Confusion For Fun and Profit: How elite are Diesel brand jeans? So elite you must struggle to buy them. This remarkable article at the NY Times (you'll have to register to read the whole thing - you can give fake info, it doesn't check) explains how whereas most stores are designed to make the purchase process as easy and obvious as possible, Diesel has taken the exact opposite approach.

To the uninitiated, walking into the Diesel jeans store on Union Square West feels a lot like stumbling into a rave. Techno music pounds at a mind-rattling level. A television plays a videotape of a Japanese boxing match, inexplicably. There are no helpful signs pointing to men's or women's departments, and no obvious staff members in sight...

Diesel stores are so confusing that it begs a question: Are they the worst run stores in America, or is something sneaky going on?

The answer: something sneaky. Diesel jeans cost $115 to $210 a pair, and 60 percent of the company's customers are young men, many taking their first anxious steps out of the comfortable but anonymous world of chinos and into the hipper (and more tight-fitting) realm of haute denim.

Allow me to pause to observe that there is a reason super-tight, designer jeans went out of style around 1979. It is because they were so abominable they nearly destroyed western civilization. But I digress. Here's the meat.

While large clothing retailers like Banana Republic and Gap have standardized and simplified the layout of their stores in an effort to put customers at ease, Diesel's approach is based on the unconventional premise that the best customer is a disoriented one.

"We're conscious of the fact that, outwardly, we have an intimidating environment," said Niall Maher, Diesel's director of retail operations. "We didn't design our stores to be user-friendly because we want you to interact with our people. You can't understand Diesel without talking to someone."

Indeed, it is at just the moment when a potential Diesel customer reaches a kind of shopping vertigo that members of the company's intimidatingly with-it staff make their move. Acting as salesmen-in-shining-armor, they rescue - or prey upon, depending on one's point of view - wayward shoppers. Sales personnel, who have been given a five-day course in denim, walk helpless shoppers through a maze of textile-industry terms like warp and weft, as well as Diesel's own confounding lexicon of styles and washes.

Now I appreciate style as much as, no, more than the next man. But it is remarkable to me that this strategy succeeds. I can understand designing promotion and sales process so that the potential customer has to interact with a knowledgeable salesman. I can speak from experience that this absolutely necessary for complicated products like enterprise level software or maybe single barrel bourbon, but these are blue jeans, for pete's sake. They have a certain specific look to them, just like, say, the Jordache look (no age jokes please), but they are made of mere denim and, no doubt, cut and sewn in third world sweat shops just like all clothes. Here's more.

When Mr. Miranda [a Diesel salesdude] spots a wayward-looking shopper, he said, he uses a deceptively soft pitch. "I try to be their shopping friend," he said.

While customers are basking in the sense of relief at being rescued, Mr. Miranda is actually engaging in a bit of psychographic profiling, trying to glean whatever information he can about them from their clothing, attitude and friends. Based on his assessment, he then recommends a number of styles he hopes will suit the customer.

On a recent Saturday, Mr. Miranda demonstrated his technique on a man wandering toward the denim bar. The man was obviously lost, and was accompanied by an attractive woman, who was significantly taller - and blonder - than he.

"He's a regular guy with a really hot girlfriend," Mr. Miranda said. "That pushes him in a certain direction. She's going to have a say. It's going to be something with a little machismo to it."

Mr. Miranda pulled his "shopping friend" bit. Moments later, the regular guy was turning circles before the mirror in a $125 pair of jeans.

"He wanted the men's bell-bottom, the Ravix," Mr. Miranda said, with a thumb's up. "I like that."

First, if this guy is that good, why isn't he profiling serial killers for the FBI? No employee discount at the FBI, I suppose.

Second, a "denim bar"? Does that make him a denim bartender? A horse walks into a denim bar. Bartender says, "Why the long face?" Horse says, "My philly just dumped me." Bartender says, "Wear these and you'll be a stud." Horse buys $500 worth of jeans. Or something like that.

Third, Bell-bottoms? Why, oh why, did those have to come back? So now we have a combination of the worst of the 60s and the 70s. That's marketing for you. And by the way, since when do bell-bottoms have "machismo"?

Douglas Rushkoff, a media critic who has written about Diesel advertising campaigns, said the company's store design is a new take on an old trick. In the 1950's, the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen realized that when shoppers were distracted by confusing mall layouts and grandiose visual stimuli, they seemed more prone to impulse buying.

"They realized the best way to get people to buy stuff is not to facilitate their shopping but to disorient them," Mr. Rushkoff said. "Diesel shoppers say, `I'm not hip enough to get this,' and then in comes the hip salesperson. What makes them hip is that they know how to navigate the space."

This is getting more absurd by the minute. Why not just put a Tilt-a-Whirl in every store? That'll disorient 'em right and proper. And really, if I ever have trouble "navigating the space" of a jeans store, just give me a Mickey Mouse backpack and put me on the short bus.

Seriously, I don't begrudge Diesel any of their success. The whole purpose of a product is to satisfy some need or want. If you satisfy a big enough audience you get rich. That's fair - and it requires a good amount of talent, perseverance, and creativity to do so in retail. So on the one hand, my hat's off to Diesel.

On the other hand, if salesmanship is key, why sell 'em on the web (here and here, for example)? Lastly,

After all, selling jeans, Mr. Miranda said, "all comes down to how a person wants to feel in their pants."

I'm guessing Mr. Miranda bears a strong resemblance to Austin Powers. Yeah, baby.