobs and keys to an increasingly touch-screen world has had several effects. First, thanks to computers and touchscreen note-taking apps we’re losing the ability to write things out in longhand. Second, as a result of supporting the base of their smartphones with their pinky fingers, more and more teenagers have an indentation there. Third, as a species I’ve observed that our hands are getting weaker. Shake hands with any high school or college student, and you’ll notice how weak their grips are. Among men, the messages once subtly encoded in a handshake—strength, dryness, moisture, hand size itself—may no longer be relevant.
The collective loss of hand strength has caught the notice of the fast-moving consumer goods industry, the industry term for low-priced drinks and produce designed to sell quickly, including soft drinks, processed foods and over-the-counter medicines. It’s the main reason why bottle manufacturers are loosening the grips of bottle caps, why today’s car door handles are easier to open and why our kitchen drawers slide out more easily.
Our digital habits are even affecting how we eat. As a boy growing up in Denmark, on hot days my friends and I ate our ice cream cones in a predictable way. We first licked the ice cream in a circular motion, as if to seal it in the cone. We continued eating our ice cream this way, and once the ice cream was gone, we finished what was left, eating from the bottom up or the top down.
If our culture today can be partly defined by the need for immediate access, it’s no surprise that the desire for instant gratification has also migrated to our ice cream cones. As I travel around the world, I’ve made it a point to watch how children raised in a digital environment eat their ice cream cones. There is less waiting around; the concept of “anticipation” no longer exists. Instead of licking around the sides, most of them bite the ice cream off from the top. Accustomed to websites loading fast, texts and e-mails sent off and delivered in seconds, they want their ice cream now.
How will the absence of anticipation affect today’s and tomorrow’s younger generation? It is easy to romanticize the concept of waiting for weeks and sometimes months for something to appear in a store, or in the mail, as people did in the 1970s and ’80s. Today we have it at once—and then what? With foreshortened anticipation comes less gratification, and I can’t help but wonder whether today’s ice cream cones pack as much satisfaction as the ones kids ate three or four decades ago. I call today’s young teens and adolescents the Power Plug Generation, or Screenagers, as they’re constantly searching for the nearest wall socket. The fear of being without power is like the fear of being consigned to a barren island, marooned from friends, forced, perhaps, to face who you are without a phone in your hand.
It’s also worth noting that smartphones are also responsible for the increase in the time it takes to begin and end a meal in a restaurant. By analyzing footage from the early 2000s on, one New York City restaurant owner posting a study anonymously on Craigslist estimated that back in 2004 diners spent an average of 65 minutes at a table, a figure that rose to one hour and 55 minutes in 2014. In 2004, diners came into a restaurant and out of a 45-member sample group, three asked to be seated elsewhere. The sample group spent an average of eight minutes deciding what to order. The appetizers and entrees they ordered showed up within six minutes. Two out of 45 customers sent back food they complained was too cold. The average diner left five minutes after paying the check.
A decade later, things have changed. Today, 18 out of 45 customers entering a restaurant ask whether they can sit somewhere else. From that point on, their digital lives take over. Diners take out their phones and try to connect to the nearest Wi-Fi. They hunt down information or check if anyone “liked” their Facebook post, often forgetting that their menus are waiting there on the table, which is why when the waiter asks them if they’re ready to order, most respond that they need more time. Twenty-one minutes later, they’re ready to order. Twenty-six of them spend up to three minutes taking photos of their food. Fourteen snap photos of each other eating, and if the photos are blurry or unflattering, they retake them. Approximately one-half of all diners ask if their server would take a group photo and while he’s at it, would he mind taking a few more? The second half sends their food back to the kitchen, claiming it’s cold (which it is, as they’ve spent the past ten minutes playing with their phones and not eating). Once they pay their check, they leave the restaurant twenty minutes later, versus five minutes in 2004. As they exit, eight diners are so distracted that they bump into another diner, or a waiter, or a table, or a chair.
An imbalance? Yes, and it’s also one especially prevalent right now in the United States. The cultural exaggerations I spend my business life trying to find operate both inside societies and between generations. Societies swing back and forth in more or less predictable ways. Generally speaking, in the United States, a Democratic administration follows a Republican government; in the United Kingdom, Conservatives will cede a follow-up election to Labour. This unconscious reflex to redress “imbalance” affects our wardrobes, too. One generation gravitates toward form-fitting jeans and wide neckties, while the next favors looser-fitting pants and skinny ties. One wave of young men will go through their teens and twenties cleanly shaven, and the next gravitates toward stubble or a scruffy beard. Considering Russia’s history since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the issue of imbalance was one I couldn’t help thinking about when I took on a complicated assignment in one of the most remote regions of the world.
My trip to the easternmost region of Russia began with a phone call I would describe as cinematic, except that the dialogue could only have been invented by a very bad screenwriter. The voice on the other end belonged to a Russian-English interpreter who was calling on behalf of his employer, a Moscow-based businessman. The businessman wanted to launch a new business in Russia with the goal of generating at least a billion dollars a year. When I asked the obvious question—what was the business?—I was told it was up to me. A few days later, the businessman and I had worked out an agreement: I would fly to Russia, spend several weeks interviewing Russian consumers, and see if I could uncover one, maybe even more, unaddressed national needs, or desires, with the mission of launching what we both hoped would be a profitable business.
What’s the difference between a consumer need and a national need? It depends, but the two are often intertwined. A new business concept generally has its origins in a cultural imbalance or exaggeration—too much of something, or too little of something—which indicates that something is either missing or blocked in the society. By gathering fragments of small data, it’s up to me to figure what that need is, and how it might be met.
Identifying the desire that creates these imbalances is a detailed process that can take anywhere from two days to a month to six months. Clue gathering is almost never linear. Some clues lead nowhere. Others are quirky, and potentially interesting, but irrelevant to the project I’m working on, which isn’t to say they have no value, since a random observation may someday contribute to the launch of another product in a country thousands of miles away. Another, more pertinent clue may feel significant enough to form the foundation of an entire concept, start to finish. Sometimes I get things completely wrong, or the company I’m working for rejects my idea as too costly or unrealistic, and I have to start all over again. But again, no insight or observation is ever wasted. Everything we see, hear, touch, taste and feel can be recycled, or repurposed, or seen in a new perspective one year, two years, five years later.
Before entering a country I don’t know well, I make it a point to ask myself a few questions. To what degree does the population—say, Italians, or Australians, or French people—come together during a crisis? (Alternately, how and in what ways, do various cultures show off their flags? In contrast to Swedes, who almost never display their national colors, Norwegians and Canadians generally sport a flag decal on their backpacks, the latter making sure the rest of the world doesn’t mistake them for Americans.) One good way to answer this question is to study a population when they are overseas, and traveling as tourists. When they hear or see a familiar accent or piece of clothing, do Americans or Germans or Canadians move toward or away from one another? The reluctance to align overseas generally derives from two things: the small size of the country of origin (Norwegians, for example, are pressed up against one another enough at home), or the nation’s internal socioeconomic divisions. Typically I get to see sides of countries that most tourists don’t. How do the less well-off residents behave toward those with more money or privilege? What is the mood around them—fearful or relaxed?
