What People Hear When You Say “1 Percent”
A song, the early internet, and the people we wanted to reach.
Some people thought 1 Percent had something to do with a biker gang. During Occupy Wall Street, they thought it was about rich people. We’ve heard it all.
We named the company after a Jane’s Addiction song. That usually requires a little more explanation.
The business started by accident in 1995 under a different name. We became 1 Percent in 1997 during the Jane’s Addiction Relapse tour. We were looking for a brand name. Perry Farrell’s lyrics on “1%” spoke to us. Somewhere out there were enough people who cared about good music. To reach them, the internet seemed like the way.
It was an idealistic time. Perhaps music no longer needed a major label to reach an audience. We would see.
Indie music was our first passion, and we saw a path to support it. How could we reach the fans who bought the music and merch, and the tickets to shows? The internet allowed us that direct connection, and “Lifestyle Accessories” laser focused our audience.
That was our 1%.
There was also a practical benefit in the name. In the early days of the internet, in directories like Yahoo and AltaVista, a name beginning with 1 could put you near the top of the list in your category. We didn’t choose 1 Percent for the sort order, but it was a nice bonus.
The street team
We assembled a street team to promote independent music. At its peak, it reached 17,000 members. In those early internet days, that was an army.
By the early 2000s, it felt like the entire system was in turmoil. Our focus shifted toward prison reform, cannabis decriminalization, and environmental causes. We even rewarded effective participation. Think Marlboro Miles, but of course we called them Tokes.
We flooded congressional phone systems and got the attention of publications. More than once, we got a call acknowledging the point and asking us to make the calls stop. This was before automated phone attendants routinely sent us straight to voicemail. Real people calling and emailing real people got results.
Later, 1% for the Planet put the number to work for environmental causes too. We were a little perturbed by the name confusion. Their social handle even matched one of our domains, 1PercentFTP.com.
Getting 1% better every day
The name stayed with us. What people imagined it meant kept changing over the decades. These days, there’s James Clear’s approach to getting one percent better each day and Steven Bartlett’s one percent mindset, complete with The 1% Diary. Small improvements that add up over time.
Improve by one percent every day for a year and the calculation gives you about 37.78 times what you started with: 1.01 raised to the power of 365.
The arithmetic works. The difficulty is deciding what, exactly, is being multiplied. A bank balance has a unit. Being better at life is hard to show in a spreadsheet. Skills have limits, circumstances change, and progress has a habit of backsliding.
Ecommerce was our wheelhouse for 30 years. We know small improvements matter. At 100,000 monthly visits, a 1% relative improvement in a 3.5% conversion rate means 35 additional orders. Whether that improvement lasts and pays for itself is the useful question.
A process can become more efficient without becoming more worthwhile. Before spending six months improving a workflow, it helps to ask whether anyone still needs it. Sometimes the valuable change is to stop doing something.
Running a business means dealing with plenty you didn’t choose. Nothing lasts forever. You roll with the punches.
The name we kept
We didn’t invent the 1% philosophy. We named a company after a song whose words meant something to us, at a time when the internet seemed ready to make things possible that hadn’t been possible before.
Since then, we’ve heard plenty of explanations for the name. Some have very little to do with us. Others contain ideas worth using. We can appreciate those without rewriting our own beginning to make it sound like a business framework.
We wanted to reach people who cared about independent music. Later, we asked them to put that energy toward causes we cared about. As participation became clicking a heart and every cause had a “take action” page, we couldn’t get the same response. We became more of a retailer, focused on American-made goods and the work of artists.
That was our 1%. Thirty years was a good run.