Coming down main street one day I noticed a large new advertisement at the
end of town.
A four by eight piece of plywood had been erected, a poorly made sign which
(using the biggest block letters possible) said only:
BEER
It was the single thing that was fully visible from one end of town to the other.
Anybody coming through Sugar Loaf for the first time would be distracted from seeing
the solid hard fought artisan businesses by the desperate last throws of this
failure in progress.
Fortunately there is a sign law which disallows such a sign due to size and
location, but the law was never invoked because the business was already gone
before the removal process could begin.
Therefore that sign became just another example of a fully published Sugar
Loaf failure.
The business that put the sign up was in a group of buildings built on speculation.
There were significant problems with the lot, so those buildings cost seven million dollars to construct and were a wager based on a full blown misunderstanding of
what business is like in Sugar Loaf: what works and what does not.
In order to pay for their poorly thought out construction costs and
overhead, the developers were working overtime to attract a steady line of
hopeful merchants
who would be guaranteed
a failure but turned over quickly enough to pay for the next accounting period.
Those of us who watched it happening were not surprised.
The developer had been quoted in one newspaper article as having said, "...at
first I thought Sugar Loaf was just a run down tobacco row. Then I noticed all the high-end
expensive cars parked outside the shops."
Of course that developer did not have a clue why those cars were parked here,
nor what the owners of those cars were coming into Sugar Loaf to find and carry off
as quickly as possible, as if they had just stolen gold bars.
In case you are wondering, the owners of those very expensive high-end cars
are coming into Sugar Loaf to find similar high-end goods made by top level artisans who
are committed to producing their own work of the highest order—in the pure light
of day within plain view of anyone who chooses to watch.
And there are many who do choose to watch.
That is to say, a great deal of money comes into this town because there are
things to buy here that you can watch being made and that you cannot find
anywhere else in the world.
Mentioning only three providers, we have:
The Candle Shop (our anchor store),
Clay Boone Woodcarver
(second generation professional woodcarving), and
also
Endico Watercolor Originals
(museum quality only begins to describe).
All provide top quality artisan products that they make here, sell here,
and that they have perennially been handed success for doing so here...not just newly successful, nor
sometimes successful, nor hoped for successful, but routinely, consistently, and very
successful.
In fact, these businesses are so strong that a number of ancillary businesses
(whether they know it or not) exist only by virtue of the presence of these
types of artisan shops.
Additionally these and other top artisan shops represent the only type of commerce that
is an almost guaranteed long term success in Sugar Loaf.
The ones just mentioned have been here for 45, 46 and 37 years respectively.
They represent the hey day and the to day.
If you recently opened a business in the hamlet and do not know that today is the hey day in Sugar Loaf, you need to quit listening to people who also do not know
this: things are neither as bad now as you may have heard, nor were they ever as good as you
may have heard.
Great businesses take a great effort...always have, and always will.
Hand made, one of a kind, locally produced items, are what has gained and
maintained Sugar Loaf's substantial reputation in the arts, and that has been done despite a continual
sideshow of temporal diversions implying the contrary.
The Sugar Loaf Four Step
The people who felt the need to erect that giant slipshod BEER sign were
only following the long standing tradition of the Sugar Loaf Four Step Process.
The process begins after somebody comes to town with a foggy notion of what
they want to do.
First:
1) they blame their location
2) then they blame there signage
3) finally they blame the rest of us
4) then they are gone
This has been my long suffering observation and is my own terminology, so you have
not heard it before.
You also have not heard what I call all the banners, flags, and whirly-gig
eye-catchers those people always resort to using.
They are: Signs of Desperation.
Always an indication of a four step in progress.
On the other hand a successful business in Sugar Loaf is as
elusive as the air you breathe.
Even people who have lived here for a long time may not be aware of
which businesses are making it.
Sounds absurd, but how long did people walk through the air breathing
it moment by moment before they tried to understand
what it is?
Turns out coincidentally that a very similar process to the one which delayed people
finding out about air has slowed people understanding what works (and what never
has worked) in Sugar Loaf.
The defining of air was delayed for about a hundred years, because the people who
should have been looking at it were alchemists distracted by something else.
They were wasting time trying to figure out how to change lead into gold.
Same thing in Sugar Loaf: a steady flow of new shop owners (who never take the
time to find out what is here and why it works) routinely take over town
advertising and continue promoting the hamlet as if it were just another retail mall, with
cheaper rents.
The result is that the last twenty-five years have been rife with group
advertising which totally ignores the successful businesses.
It is advertising that has been directed by individuals
unlikely to be here for the next accounting cycle and who are replaced in turn
by the next round of the clueless.
Being missed in the promotional hubbub has never bothered the true businesses because
they know the old saw: "If it worked they wouldn't have to advertise it."
And the artisan businesses work.
Well, ok, they also do there own brand of advertising, but they will likely point
you to the door if you ask them to join another group.
Or they might set the high-bar for a traveling ad-space salesperson by
offering, "Of course
I'm interested in advertising in your publication. Just do a cover story on me first,
so we can see if it is any good."