Another thing I do when I arrive at a new airport is handpick a taxi driven by a non-native. Foreign-born residents are likely to tell you the truth about a country and a population that natives can’t or won’t. A Nigerian taxi driver in Los Angeles once told me that he found it ironic that everyone in the city was rushing around buying Christmas presents for people who in most cases they didn’t know. He didn’t have to tell me that an unspoken level of guilt, and utility, underlies many American friendships, especially in the film industry. Denmark shows up regularly on magazine and online lists as “the happiest nation on earth,” yet every year tens of thousands of business professionals leave the country. In a nation of only 5.6 million people, where one in four Danish women admits to suffering from high degrees of stress, its hard not to believe that some lists can be misleading.
Denmark is also a country where, in household after household, families set out Brio train sets across their living rooms. Brio is the Swedish manufacturer of wooden, nonmotorized trains and tracks, all of the highest possible quality. At first glance it’s tempting to believe that Danish families are not only happy, and want to give their children old-fashioned, well-made toys rather than iPads and computer games, but that they also welcome the cheerful disorder that comes along with having kids. Over time, though, I began noticing that none of the Brio trains or tracks in any of these Danish houses showed any evidence of chipping or degradation. No one was playing with them at all. Those train tracks and small, simple, beautiful trains were like props in a stage setting, a surface snapshot of conformity concealing deeper levels of national unease. I might add that Danish kitchen manufacturers often use the term “Conversation Kitchen” to refer to an expensive, well-appointed kitchen that is used less often for cooking than it is as a theatrical backdrop for entertaining guests.
I’ve traveled and worked in Russia many times in my career. There is a lot I like about the country, and about Russians in general, not the least of which is their directness. When you do business in Russia, you always know where you stand. I’ve had unsettling dinners with Russian CEOs and their colleagues, during which the CEO discusses the people present in the third person, as if they aren’t there, while the rest of the table sits there, nodding, never once objecting or showing any emotion. Metaphorically speaking, if you’re in the middle of a negotiation, a Russian will remove a knife from a handy drawer, letting you know the blade is near. In the United States, the knife is at rest, and nearby, ready for use days, weeks or months down the line. In England, the British employ what Margaret Thatcher called “the Kitchen Cabinet Approach.” They are smiling, charming and polite until it comes time for the real conversation to take place hours later in the rear of the kitchen. In an analysis of over one billion pieces of emoji data across the globe, across numerous categories, it wasn’t surprising to find that UK residents had the highest ratio of “winking” emojis, a means, perhaps, of compensating for their usual reserve.1 (To me, emojis are condensed emotions, and an unbiased reflection of a society’s emotional state, imbalance and compensation.)
Russia’s biggest downside, for me at least, is its lack of color. Being in Russia is like breathing different oxygen, and I can feel a gray shade pulling down over me the moment I board a plane to fly there. No one is animated. No one smiles, or laughs. Ask most Russians what they like most about visiting other countries and they’ll say it’s the sight of other people having fun.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Russian women weren’t “allowed” to wear cosmetics. It wasn’t a law, but more an unspoken protocol. This all changed in the late 1980s when the Berlin Wall fell, and cosmetics companies like Mary Kay and Maybelline entered Russia for the first time alongside nightclubs, discos, restaurants, gaming companies, car dealerships and high-end stores like Versace. Russia was awash with cash. From the airport all the way into Moscow, the billboards and flashing neon plastering the highway made it look like a colorized Russian version of Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life.
It ended abruptly in 2006. Announcing that gambling was no different from alcohol and drug addiction, as well as a magnet for organized crime, Vladimir Putin exiled casinos and slot machine parlors to distant regions, including Armenia, Belarus, Georgia and Crimea. Overnight, Moscow’s color went away, as if the capital had woken up from a short, garish dream. Nothing was left but new hues of the old gray. In short order, Russia was more or less back to its old self.
But the disappearance of color had other associations and meanings, as I would find out later.
In midsummer, my two assistants and I flew from Zurich to Moscow on a private jet the Russian businessman had chartered for us. We spent a few days interviewing consumers in Moscow. There, a local crew joined our Swiss crew to fly our plane over certain sensitive military areas in Siberia and the Russian Far East. More than 4,000 miles later, we touched down in the town of Krasnoyarsk, where we met up with a Russian translator, a driver and a car. For the next ten days we traveled from one Siberian city and apartment building to another. At night, the car took us back to the airport, and we reboarded the plane. In four or five hours, during which time the three of us analyzed that day’s findings, we touched down in yet another withdrawn Russian town. In a week and a half, we passed through eight separate time zones, and at one point were less than a 45-minute flight from Tokyo.
In his 2010 book Travels in Siberia, Ian Frazier writes that no political or territorial entity inside Russia bears the actual name “Siberia.” The world knows Siberia as a metaphor, Frazier writes, a geographical or social condition that connotes being rejected, or given the cold shoulder. Siberia is the table beside the restaurant’s kitchen doors, the seat in the ballpark so far away from the field you’re better off watching the game at home on television, the party you throw for yourself where no one shows up. Geographically, Siberia refers to the roughly eight-million-square-mile landmass from the Arctic Ocean to the Kasakhstan mountains to the borders of Mongolia and China. The American composer Irving Berlin was born in Tyumen, Siberia, and lived there until he was five. One of his biographers wrote that as an adult, Berlin had no memories of his childhood except one: in the wake of a pogrom, he remembered lying on a blanket on the side of a road, watching Cossacks burn his house to the ground. It’s no surprise that at the turn of the twentieth century, his parents emigrated to the Lower East Side of New York.
Bordering the easternmost chunk of Siberia, and further north, the Arctic, the Russian Far East isn’t a place where appearances matter much. Life is difficult, and the weather is extreme. In the winter, temperatures drop to as low as 50 or 60 below zero. The summers are warm and short. The length of a day varies from 21 hours in mid-July to three hours in December. Political correctness doesn’t exist. In the winter, fur coats, fur hats and boots made from reindeer are the only things that can insulate bodies against the cold, and the most desirable winter gloves are made out of dog fur. A Russian fashion consultant once told me that fashion stops at the Siberian border, where instead of showing off, the prerogative is survival.
