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Because fashion trends come and go so quickly, women want to have over-the-top luxury accessories for special occasions without suffering buyer’s remorse or over-cluttered closets, [chief marketing officer Jodi] Watson says. Once customers have finished with their fashion statements, they can exchange them for the next things on their lists for a monthly fee, à la Netflix.

Women also use the company as a way to try the items out before sinking a few grand on the newest Gucci. The “steal” option in the company’s title allows customers to purchase any accessories, sometimes at discounted rates, depending on the make and condition of the item.

So it's a business that doesn't promote consumption, but in a way restrains it: instead of buying wardrobes with quick expire dates, you rent and return them. Sort of high-end fashion recycling.

So who rents this stuff? "Transumers." No, these aren't spendy trans-sexuals or transvestites, they're "people who want to experience luxury without the hassle of ownership."

As indicated in the definition above, the rise of FREE LOVE* can be attributed to:






• An all-out war for consumers' attention (make that saturated consumers), including various handout and sampling techniques.


• The online world, with its amazing capacity to create, copy and distribute anything that's digital, with costs that are close to zero, forcing producers to come up with new business models/services, which are often purely ad-driven.


• The ever-decreasing cost of physical production makes it easier to offer more (nearly) free goods in the offline world too. In fact, many goods have actually become insanely cheap. Just one example: the price of televisions has fallen, on average, by 9 percent each year since 1998, according to U.S. Dept. of Labor data.


• The avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C.


• C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, making transactions cash-neutral.


• An emerging recycling culture.


• And all of the above fueling consumers' expectations to get online and offline stuff for free.

Student textbooks • U.S.-based Freeload Press provides free college textbooks in electronic form with advertisements inserted at chapter breaks. Inexpensive print-on-demand versions with no ads can be ordered for about USD 30. 'Customers' include students at four-year and two-year colleges throughout the U.S. and Canada. Freeload publishes primarily business and finance books. Students who register and complete a survey on Freeload's website can download a free PDF version of their textbook. Advertisers include Discover Card, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the College Loan Corporation.

In Europe, Danish Ventus Publishing runs a similar concept in 5 countries: (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium). Ventus offers titles in the fields of economics, science and engineering, featuring ads from companies such as T-Mobile, British Airways and Deutsche Bank every four pages.

If giving is the new taking, then hundreds of thousands consumers/individuals are on the right path. Never before have we witnessed such an explosion of free content, courtesy of individuals who—for free, nada, zilch—are happy to share their thinking, their novels, their photos, their movies, their music, their knowledge and expertise, their advice, their crafts and more.

Call it GENERATION C, the HOBBY ECONOMY, the GIFT ECONOMY or CROWD MINING, as long as you don't forget that besides undeniable passion, this user-generated FREE LOVE provides participants with visibility, with respect, with status. Even if they participate anonymously (Wikipedia is a good example), it gives them bragging rights among other GENERATION C members.

Now, we’ve written and spoken about participation vs consumption so often that we won’t repeat the whole spiel, but two more thoughts:



Firstly, nothing indicates that user-generated content, both of the paid and the free kind, and in all its variety, is not here to stay.

Secondly, if many consumers are now producers too, and if they mostly produce for free, will they not expect a similar sharing and loving attitude from corporations? So as a brand, not only may you find yourself competing directly with individuals doing what you do for free, but you will also be confronted with growing expectations for your brand to be giving rather than just taking.