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Playing dress-up
May is a month of transitions here at Business Monthly.
This month, AmCham, our publisher, will relocate from its various
offices to a new building in Mohandiseen. Later this month, AmCham
will choose a new president and board of governors. Just to complicate
things, we’ve decided now is also the time to launch our redesigned
magazine.
What you have here is a Business Monthly with a decidedly different
sense of style. If you like what you see, you have Art Director
Ann Friend to thank. If you don’t, you have me to blame. Either
way, we hope you’ll appreciate our efforts to keep things interesting.
Many of the changes you’ll find inside have a very clear purpose.
This is the most efficient magazine we’ve ever published, a
result our design choices have produced and, where necessary, relieved.
Many of the choices we’ve made, how-ever, reflect only our
tastes. Less grounded in necessity, perhaps, but no less urgent.
It’s easy when plunging into our spread-sheets to forget about
appearances until it’s too late, but to do so is a terrible
mistake. Aesthetics are critical not just for one’s quality
of life, but also for one’s volume of sales. Think about the
most popular products of the last few decades and why they were
successful. Take Euro-pean and Japanese cars. Was it superior engineering,
better gas mileage, that en-abled them to pound U.S. models in the
market? Of course not. The victory was all about bucket seats and
stick shifts and a population that wanted to feel young.
Now, there are a few computerized con-sumers out there who grind
through the facts until they arrive at a choice that best balances
the costs and benefits under consideration. But the rest of us decide
in an instant what looks best, buy the thing and then make up a
reason for doing so.
The point here, 48 lines into the lead, is that if Egypt wants to
sell its products abroad – or even at home – it had better
start paying more attention to how they look. Italy, working off
a base of small businesses, turned itself into one of the world’s
Top 10 exporters by selling one thing: style. Egypt, with its fantastic,
historical wealth of world-class design, could find success with
a similar strategy. That is, it could if more business people would
emulate the few out there who real-ize the value of Egypt’s
aesthetic heritage.
The point becomes more urgent be-cause Egypt’s import bill
is rising at just the time its main sources of foreign ex-change
earnings are stagnant or falling. The gap will have to be filled
by exports. Unfortunately, Egypt’s export prospects aren’t
great. Few manufacturers are producing on a global scale, and innovation
is weak. Good design could give Egyp-tian products the competitive
edge they desperately need. And it would be a lot more fun to crow
about how good our products looked than how little we paid the labor
that made them.
The statist governments of Egypt’s past have committed a number
of crimes, both political and economic. But we must add, right near
the top, the uglification of Egypt, the dulling of an advanced aesthetic.
Egypt has done a lot better job shaking off socialist economics
than it has cutting through the bonds of socialist style. With a
little effort, life here could be a lot more pleasant – and
for about the same price as being drab. We hope we’ve managed
this month to push things forward a bit. If not, there’s always
June.
ANDREW DOWELL
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