The cities and towns of Dalniy Vostok Rossii lack even the dabs of color a visitor might see in Moscow or Saint Petersburg. The skies, streets, sidewalks, footbridges, lakes, shops and buildings all seem drained of life. Whatever trees there are were planted in a hurry a long time ago, and ankle-high pollen covers the streets and sidewalks like snow. In the winter, locals leave their cars on all day knowing that if they don’t they won’t be able to restart them. Now and then you catch sight of one that gave up, sunken down over flat tires and abandoned, its undersides rusted out.
Traditionally the way I connect with people is by subverting the rules. If you can’t connect with the natives of a country, you won’t get very far. As everyone knows, people send out unconscious signals, and, as I am a chameleon by nature, one of the things I do is “become” the person I’m talking to, since we tend to respond to the people who are most similar to us.
This turned out to be harder than usual in Russia, where trust is generally lacking. Most people there don’t look you in the eyes, and their gazes have a cloudy, dissociated look. Decades before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden made headlines, Russians knew their phone lines were being tapped. My Moscow-based employer had a dozen or so cell phones on him at all times. The people who mattered most to him had their own dedicated phones, and whenever one rang, he had to sort through his briefcase to find it. When he spoke, his words were hushed, a hand always covering his mouth in case someone could read his lips.
I’m always looking for topics, symbols, actions and behaviors that ground or define a culture and can serve as a footbridge of sorts between a stranger—me—and the local residents. I might show up at a bar or an outdoor farmer’s market or spend an hour or two with a local political figure. Knowing I would stick out immediately in a remote Russian city that few non-natives visit, I needed to make myself conspicuously visible. I needed to prove I was safe and worthy if not of friendship, then of being given a chance.
In the main square of Krasnoyarsk, I noticed that elderly men spent most of their afternoons playing long games of chess. There was a nice, obvious sense of community, fellowship and physical interaction, of residents looking out for one another. In my experience, the more physical touching there is among people, the healthier the country is (a point I’ll revisit later on).
With my interpreter translating, I challenged one of the old men to a game. Before long a crowd had gathered. As the games went on, I could feel myself becoming, at least from a local perspective, Russian. The expressions of the people in the crowd grew soft, and now and again, their eyes showed patience, or humor. At one point the old man I was playing against grabbed hold of my finger and moved the piece with me; a few minutes later, someone from the crowd sat down beside me.
It was the moment a stranger came over to where I was sitting that I knew I’d passed a test. Nothing was ever said, but everyone understood what had just happened: if I won the game, or even lost while playing honorably, or well, I would be seen as trustworthy, someone who had earned the right to do his job in their city, whatever that job was. Fortunately I’ve always been good at chess, and when I won a game or two, I knew I’d surrendered my outsider status.
There’s an iconic film in Russia wherein the protagonist comes home after work only to find he’s in the wrong apartment, and the wrong building, and the wrong city, but since everything in Russia looks the same, he doesn’t realize it, and now he has no idea how to get back home. No matter where I went in the Russian Far East—Krasnoyarsk, Samara, Yakutsk (known, unofficially, as the coldest inhabited place on earth) or Siberia’s largest city, Novosibirsk—the apartment buildings, where 95 percent of the population live, were the same. Not just similar but exactly the same. Most were built between the First and Second World Wars. They were all 25 stories high. The metal fences surrounding them were all the same height and painted in the same green and yellow colors. The trees around the circumference of every building had been planted in the same places. On the sidewalks and small lawns in front and on the sides of buildings were ashtrays made from rusted soup or stew cans, with butts sticking up out of them. Now and again I caught sight of a line of clothes drying in the heat. Cats prowled the paths and walkways. Inevitably there was a smell of something decomposing in the air, most likely a pet who’d died. The building lobbies were slapdash-looking. But more important than the exteriors and lobbies of apartment buildings, I later realized, was what went on inside them. If Russian apartment dwellers took the time to make their buildings’ exteriors neat, or beautiful, they might be seen as vulnerable. Better to appear not to care.
The first thing I noticed were Siberian doors. There may have been multiple locks on the outside, but inside, every door in every apartment I visited was thickly cushioned and upholstered. The effect was to create a soundproof space that deadened all sounds and cut the inhabitants off from the outside world. Inside, the rooms were functional, cramped and plain. Few residents had taken the time to decorate. Most apartments had two chairs and a couch, a television set, a computer maybe, and that was it.
Whenever I enter someone’s home, the first thing I focus on is the artwork. Around 90 percent of the people I interview have something hanging there. If a living place can be likened to a city, the art on the wall, or the lack of art, is the first sign you see on a city’s outskirts, the one declaring the start of the city limits. The bedroom brings you closer to the city, followed by the kitchen and the bathroom, both of which take you into the “downtown” of someone’s living space. After first asking permission, I will generally look through women’s handbags, and even their clothes closets. What hangs there so that they can reach it most easily, and what sort of clothing is hanging the farthest away?
In Russia, I later found out, women are in charge of the home. Therefore, you can be assured that the way a man’s clothes are displayed in the bedroom, or the closet, reflects her desires, not his. For the next few weeks I met any number of worn-out, worn-down Russian husbands. They seemed indifferent to how they looked. Their pants were dirty, their T-shirts simple, their shoes old. But inside the bedroom, the fanciest men’s clothes could be seen hanging in the closets, visible but unworn. It was a hopeful gesture on the part of their wives. Though they never said so, it seemed they had hung the clothes there in an attempt to bring back the romantic potential of the men they’d married.
You can’t really talk about Russian women without bringing up Russian men. Across Russia, women have a much longer life expectancy than men, for one simple reason: alcohol. A 2014 study in the Lancet tracked 151,000 adults across three Russian cities for over a decade and concluded that up to 25 percent of all Russian men die before the age of 55, with liver disease and alcohol poisoning the main causes of death. Drinking and alcohol-related morbidity are linked to political volatility, too. In 1985, then-General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, cut back on nationwide vodka production and passed a law prohibiting stores from selling liquor before noon. Consumption and overall death rates both dropped. When communism fell, vodka became available again, and rates of consumption and alcohol-related deaths rose accordingly. Russian women aren’t teetotalers by any means, but the average life expectancy for Russian men today is around 64, the lowest of any country in the world outside African nations.
Less important than what Russians drink is how they drink: like first-year fraternity pledges. Russia is a country of bingers. Natives seem to have convinced themselves that this is an unalterable element of what it means to be Russian, that it’s effectively baked into the country’s genetics. Others blame the alcoholism rates on the difficulty of life. Whatever the reason, almost every person I spoke to had up to a dozen different vodka varieties on hand. In one Yakutsk apartment, a sectional living room couch even had a hidden compartment in its middle that swung open to reveal a doll-sized magic kingdom of vodka and glasses, as well as a stack of Swiss chocolate bars. Based on the date on the package, the Swiss chocolate had expired 15 years earlier, but that didn’t matter. The owners had a private cupboard containing not just a pipeline to their dreams, but also to the safety, efficiency, cleanliness and order that Switzerland stands for.
