Victoria's Secret Rise and Fall.

I remember hearing about this story over a decade ago, but feel like it could still be relevant during times like this.

Inspired by an uncomfortable trip to a department store to buy underwear for his wife, Raymond set out to create a place where men would feel comfortable shopping for lingerie. He wanted to create a women's underwear shop that was targeted at men.

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"Raymond imagined a Victorian boudoir, replete with dark wood, oriental rugs, and silk drapery. He chose the name 'Victoria' to evoke the propriety and respectability associated with the Victorian era; outwardly refined, Victoria's 'secrets' were hidden beneath."

That didn't work out so well for ol' Raymond.

By 1982, the company was making more than $4 million in annual sales, but according to reports, it was nearing bankruptcy at the time. It was at this point that Les Wexner swooped in.

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Wexner's leadership, the company acquired Victoria's Secret's six stores and its catalog for $1 million.

Wexner turned Raymond's vision on its head, creating a store that was focused on women rather than men.

He was closely following the European lingerie market of that time and wanted to bring this aesthetic to the US. So, he set out to create a more affordable version of European upscale brand "La Perla" — lingerie that looked luxurious and expensive but was affordable.

And it worked. By the early 1990s, Victoria's Secret had become the largest lingerie retailer in the US, with 350 stores nationally and sales topping $1 billion.

The story of Victoria Secret...

is the story of financial success using nothing but more effective marketing while still utilizing the same infrastructure and logistics.

The brand began to cement its image over the next few years. In 1995, its famous annual fashion show was born.

In 1999, the show aired for the first time online. Time described it as the "internet-breaking moment" of this era after 1.5 million viewers tried to tune in and crashed the site.

So sex sells?

But not in the ways that many would think. Apparently men want to look at women in underwear, but they don't want to be the ones that buy it. Go figure.

I think this story was so interesting to a lot of people because it had a bunch of boring business ideology stacked on top of a somewhat controversial topic: the societal pressures we put on women to "look their best" and such.

Which is why we've had so many weird political backlashes like "plus-sized" models and the like to make it feel more inclusive to the general public.

But that's not really my point here.

How can we apply these lessons to Steem and crypto in general? Will Justin Sun usher this platform into a new dawn of awareness, or stomp it into the ground underneath his boots? Who knows, but I do find it interesting to think about.

Perhaps all crypto in general needs a makeover to become palatable to the general population. How can we make crypto sleek and sexy to the average person? Making money is often considered a highly attractive prospect. Unfortunately the general public seems to get suckered into crypto at the peak (the absolute worst possible time) only to see the market crash 80-99% and become completely disillusioned. Perhaps what the cryptosphere truly needs is less volatile and stable growth, so it markets itself.

Barring that obvious necessity, jobs need to be provided to the general public in a way that's never been presented before. Imagine being able to take a job online without even being required to provide one's identity. The prospects of this up-and-coming economy are boundless once we jump over a few of these hurdles in the way. Once users are getting paid in crypto for their services, closing the loop and keeping that value circulated thought the network becomes a much more trivial process.

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One thing I do find noteworthy about all this is that "Internet melting" moment in 1999 when they tried to put the "fashion show" online. Not nearly enough bandwidth at the time to keep up with the demand. This is one of the big differences between the Internet and crypto.

The Internet always has a reason to be looking to scale up, but crypto doesn't. In fact, we see when we attempt to scale crypto we end up losing a lot of security and decentralization in the trade offs. In addition, it becomes apparent that the vast majority of developers don't even have the slightest clue of what services they should even be putting on the blockchain. We've all seen them mash the square peg into the round hole of blockchain and call it an "innovative dapp". Most of the services provided would be far more efficient on a centralized database. The formulas for what does and doesn't belong on a blockchain hasn't even come close to being flushed out yet. Developers seem to be much more concerned with capturing value than they are about creating it, and I believe this is the crux of the problem when transitioning to this new cooperative open-source economy.

Conclusion

Steem was originally marketed as a place you could go to make easy money. This is obviously not the reality. People don't like being lied to. Going forward we should be a bit more careful about how we choose to market this place. Perhaps we should be a little less focused on that mythical "killer dapp" that doesn't exist yet and look more to the parts of this network that we can change ourselves for the better.

Yeah, we've got a long way to go, but we're still lightyears ahead of the rest of the world. Sometimes packaging what we have into a sparkly box is all we need to get that fabled "mainstream adoption". However, we should be careful what we wish for, as the next bull run will make it painfully obvious how ill equipped we really are to deal with all that volume we claim to desire so badly.

Perhaps what we really need is time. Maybe the real answer is to just wait around for the current fetid economy to implode in on itself under the weight of its own corruption. New life always springs forth from the ashes of inferno.

Posted via Steemleo