In addition to the steady flow turnover, there are other people who are also not
artisans but have lived and worked in Sugar Loaf for
years without the slightest understanding of what is around them.
But you, dear reader, will not have to guess what it is about Sugar Loaf that they
are missing, because I am going to
give you
the truth right now.
At the very core of Sugar Loaf are the successful full-time working artisans
who have built stellar reputations with incomes to match.
The way this is done is so uniquely different from the way things are done in
the rest of the world, it is possible these businesses can be sitting right under your nose and you
not catch a
whiff.
Let's take a quick sniff.
Not a week goes by that somebody does not come into the Endico studio and
assume all the work on display is done by numerous artists, not merely the output
of a solo,
prolific, internationally successful
master of watercolor,
and that the artist is standing right there in front of them.
Uncommon access.
Now take a look at the candle shop on
the home page and ponder how many people come into
it thinking, "Wonder
where they buy all these candles."
Sometimes the most visible is the hardest to see.
Drop by
Boone Woodcarver
and go through his flipbook photos sitting by
the front door and try to imagine what it took to generate that kind of output.
Only the
smallest part of that output is shown on pages
here, so go to Clay's shop and look at the photos closely.
Study them until, just like one of those poster images that jumps out of
the chaos when you relax your eyes, you will realize you have been among Boone
signs your entire life: they are everywhere.
Boone Woodcarving flipbooks
Do you really think that Clay Boone has the slightest interest in hearing about
your new scheme to promote his town if it has nothing...
Let me back that up a little.
Do you really think that Clay Boone has the slightest interest in hearing
about your new scheme to promote his town if it does not
have everything to do with attracting more of the finest artisan work to be done
here by a newly resident craftsperson hoping to become
the next rarely advertised Sugar Loaf artist supershop?
Regarding Illegal
Faux-Historic Signage
To be clear, the Sugar Loaf supershops have not become part
of a vast hidden successful commercial
underground on purpose.
They do not mind if you hear about them (from maybe somebody like me), but
a major block to anybody trying to highlight what uniquely exists in Sugar Loaf stems from the semantic problem.
It is a matter of definitions.
That is to say lots of towns like to call themselves craft villages or artist
enclaves, but they have not a single artisan living, working, and thriving in
them.
Those places are just fancy (or funky) import retail stores by another name.
Sugar Loaf is different, profoundly different, but breaking through
preconception to reveal that fact is difficult.
I know because years ago I personally had a run-in with a head of Orange
County Tourism who was taking steps to lay waste to our sign laws.
They refused to listen to even their superior at the state level who
contradicted what they were saying was the state's position on trashing
local sign
regulations.
I guess they assumed I would not check to make sure their signage program
actually was award winning.
Plus they had no understanding that I was fully involved in producing
Sugar Loaf's promotional presence long before they themselves got into
what they were calling, "...eighteen years in the
tourism game."
During my years involved with Sugar Loaf community promotions, we
were number two in bringing people into the County, just slightly behind West
Point.
Sadly the assumption of the head of Orange County Tourism was that I could
not possibly
understand what it took to promote a destination.
Nonsense: my life was a destination.
The County's efforts toward encouraging tourism to Sugar Loaf has always been pitiful,
because they would have to understand what it is they are promoting in order to do
so effectively.
Fortunately Sugar Loaf does just fine without them, or rather despite them
in such instances as when the County proactively tried to lay waste to our
local sign laws.
Why the County believed it appropriate to use illegal signage to promote
a
pet project, well, it was as much a mystery to the rest of the world as it was
to me.
The start-up business they were supporting stuttered, sputtered, and failed.
The destination the County was promoting was Lycian Centre.
I know you are thinking I have misspelled 'Lyceum' (an actually venerable old name in
theaters and gathering places) and 'Center', but I have not.
The County promoted Lycian in part by using illegal off-site signage (faux
historic signage at that), and their actions put our sign
law in jeopardy.
BEER anyone?
Lycian was never more than a start-up with no track record, regardless of it
being heralded (right out of the gate) as a massively significant cultural
attraction—an idea supported in no small
part by the erection of illegal faux national-forest type markers off-site.
Lycian went predictably bust, and those who took over the facility
afterwards made it clear they had no interest in being associated with the
past.
Happily those of us in Sugar Loaf who own artisan businesses do know
what we are promoting.
Therefore the County's overstatement of Lycian's importance had no impact
on us during its brief existence, and did not serve
to destroy the rest us along with the Centre when it finally failed.
Once again the local artisans were left scratching their heads.
However, the big problem remains.
It is hard to describe Sugar Loaf, because there is nothing to compare it against.
That is as true today as it was the day I got here in 1977.
The term Crafts Village is universally misrepresented.
It is a term used to refer to almost anyplace—especially by tourism boards.
Therefore when you actually live in a true Crafts Village, it is hard
to describe.
People have never seen one.
Of course they have often been told they are
looking at a real deal artisan community, but what they are looking at does not even come
close.
Just like those
faux hand-dipped candles I once found in North Carolina that didn't come close
to being hand-dipped.
The result of this confusion of terms has been that the situation in Sugar Loaf is nearly impossible to
communicate, but
it has been done.