I jotted down this piece of small data in my notebook, not knowing at the time the pivotal role it would play later on.
The issue of alcohol kept coming up, especially when I entered apartments where it was easy to intuit two levels of life—a public one and a second unseen one. One day I was interviewing a Russian woman when she asked if I wanted some water. When I took a sip, I nearly spit it out. It was pure salt and bubbles. It was like swallowing a mouthful of the ocean. At the time I had no idea why water that tasted like that would ever be for sale commercially, or why she would offer such a thing to a guest. (I later discovered that the salt water came from nearby lakes, and Siberians perceived it as clean, bracing and nutritious.) Later that night, back in my hotel, I realized that the salt water was in some respects an everyday substitute for alcohol. Like alcohol, salt is highly addictive, and if they’re not actively drinking, alcoholics are often drawn to things—cigarettes, coffee—that give them the same rush, and that also hurt a little going down.
I was picking up a clue here, a clue there: the indifference and lifelessness of the apartment exteriors and lobbies. The soundproof doors. Of course those doors kept out the cold in the winter, but could that be the only reason they were so well insulated? A high alcoholism rate that led to one hostess serving me carbonated salt water. Was salt water the only compensation for alcoholism in Russia, or were there others? If alcoholism masked or concealed a cultural vacuum, then what was it?
Almost every man and woman I spoke to in Russia told me that if given the opportunity, they would live somewhere else. The top destinations they listed off were Italy, France and Switzerland. Why Italy and France? The food. Why Switzerland? Because of its perceived security and safety. Most Russians had never been to these countries and had no idea what life was like there, but it didn’t matter. More important was what they symbolized—good food, smiling people, leisure, romance, beauty, flirtation and freedom. If the first clue revolved around desire, and discontent, the second clue had to do with aspiration, which brought up the subject of what it meant to be a Russian female living in a rough, survivalist nation.
Earlier I mentioned I am always seeking the exaggerated elements in a culture, the things that stick out. Almost immediately, two possible business ideas occurred to me. The first was an online medical clinic where doctors saw patients virtually, between certain hours of the day, but I soon found out that the Russian medical infrastructure is so byzantine that an online clinic would be almost impossible to put into place. Second, I’d noticed that almost everyone I’d met owned a dog, a cat or both. Why not launch an online pet store? Then I found out that Russian pet owners rarely spend money on their dogs and cats, and fed them whatever was left over from their own meals. I would have to do some more digging.
The next clue that showed up was more an observation than anything else. In contrast to the featurelessness of the apartments I visited, almost every woman I interviewed had extremely red lips. Why did Russian women wear so much makeup? By painting their lips like that, what were they conveying exactly? Was it the need to be noticed? If so, why? What sort of culture, or environment, makes a woman feel she isn’t getting the attention she needs?
It may sound overly dramatic, but men and women tend to rebel against whatever imbalances exist in their countries. They do this consciously and unconsciously. Whenever I visit the United States, for example, one of the first things I notice is that no one ever touches one another, especially the men. In America, touch is perceived as sexual. At the same time, American culture overemphasizes sports, especially football, which is one of the few places where men are given permission to touch, slap, wrestle, tackle and hug one another. France is renowned for the high quality of its food as well as its drawn-out, multicourse meals. Yet France is also ranked number one in the world when it comes to eating premade food, including frozen food, and McDonald’s revenues there are the second highest worldwide. Then there’s Japan, one of the most polite, controlled nations in the world, a place where if you bring up the topic of sex with a woman, she will literally blush. But Japan is also the country with the highest number of “sex hotels” and female-only train cars to protect women from being groped.
Back in Siberia, it occurred to me that the red lips I kept seeing symbolized the girl inside—the one eager but forbidden to express herself in a visual way. Those red lips were also a feminine way of controlling the home, a manifestation of a Big Mouth who can speak emotionally and without constraint. The combination of the exaggeratedly feminine and the confrontational kept showing up. One Russian woman I interviewed wore a black T-shirt with a front showing a white Persian kitten gripping an MK-47, as if the shirt were telling the world that its owner may have been soft on the inside but she also wouldn’t hesitate to kill you. When I asked another Russian woman to draw me a picture, she sketched out a beautiful mural of a school of underwater fish. The fish didn’t look like any I’d ever seen before. They were stylized creatures with Betty Boop eyes and—more confirmation, but of what?—red lips like flowers in bloom. A day later, another woman drew me a tiger, again with a huge red open mouth.
Women as cats. Women as tigers. Women as pairs of oversized red lips. At that stage, I wasn’t sure what I was even noticing, but I jotted it all down anyway, along with another strange fact: there were no mirrors anywhere. In several homes in the places where mirrors usually hang—over a dresser or the bed, or against a bathroom wall—there were sheets of cardboard similar to the ones you find in amusement parks, where by poking their heads through a hole, children can inhabit the torso of a prince, or a warrior, or a muscleman, making them resemble their—or more likely their parents’—favorite characters.
Elsewhere, it’s unusual to see a house without mirrors—in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. Most people are in the habit of looking at themselves in the mirror several times a day. (On my own apartment block, workers recently wrapped the mirrored building elevator in plastic in preparation for new people moving in, and I noticed that someone had poked a hole through the plastic so she could check herself out in the elevator mirror before coming home.) But even the bathroom mirrors I saw were dark and somehow gloomy. Some were cracked, or dented. If a mirror serves as a frame for a piece of human art, the mirrors I saw looked and felt like afterthoughts. In many bedrooms I found small, wood-handled mirrors hidden away in drawers. Based on the smooth grain of the wood, they didn’t see much use. The absence of mirrors led me to believe that Russian women were deliberately muting themselves in order to fulfill someone else’s needs. The bright red lipstick was a call for attention, yet at the same time, these women avoided looking in the mirror. It made no sense. Or did it?
With almost every Russian female I spoke to, I came face to face with the duality between a woman’s red lips and the “male” behavior the culture enforced on all its natives. Physically and in conversation, Russian women were practical, determined and no-nonsense. With their husbands working in labor-intensive jobs like mining, oil and forestry, clearly they kept their families and homes together, with one of their primary goals being to make sure their husbands didn’t fall prey to alcoholism. More evidence that Russian women ruled the roost kept showing up: in every bathroom I went into, the women had placed their toothbrush in a shared glass with the bristles facing upward. In contrast, men’s toothbrushes were placed with the bristles facing down, as if to signal that their heads were buried in the sand.
