I got a flyer in the mail the other day. Nice photo of a young man, a shiny fellow, or at least recently exfoliated, with the tag line “Crafting Bespoke Experiences.” Naturally, I was all a-twitter.

I flipped it over. I suppose I should not be surprised he turned out to be a realtor. If you’re branding yourself as a crafter of bespoke experiences, you could be doing dang near any obscure thing. As a letter carrier, I could have marketed myself as a purveyor of hand-curated postal dispatch. Probably couldn’t have gotten away with “bespoke” because–spoiler alert here–a lot of that crap that lands in your mailbox actually went to everybody.
I was in my forties before I heard anyone say “bespoke” and I strongly suspected it wasn’t really a word. It’s not a great word, in my opinion. You can’t slide it into a sentence without it sounding like the wrench that got left inside the engine. But it has earned a vintage quality, having first been used in its current meaning in the 16th century, and it has strutted Britishly about mainly in the field of tailoring until recently, when it got discovered by Marketing, and now it is used willy-nilly to mark the user as a precious sod.
“Bespoke” primarily and historically describes tailor-made suits and shoes. If an item was bespoke, it was spoken for; it was ordered, or commissioned. Another word for it, in this country, is “custom.” By golly, if you got something bespoke, it was not off-the-rack. It was made for you. Just for you! So our realtor friend is promising to give you an experience not meant for anyone else. Something he has fashioned for you and you alone.
That means he’s not going to sell you just any old house on the block. He’s going to sell you the one you want. Maybe you even specified you wanted one with an eat-in country kitchen and a big yard and he didn’t even bother showing you the kitchenette on the postage-stamp lot–that’s how bespoke the experience he is crafting for you is. And if you’re the seller, it’s your house he’s going to represent. Not your neighbor’s crappy old place. Yours.
You want that kind of mindfulness in a realtor.
It’s possible I am being too snide, or even cultivating snideness. For all I know, this realtor indeed excels in facilitating artisanal transactions. It’s possible his is a heart-centered mission that supports homefulness. He may even empower his clients’ self-empowerment. If he really can create an ideal customer journey map, I think I speak for all of us in saying I can honor that.
And in any case I shouldn’t judge. Here at Murrmurrs we are a bootstrapped enterprise of ideation and snackable content inputting. I’m mindful of that.
On the other hand, if he’s just signaling he’s gay, that’s not going to make him stand out in real estate.