Untouched World

I just went shopping for three days in New Zealand. I was hoping that traveling halfway across the planet would bring me new ideas and thrill me with innovation. Well, the farther you travel, the more things stay the same.

The last thing you see, leaving the Los Angeles airport, is The Gap. Then, after you travel 11 hours (a trip that took three weeks in 1945 and three years when Darwin did it), you get off the 747 in Auckland, and the first thing that blinds you is The Gap.

It's a bit late to start announcing the sameness of global marketing is turning the planet into a visual prune. But it's not too late to lament it.

I saw Starbucks in Auckland, and Marriott, and an immense McDonald's. A 100-screen multiplex was showing Mission Impossible II. When I went out to buy a book, I chose a picturesque, old independent bookstore. Within two minutes, the owner took me outside and pointed me to a Borders bookstore.

I went to shopping centers and saw a universal blizzard of big red “SALE” signs, all with percentages-off that no one believed. I saw a Kmart without Martha Stewart. (Remember that?) And I saw, once again, an excellent Target.

Then, driving through a commercial suburb of Christchurch, I suddenly came to a store so original, so thoroughly composed, and so exhilaratingly excellent that the idea search suddenly worked. The store is called Untouched World.

What a store — and more! Untouched World is a store, a factory, a wholesaler and exporter, a clothing company, making and selling fine New Zealand designs. And it's an eatery and watering hole.

It's also a catalog showing real young people out in the Gap-free wonders of the South Island mountains and fjords. The “models” — customers and family and friends — are believable and beautiful.

The store itself creates an untouched freshness. You enter the corrugated iron building through “the volcano,” a round entrance hall with an open top, lined with concrete, stones, rushes and a corridor leading to the main room of the store.

The store represents the best of an untouched world — fine scenery, “green” attitude, reverence for nature, truth in fabrics and colors, and glorious photographs of healthy young people wearing good clothes suitable for New Zealand's outback. Bingo. Local. Unique. Innovative. Finally. I relaxed after two days of the growing tension caused by the disappointment of global retail sameness.

Tall reeds separate the clothing floor from the bar and restaurant. The fireplace under the giant Maori kite that inspired the logo (once seen, not forgotten) is a long, long, multi-flamed gas, and customers sit around it in the dining room, where the food is as original as the rest of the place, and the waiters make you laugh. The bar is a big pile of rocks contained in a cyclone-fence net, and everything else you look at, you look at twice, because it has been thought about more than three times. Outside the dining room is a garden and waterfall, which owner-designer Peri Drysdale calls a “bush garden.”

I met Peri fretting over a mirror — a tilted twig affair that I had admired five minutes earlier. “I hate it,” she said. “It's the thing I hate most in the whole place.” During introductions, she turned to me and said, “What should I do about this horrible mirror?” I suggested we have a nice cup of tea beyond the hedge, and four of us sat down. By the time I had spoken for about a minute, I realized that she had written down every word I had uttered. You know a confident executive when she asks a total stranger for opinions.

The conversation rolled, with just enough friends and just enough strangers at the table to make fireworks. By the time the cappuccino arrived we were all enjoying that encounter and spontaneous creative conversation (my greatest pleasure).

Just as we were admiring the logo and the catalog and the lunch, Gavin, the catalog photographer, and his wife joined our table. The conversation expanded by two. A Renaissance man, Gavin was videographer of the Untouched World company video, a skilled pilot who runs a glider school and a skilled climber who ran the Mt. Cook, N.Z., climbing school. He believes, I was told, that anything can be conquered through hard work, courage and skill.

He was being tested.

Within moments, Gavin announced to the table — friends and strangers — that his daughter, Lucy, this 22-year-old girl on the cover of the catalog, learned this morning, without warning, that she had cancer, advanced.

It wasn't an untouched world. This remarkable moment turned this island in the Southern Hemisphere briefly upside down, so day was night again. The conversation paused.

But it also resumed. A moment later, when the lights came back on and the hemisphere righted itself, this table, half strangers, began again. The table that, three minutes before, had been filled with upbeat conversation was still the same table, and the same people were sitting there. They had been optimistic before, and so they were now, offering the kindest words, and moving along, acknowledging and moving on.

In the face of bad news, we react just as we do to any news: with optimism or pessimism, predominantly. This was a fortunate table for such a sad announcement, which needed to be made, because the folks having lunch were already in the habit of finding out what is good in any situation. They had just been handed a hard one. Like life.

This is where I got my thrills in a store in New Zealand.

This is how work and life collide.

Peter's current activities include presentations to News America Marketing and Spencer Gifts. A videotape of Peter's inspiring keynote address to R.A.C. 2000, entitled “It's About Time!,” can be ordered from the Retail Advertising & Marketing Association (RAMA). Phone: 312-251-7262; fax: 312-251-7269; Internet: www.ramarac.org. Comments? Peter can be reached by e-mail at jasminehill@thegrid.net.