I couldn’t stop thinking about one Russian woman, whom I called the Orange Lady, for the simple reason that the color orange dominated her tiny apartment. Her tablecloth, the wristband she wore, her socks, the magnets on her fridge, even the fish in a tiny, glass-bowl aquarium were all the brightest possible orange. The clue that helped me connect orange with something bigger was a painting I saw hanging on her living room wall. It showed a little girl standing on a drab gray street, dressed head-to-foot in orange. It was, I realized, the woman standing in front of me, but as a young girl.
Realizing this, I asked her about her childhood. She grew up, she told me, in Yakutsk, and never left. When she was a child, she’d pined for a dollhouse but her parents couldn’t afford to get her one. When she asked for a doll, she got the same answer. Both the dollhouse and the doll she’d had her heart set on were orange. Orange, then, was the color of the two things she’d wanted most in her life but couldn’t get.
Like all the women I spoke to, the Orange Lady seemed starved to express her girlish or feminine side. In Russia, as a rule, creativity is suppressed. Schoolchildren are taught that the answer to almost any question is found in a formula. In a rote, rational society more or less hostile to creativity and emotionality, stepping outside the approved gray palate and into a universe of color and imagination means flirting with the possibility of being “gay”—a huge stigma in Russia. The only exception is ballet, so it’s little wonder that the Bolshoi is as popular as it is.
Color. Imagination. Thick doors. Red lips. No mirrors. What role did these things play in Russian culture? But it turned out that the biggest piece of small data of all was staring right at me: the enormous number of magnets on every refrigerator door.
It took me a few visits to notice them. Fridge magnets have a way of mixing in with their surroundings, and then one day it struck me: every refrigerator seemed to have an extravagantly large collection of magnets. They weren’t at eye level, either. Most were at waist level, or a little higher. But why? Most people, I know, have at least a couple of magnets on their fridges. A lot of them are goofy, or sentimental, or both—“Life is Too Short to Drink Cheap Wine,” “Nothing Says ‘I Love You’ Like Bacon,” and so forth. Others clasp children’s drawings, or grocery and to-do lists. Hipsters display sashimi magnets, or bass guitars, or retro cartoon characters like Casper the Friendly Ghost or Bart Simpson. But on the fridges of the Russian Far East, there weren’t just a couple of fridge magnets, there were twenty, thirty, even forty or more. Like a metallic mural, they saturated every fridge door in every kitchen I visited where there were children.
From that point forward, I made it a point to ask the family who had put which magnet where. The answer was always the same: The mother placed the first fridge magnet in the center of the fridge. The father was responsible for the next magnet, and he generally placed it to the right of his wife’s. Then it was the child’s turn to place his or her magnet directly underneath the parents’.
The magnets made a circle around the mother. She was the nexus of the home. It was further confirmation, if I needed any, that at the heart of Russian culture was a woman. From a symbolic standpoint, the magnets I saw were devoted to freedom, to escape, to foreign travel, to exotic foreign cities. They gazed back out at children’s eye level. They seemed to say, “There’s a future ahead of you. You can do anything.”
By now, I was starting to Small Mine the observations I’d gathered in the hope they would take me someplace worthwhile. Desire, I knew, was embedded somehow in those fridge magnets, but I couldn’t say how, and even if I could, there was no real proof. How were these fridge magnets different from Pinterest, the website that allows users to post photos and designs and artwork? I knew that in a study of emoticon use across the world by the British technology firm SwiftKey, Russians were revealed as the biggest romantics, “using three times as much romance-themed emoji than the average,” especially hearts and flowers, a compensation, as I saw it, for the absence of smiling people, the gray buildings and the overall lack of color.2 But what did this say about them offline? Humans all need a channel of expression, or what I like to call an oasis. An oasis isn’t a point of departure, exactly, but more an exit ramp where we allow ourselves to relax and float away. For Russian men, the oasis centered around fishing with their friends in the summer in boats weighted down with vodka, Russian cognac and beer. Alcoholism, or any kind of addiction, is at its heart a search for transformation and transcendence. It’s an escape from both identity and place. Transcendence isn’t possible for humans, but we keep at it until we die, go crazy or give up searching.
By showing off the softer, more artistic, more visually expressive, more “feminine” side of their characters, fridge magnets—at least it seemed to me—had become a repository for these women’s hopes, fantasies and aspirations. They weren’t just the expression of a desire to escape the hardness and maleness of Russian life. They also symbolized the dreams Russian mothers had, that their children might someday live lives less constrained and more refined than theirs. It took a short stroll around the local courtyards the next day to confirm this observation.
Russian playgrounds are as colorless as the apartment buildings nearby. In every Siberian playground I’d visited, the parents sat on benches on one side, talking among themselves as the children played on the other side. One afternoon, in between interviews when there was no one else around, I sat on one of the swings and rocked there for a while. A few minutes later my fingers picked up something: the wear and tear on the swing ropes. Closer to the swing itself, the rope was smooth, but higher up, where the swing fastened to the bar, the rope was discolored and worn. Up high but not below, the rope had seen a lot of use, which told me something: It was the parents, and not the children, who used the swings, which didn’t surprise me, as I had noticed that across Siberia the children I’d met didn’t seem to be all that active. Even during the short summers, they tended to play indoors. The older kids hung out with their friends or went in a group to bars. No, it was the parents who’d taken a childhood totem—the playground swing—and turned it into their own. If nothing else, this confirmed to me what Russian parents, in particular the mothers, were lacking in their own lives. Freedom. Release. Irresponsibility. Time. In short, many of the qualities we generally ascribe to children.
The flame of Russian culture, which at the same time communicated what the culture lacked, was inside those fridge magnets, and from there I had the beginnings of a concept—one that would have never come to me if, two years earlier, I hadn’t traveled to Saudi Arabia to help design a new shopping center.
Saudi Arabia is a new and booming market, and given the success of its oil-based economy—with 16 percent of the world’s proved oil reserves, the kingdom is the world’s largest oil exporter—life there is seldom lived un-extravagantly. In a country that teems with Ferraris and Lamborghinis, where consumption is proud and relentless, a new mall would have to stand out in some way.
But from a clue-gathering perspective, Saudi Arabia is an extremely complex culture, since some of its protocols can be hard for outsiders to come to terms with. As I’m sure you know, Saudi Arabia is a hugely repressive society for women. In 2014 the kingdom was ranked by the World Economic Forum as 130th out of 142 countries for gender equality.3 It’s the only country in the world where women aren’t permitted to drive cars. Nor can women travel, work, attend school or submit to certain medical procedures without first getting permission from their male guardians, typically a husband, a father, a brother or a son. In a society like that, it can be hard for a Westerner to determine what’s rational and what’s not. Still, the mall developers who hired me knew that women are families’ chief acquisitors and decision makers, and that any retail innovations had to take their needs into account—a challenge considering that the majority of the people working on the mall project were men.
