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Want to know why online-only retailers won't outsell their bricks-and-clicks competitors anytime soon? The answer is...brown.
Brown was once a color of clothing. Not anymore. The other day, I was looking at a newspaper ad for hiking shorts. One label offered them in fossil, tierra, and baltic. Not having the slightest clue what any of these colors was, I went to paragonsports.com, the outdoor gear retailer's Web site to see these colors in color.
There that I discovered that fossil, tierra, and baltic all appeared, on my computer screen at least, to be...brown. Now, I understand tierra is "earth" or "land" in Spanish. Fossil is tougher, but I guess I get it. Baltic, however, baffled me. My dictionary, which is red, had only one citation for baltic, and that was the Baltic Sea. This, I am sure you remember, is a body of water in Northern Europe bordered in part by Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. It's true that each of these countries is, to some degree, brown. Especially in early spring. But the Baltic Sea?
I looked it up on britannica.com. I learned that the Baltic is the largest expanse of brackish water in the world. But nothing suggested that it was any color other than standard ocean blue. I even checked with a colleague who traveled to the Baltic recently. He assured me that it is indeed not brown. So I called the maker of the baltic shorts, Columbia Sportswear Co., to ask about this. And I discovered that -- land ho -- baltic is blue after all. Not bluish-brown, but true blue, insists Sean Beers, the company's director of investor relations.
Why do they call it baltic instead of blue, I asked. Marketing, Beers replied. "It's the 'what are you going to call Navy blue this year' problem,'" he says.
Except it sure doesn't like like blue on Paragon Sports' Web site. It's deep, chocolate brown. You might say, "swamp." Or is it my monitor that's murky?
Now, this seems like an awful lot of trouble for a pair of shorts. Of course, had I gone to Paragon's store in the first place, I would never have learned so much about the Baltic Sea (perhaps I'll visit now). On the other hand, I would have had my shorts already.
The lesson here is simple: I still want to see and touch a product before I buy it. Web sites are pretty good for selling books and airplane tickets. But they don't do feel. They barely do sound. And colors....well, colors need to be really seen. As Columbia's Beers says, "The Internet is a lot more problematic than people thought."
So, next weekend (after I'm done surfing the Net), I think I'll wander by a sporting-goods store and pick up a pair of brown hiking shorts.
Gleckman, senior correspondent for Business Week, offers his views on Mondays (usually on political matters), only for BW Online EDITED BY DOUGLAS HARBRECHT
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