A Side of Decor

"I think what it was was that one person had a bunch of crap on their walls and it was successful and everybody followed. Who the hell knows?" he said. "When I go to Chili's, it's not because of the southwestern decor."

Susan Sontag nailed the idea of camp in the 1960s, labeling it as "failed seriousness," but no one has yet put a finger on the failed joviality of the retail age -- and its air of enforced cheer, sentimental prefab and the replication of nostalgia.

Nevertheless, it's a profitable formula, but one that needs to be served to a new generation, whose retro tastes run more Atari than Great Depression.

And so T.G.I. Friday's undertook in 2002 a corporate-mandated makeover, a $200 million process that continues to this day -- location by location, exit ramp to exit ramp -- until all 531 of its U.S. restaurants will get the "new" look: a slightly less-cluttered update with pop-culture touchstones that evoke the mid-1960s to mid-1990s. That means skateboards, bicycles, classic rock and new-wave album covers, surfboards, disco balls.

Which is where Michelle Edwards comes in.

Based in Nashville, Edwards, 39, is Friday's principal supplier of decor. She's been with the company for 13 years, part of the old guard of collectors -- a group of treasure hunters hired to fan out to various garage sales and flea markets in Tennessee in search of antiques and other quaint clutter to send to wherever a new Friday's was about to open.

When the corporate office decided to switch looks, most of Edwards's old-guard collectors "didn't see it as doable," she said, because "when we went to this newer look, it was harder to find because it wasn't surfacing in the flea markets."

She persisted on her own, and eBay and other Internet sites amply provided most of the ephemera that Friday's needs. She estimates about a quarter of the company's restaurants have been redecorated so far. To meet demand, she constantly acquires album covers, road signs, Boba Fett helmets, Gumby dolls, vintage Levi's signs and more. She ships three to four completed assemblages of decor a week to be included in a new-look Friday's.

So voracious is Friday's need for retro junk that Edwards had to devise a bar code inventory system to keep track of it all. Working online, she found just the right kind of Internet kitsch mercenaries and manufacturers to join her army:

She has a woman in Maryland who sells her skateboards, a guy in California who manufactures surfboards, a guy in Tennessee who sends her propellers . She gushes about a Web site forum for BMX bike enthusiasts that drew compliments for the bikes Edwards had chosen for display at some of the restaurants.

She thinks that more people can identify with the new look, as few recognize or are interested in "old-timey" items.

"We've tested a lot of focus groups and they're they've reacted very well to [the new] design," she said. The items "were always designed to be conversation pieces, but people couldn't recognize them anymore."