In a nation dominated by Sharia law, what did Saudi women actually want, versus what they were told they should want by the nation’s century-old Mutaween, or “morality police”? The Mutaween, otherwise known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, is made up of men who patrol cities and small towns, restaurants and cafés, stores and malls to report back on and redress any and all breaches of morality. They enforce dress codes and make sure that all stores close for half an hour during noon, afternoon, dusk and nighttime prayers. In such an environment, it’s nearly impossible to coax a woman to speak honestly about her needs. “I love surprises as long as I know what the surprises are beforehand,” one Saudi woman said to me, which struck me as the essence of the Saudi Arabian mentality.
In some key respects, the populations of Russia and Saudi Arabia are very similar. Russia’s cold weather can be paralyzing, and in some regions Russians wall themselves off inside their homes for half the year. In Saudi Arabia, the extreme desert heat prompts similar behavior. During my Subtext Research, Russians and Saudis both expressed frustration with the leadership of their countries, and as many Saudis as Russians told me they would happily move someplace else. The difference between the two cultures lay in the fridge magnets. In Saudi Arabia, most displayed obvious international icons: the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, Rome’s Coliseum, Big Ben, London Bridge. What, then, was the connection between Russian and Saudi Arabian fridge magnets? The need for escape. For imaginative travel of some kind. Except in the Middle East, that need for escape kept reappearing in the guise of familiar talismans like the Eiffel Tower.
When I began interviewing Saudi Arabian women in their homes, it was the first time any marketer had visited, or interviewed, native women where they lived. I hadn’t asked for, or gotten, permission, and what I did was, in theory, against the law. The country’s unspoken rules decree that no male is allowed to be alone in a room with a female unless her husband or father is there, even if he is in the next room. Obviously, I needed to tread carefully.
For instance, in every Saudi apartment I visited, thick curtains were drawn across the windows. No one could see in or out. As was the case in Russia, the heavy fabric served as weatherproofing against the extreme outside temperature, but I also wondered whether, along with the Saudi Arabian dress code, the curtains provided an additional layer of subjugation. In Arabic, hijab can literally be translated as “screen” or “curtain.” The Qur’an, I knew, directs that male Muslims should address the wives of the Prophet Muhammad behind a curtain. Did the curtains have some unconscious religious significance? When I interviewed local religious leaders, I got conflicting answers. I found out that the Mutaween was known for handing out tickets to homeowners whose bare windows overlooked the street; yet when I asked the Saudi men present at my interviews whether the curtains were religiously prescribed, they told me that closing the curtains was a general courtesy. The curtains, it seemed, were nothing more than tradition, a self-invented rule enforced by the morality police.
The next piece of small data I stumbled on had nothing to do with gender.
As I wrote earlier, you can typically identify the first clue about any consumer’s identity on his or her walls. It took me three or four visits to notice that the paintings in Saudi homes all had as their subject matter one theme: water. Streams. Lakes. Waterfalls. Oceans. (It’s worth noting that Arabic speakers are four times more likely than other speakers to use flower and plant emoticons.)4 I took note of this as a curiosity, nothing more. After all, lots of paintings have water as their theme, and no doubt the blue pastels were calming, especially in a sandy, landlocked country where there are no rivers, lakes, ponds, streams or much rainfall, only aquifers that process and desalinize the nation’s drinking water from the surrounding oceans.
From consulting work I’d done years before with Colgate, I know that around 40 percent of all toothbrushes sold around the world have red handles. But Saudi toothbrushes were anything but that; the figure, in fact, was 2 percent. There were no oranges, either, and barely any yellows. This wasn’t normal. What could the absence of red, yellow and orange toothbrushes imply?
Over the next week, I also began noticing how juice glasses were arranged on trays. They were positioned beside one another, instead of stacked, and the same went for the drinking glasses inside nine out of ten Saudi cupboards. Nothing could fall or topple, break or shatter. Control is generally a sign and a consequence of fear, and for the first time, I recognized that fear—but fear of what?—permeated these Saudi households.
I jotted down other small data, too. The clocks in practically every home, as well as most of the watches on women’s wrists, were five minutes ahead of time. In Arabic culture, there is no “good luck” number, but there are five pillars of Islam, suggesting to me that Saudi natives were compensating for some as-yet-undefined terror by creating a halo effect in their homes—a way of warding off bad luck or misfortune.
At the same time, what could account for so many Eiffel Tower fridge magnets? They were literally everywhere. They sat on windowsills. They served as paperweights and desk ornaments. The reason I didn’t pick up on them at first was because the Eiffel Tower is iconic to the point of corniness. But aside from some Saudis visiting France and bringing home souvenirs, why were there so many of them?
My first thought was that the Eiffel Tower is a symbol of desire. “Desire is full of endless distances,” the American poet Robert Haas once wrote,5 and I couldn’t help but think again of the theme of water in the paintings on the walls of every Saudi household. There was no difference between what an Eiffel Tower represented and what water symbolized, or was there? Someone once said that blue is the color of longing for the distances that we as humans can never reach. We can get rid of desire by surrendering to it, or we can resist and deny it. But desire can’t help but show up somewhere in our lives—whether it’s in a drink, or a drug, or the music we listen to that takes us back to the time when we first heard it; and if desire is frustrated, it will burst through somewhere else, in a curio souvenir bought in a Paris airport, or in a painting of a stream, or a creek, or a waterfall.
Throughout my visit I’d also made it a point to watch Saudi children playing. Their behavior, I noticed, was controlled and careful. Instead of playing hide-and-go-seek-type games, their games seemed to center instead around themes of protection and caretaking. Most of the kids’ books I pulled down from the shelves reflected these same themes, indicating that whatever fear I was picking up on had been passed down from Saudi mothers to their children. It’s always instructive to leaf through a nation’s children’s books, since they create our earliest expectations, and the Saudi mothers I met were raised on these same books. What surprised me most were their settings and locales. Few took place in any Bedouin kingdom, and if they did, the children’s-book version of Saudi Arabia bore no resemblance to the actual country. Instead of vast expanses of heat and sand, the books showed green fields, farms, creeks, water mills, weeping willows, patches of snow visible on the peaks of nearby mountains. Small exotic animals roamed around. It was a storybook Swiss fantasy combined with a dream world of water, purity and innocence.
But the toys favored by Saudi children challenged that innocence. Nearly eight out of ten of them were fire trucks, ambulances or police and safety vehicles. Having visited the bedrooms of hundreds of children in my work for LEGO, this struck me as anything but normal. Was the emphasis on police cars and fire trucks a result of the television shows or movies kids watched? When I took a closer look at Arabic and international programming as well as national toy sales, the answer was yes, to some degree—but not enough to explain why there were so many rescue vehicles. Digging further, I discovered that sales of kids’ emergency toys were 49 percent higher in Saudi Arabia than anyplace else in the world.
It goes without saying that the Middle East has a lot of sand (and dirt), and when I visited a nearby store with a Saudi Arabian woman and her driver, at first I thought nothing about the fact the car seats were wrapped in plastic. As my visit went on, I noticed that the television remote controls in most homes were also enclosed in plastic. So were many chairs and the newly bought clothes I found in bedroom drawers. A similar phenomenon is common in Chinese homes, where the fear of bacteria and infection links back to horrific amounts of urban smog, but Saudi Arabia had no obvious pollution problem. Did the plastic wrap have anything to do with the absence of freedom between Saudi men and women? Was it a symbol for the hijab? Did it connect somehow to the thick curtains or even the lack of brightly colored toothbrushes in Saudi bathrooms?
By now, I was convinced that the combination of toy fire trucks, ambulances and safety vehicles mixed with the plastic wrap covering up so many everyday objects was driven by a desire for protection against some unnamed cultural terror. From the first years of a child’s life, fear was rooted in Saudi culture, but I didn’t know why, and I had no idea what that fear was, either.
When I asked myself what water meant, in conjunction with the safety vehicles in children’s bedrooms, the answer was obvious: water put out fires. But what kinds of fires could break out in a desert climate? Still, I knew I was onto something, and when I brought up the subject of fires with Saudi women over the next few days it seemed I’d struck a nerve. No one could tell me why exactly, but they were morbidly afraid of fire, they told me—of flames, of burning to death. Mostly, they were afraid of burning buildings. Burning hotels. Burning skyscrapers. Shopping centers on fire. No mall has ever caught fire in Saudi Arabia, but they were convinced it happened regularly. Maybe it had something to do with a dread of being suffocated, since the hijab Saudi women wore was, at least to Western eyes, claustrophobic, even strangling.
I began analyzing Saudis’ favorite buildings and top travel destinations, while poring through interviewees’ photo albums and computer disc drives. If nothing else, the mall that I’d been brought in to help design needed to symbolize an escape from day-to-day reality, as well as offer refuge from the cultural fear of fire. I eventually contacted three Saudi female psychologists to help me uncover so-called “reverse” symbols that would help dampen and relieve this national paranoia.
Reverse symbols are common in children’s hospitals—the cartoon animal faces on walls, for example, that soothe children when they are about to undergo a medical procedure. Working together, we created large “fear” maps, which we counterbalanced with “dream” and “escapism” paths, all of which would underlie the mall’s future construction. I knew this much: whatever the mall ended up looking like, unless we took heed of the cultural fear of fire, we would have no customers.
A few months later, the mall’s construction was under way. Most Saudi Arabian malls consist of a long corridor, with cold, marbled stores on either side. Most were designed and built by developers with strong links to the royal family and reflect the latter’s power, mystery and remoteness. The overhead light is either dim, or harsh. The corridors echo and the acoustics are poor. Other malls are ornate and pompous, with huge statues and artificial palm trees planted in sand beds, which is ironic in a kingdom whose natives would prefer to surround themselves with totems of the West.
Our mall was different, in that it was focused on bringing in a more human dimension. The design team and I agreed we wouldn’t use certain colors, including red, orange and yellow. Revolving around images of water, with large canals flowing through the mall, our design created as strong a visual negation of the possibility of fires, or flame, or burning, as possible. We imported real bird sounds, and the rush of running water. Working alongside architects and designers, the mall became a dreamlike environment teeming with water images, including fountains, streams and even a wintry landscape with Swiss cabins, snowy mountains and ski slopes, to help Saudi Arabian women feel safe, and also to mirror the protection and the warmth that they felt as children growing up. If the cups I’d seen in Saudi households were arranged so they couldn’t fall, or topple, as a burning building might, I made sure that even the hills in the landscape were close to the ground. The calmness of the scene evoked a sense of protection against the elements, eliminating the metaphorical need for “plastic wrap,” as why would anyone need that level of immunity in such a cool, soothing environment?
What did any of this have to do with the Russian Far East? Well, a few things. As is true in Saudi Arabia, Russian society was closed, with very few options for escape. In Russia, women were seldom given the opportunity to show emotion; in Saudi Arabia, women weren’t even permitted to show their faces. In both cultures, public expressions of creativity barely existed, and rulership and religion were dominant. Russia had Vladimir Putin and the KGB’s current incarnation, the FSB. Saudi Arabia had Islam and Sharia law. In the Middle East, however, children, and not women, were the center of the family. Since women weren’t permitted to reveal their bodies or identities, their children acted out their emotions for them. Saudi children, even young females, were allowed to express what Saudi women couldn’t. In common with Russia, the most popular cuisine in the region was Italian food. Russian fridge magnets were situated low enough to serve as toys for kids, whereas in Saudi Arabia they were beyond reach for most children, serving only decorative purposes. Russia needed toys, and Saudi Arabia didn’t.
There is no way I would have picked up on the fridge magnets in the Russian Far East if I hadn’t worked in Saudi Arabia, no way I would have been reminded, again, of the unspoken balances between men and women, freedom and restriction, appearance and reality. When a society is out of balance, its natives will always find ways to compensate—or, in this case, escape. Alcohol in Russia is an escape. Cannabis in Holland is an escape. Prescription pills in the United States are an escape. What, then, were Russians escaping from?
Generally speaking, Saudi families could afford to travel with their kids, whereas most Russian families couldn’t. Hence, the profusion of fridge magnets in Russian homes, symbolizing the places families wished they could expose their children to but couldn’t. I may be paraphrasing Sting circa 1985, but did Russians love their children, too? Yes. Did they wish they could provide for them, pay for long-distance travel, expose them to the world? Yes. But as I said, foreign travel is beyond the average Russian budget. As compensation, and in contrast with Saudi Arabian households, Russian families gathered and hung fridge magnets at a level where their children could see, touch and maybe even draw inspiration from them.
The magnets were an oasis, a charging station for escape. Russian men had alcohol, but my guess was that fridge magnets were oases where Russian women and children went to refuel. By nature, oases belong to the past. As time goes on, they grow in romance, mystery and dimension. If most of us paid a visit to the real-life oases we remember—a summer at Martha’s Vineyard, a childhood trip to Europe—chances are we would be disappointed. Our memories can’t help making those places larger than life, slightly unreal. Situated in the most visited room in the home, fridge magnets were a pipeline to those imaginary places and experiences. They ensured a stream of energy from Paris, or London, or Tokyo directly into the kitchens of the Russian Far East. They gave Russian women—and Russian children—a ticket to another place and time, transporting and reenergizing them before dropping them back inside everyday life.
In both Saudi Arabia and Russia, life isn’t easy, and escape routes, if they exist, are often blocked. Over the years many Russians who travel or live abroad have told me they feel out of place in other cultures. “The place where you are born best suits you,” is a well-known Russian saying, and most Russians believe the only possible place where you can find out who you really are is in the country where you were born.
Still, what struck me most about life in the Russian Far East was the sense of community I found in every town I visited. I had a strange feeling I’d caught it on its last legs, too. In a Novosibirsk courtyard, I saw two Russian boys enthusiastically playing catch with a rock, in contrast to the United States and parts of Europe, where a new smartphone app occasions a few moments of excitement at most, followed by boredom. The Internet was gradually making its way into more rural areas of Russian society, even in areas as remote as Siberia, but full penetration was still one or two years away. One man I spoke with told me that since the Russian government had limited any and all personal initiative, or entrepreneurship, “freedom” had no choice but to find its way online. It was the only place Russian citizens could express themselves without the fear of reprisal.
If trust doesn’t exist in Russia, the natives certainly don’t trust the Internet. The most popular social networking site in Russia, with around 110 million users (compared to Facebook’s 10 million), is VKontakte.com, or VK. Online privacy is a very real issue in Russia. In 2014, Vladimir Putin signed a law requiring all Internet operators to store their user data in centers within Russia by 2016. Companies that refused to comply, he said, would be banished from the Web, which means that any data stored on Russian servers is vulnerable to censorship. Additional regulations require blogs with a reader base of over 3,000 daily views to register officially as “media,” thereby subjecting them to governmental monitoring. In the wake of the political upheaval in Ukraine in 2013, VK founder Pavel Durov made headlines when he refused to hand over information on his website pertaining to Ukrainian protesters to Russian security agencies, or to block the VK page dedicated to Alexey Navalny, the anticorruption foe and Putin critic. Durov posted the government’s orders instead on his VK home page. It took only a few months for Durov to be dismissed as VK’s CEO. A longtime proponent of freedom of expression, Durov made it clear that VK had been taken over by the Russian government.
Even when the government is not involved, e-commerce in Russia involves ordering a product online, then picking it up at a nearby outlet. As an analogy, imagine ordering books from Amazon, and going to an Amazon warehouse around the corner from your house to pick them up. Order something in Russia, and there’s no guarantee that your package will show up when it’s supposed to, or that it will show up at all.
Back in my hotel one night, I placed every fragment of small data I had on a bulletin board—photos, videos, notes, observations, insights. I pictured the fridge magnets in every apartment. I thought back to the Orange Lady, and how the two things she’d wanted most as a girl, a dollhouse and a doll, were denied her, and of the emotional power of the things we crave the most when we’re young. I thought about the guilt that Russian parents, especially mothers, carried around with them, of not being able to give their children more than they themselves had as kids. Then there were the lack of mirrors and the frayed top ropes of the playground swings. Still, everything came back to the distilled emotional power inside those fridge magnets, and back to the imbalances in Russian society: the cold weather, the frustration, the distrust, what it means to be a Russian parent who wants more for her children. The preoccupation with children showed up in the worn rope swings and in the cardboard sheets of princes and warriors crowned with the heads of sons and daughters. Suddenly, I had my business idea.
Over the next few days and weeks, I set in motion the rollout of a huge online website devoted to Russian mothers and their children. We called it Mamagazin, which in Russian means “Mums’ Store.” Our mission was to create the most honest, reliable e-commerce site in Russia. To help combat the high levels of distrust in Russia, I knew instinctively who to call upon to help me with the website: Russian mothers. They may have been nominally in charge of their households, but almost no one listened to them or sought out their opinions. Almost every Russian woman I spoke to told me how friendless and isolated she felt. Across Siberia, the strongest communities women have, now and in the future, are online.
Mamagazin, then, was the first-ever online community that respected, and listened to, Russian women. It was built by mothers, for mothers. Yes, it is a company first, but it’s also a resource where mothers can tap into advice from other mothers, which is why we asked those very moms for their help in creating it. In Russia, we found out that most mothers buy toys in partnership with other mothers, to save on shipping and handling costs. In response, we created a mechanism that enables them to make one order, splitting the payments and even the products, using a single account. Realizing that grandparents buy around 40 percent of all toys in Russia, we also created a system where grandparents could submit the characteristics of the grandchild in question, their preferred price range, the child’s dreams, the topics on which they bonded the most with the children and even a wish list.
Our goal? To let Russian women be heard. To appeal both to their actual children and to the little kids who still lived inside these women. Not least, one of our mission statements—smiles are infectious—was a way of trying to bring a measure of happiness to a country where smiles were rare.
It had never been done before, but to help launch the business, we next recruited a select group of Russian women to serve as our “mom ambassadors.” What did the ideal “trustworthy” Russian mother look like? What were her characteristics? We then put the candidates who matched those characteristics through a two-month-long boot camp where they learned social and communication skills, and how to cope with unforeseen crises. Russian women are extremely introverted. They’re unaccustomed to small talk, or to letting a conversation build up slowly, or to building up a rapport; most go straight to the point. In effect, we taught them how to create casual conversation with strangers. They then partnered up and traveled across the country in pairs to thirty different cities, to meet with 150 additional mothers daily to discuss any and all issues they face. No selling, no pushing—just conversations in which women with children could talk, and listen. For most, being in the spotlight was a new, and emotional, experience. Every day we collected more than 500 good and great ideas. We implemented many of them, too, crediting the mothers who came up with them on a special honorees’ page.
Our next step was to create a series of nationwide family festivals we called Mamafests, devoted to creating an experience for both mothers and children. We invited approximately 250,000 Russian mothers and their families. When they got there, children were given a mock passport, and told they had to accumulate stamps they would receive once they’d completed certain activities, including painting a character’s face, icing cookies, playing Angry Birds and tic-tac-toe, and racing other kids in cardboard cars. Eventually they could swap their passport stamps for prizes.
Up until the point Mamagazin ran up against 2015’s sanctions on imports, and was temporarily “frozen,” the website—as well as our Mamafest projects—was the fastest-growing, most user-friendly e-commerce site aimed at parents in all of Russia, with over 500 employees, and Russian moms consistently voting the site as “The most appealing to visit.” Never before had thousands of mothers come together to help create a company, and never had a company gone to market by simply listening to what mothers wanted. In contrast to most other businesses, we had made the time to grow our business organically. We spent a year talking to Russian mothers, and another year building the website in line with what they wanted. Our bigger mission was to create a collective experience for Russian mothers, all of whom wanted the same thing for their children—a chance to satisfy desires their lives prevent them from expressing. Whether in the Middle East or the remotest regions of Siberia, it was a need reflected in the radiance and romance of a universally adored Parisian landmark.