A Personal Recollection

Remo was a large store on a corner block on Oxford Street. I passed it most days, on the bus between university at Broadway and my home in Bondi Junction. Apart from merchandise, they also had a café. We frequently stopped there for coffee, it was a convenient spot to meet friends, the coffee was good, and if you were alone, you could just sit and watch all the people walking by on Oxford Street.

But it was the store itself that was the main attraction. Almost everything Remo sold was appealing. It wasn’t like a department store, crowded with multiple choices for each object. Remo generally just had one choice, but it was always a beautifully styled or practical choice. And there was always a sign to explain why the object had been selected for the store. You could buy a set of Splayds, but not a full range of cutlery. You could buy Cuisenaire rods, but not other maths teaching aids. If I wanted a gift for someone, I could always find something I knew they’d love in Remo.

It must be around 30 years since the store front closed, but I still use some of the things I bought from there in my home. A set of cheap Chinese hand towels are one – they’re getting rather thin, but I still prefer them to other, thicker, hand towels. Mine are faded now, and no longer have the ‘good morning’ printed in red on the border, but I keep using them. The other item that springs to mind is my ‘Loved’ apron. Not ‘loved’ the past tense, as in ‘I was loved once’, but current tense, as in ‘I am loved’. They don’t seem to sell aprons anymore, but I found the Loved design on a T-shirt at their online store.

- Toriaz

I’m an American writing about a beloved Sydney-based company for a Sydney-based website. God help me.

In my defence, Kickstarter does not gatekeep. If you visit Kicksta⁠⁠rter with the intent to aimlessly peruse the creative endeavours people are attempting to fund the production of, you will be presented with a variety of projects that may appeal to your tastes, regardless of who created them or where in the world they are located. It’s the internet, after all, and that can be half the fun.

So it was with REMOЯANDOM. I saw the promise of a series of handsome-looking books filled with pages of miscellany—an assortment of items, events, and ideas that, at best, were so foundational in everyday life that there was no consideration how such things came to be; or, at worst, were concepts completely foreign to me but interesting enough in their own right. The conceit was simple: I would read, and I would learn.

... In other words, it’s a book of trivia. Or, more accurately, a series of books; four have been released as of this writing, with entries 5 and 6 in the works. That’s the basis of my review today. Should be simple, right?

But what I didn’t know at the time⁠—it’s possible I was just too young to be cognizant of such a thing, or perhaps it was due to living on the other side of the world (who can say, really)⁠—was that the origin of REMOЯANDOM is not, as the title would suggest, entirely random. It is, in fact, the newest project from Remo Giuffré, seemingly a “big ideas” guy who created the REMO brand in 1988 when he opened a storefront in Sydney, Australia. I’m sure I’m not quite doing the description justice as somebody who has little more than these books and the Our Story page of their website to go off of, but from what I can glean, it appears as though the store gained some amount of international acclaim for its selection of what I would call “curated designs and thoughtful novelties”. Apparently, they even had a catalogue.

I mention all this because REMOЯANDOM is not shy about its connection to the REMO brand. And I really think it’s to the detriment of the final product. It would be one thing if it simply had the nod to REMO in the name, and perhaps kept the introduction from Giuffré at the beginning of each volume. But a not-insignificant number of curiosities in this collection end with either a personal anecdote from Giuffré about his own connection to an individual associated with the topic on that page, or⁠—and this is undoubtedly worse⁠—“we used to sell something with this design in our shop! Remember when we had a shop?”

That’s a detail I neglected to mention so far. The physical storefront no longer exists. And their online store mostly just sells printed t-shirts now. Plus, I guess they do a podcast (I haven’t listened to it).

It’s honestly really bizarre how much the REMO brand is being hyped up when, from the point of view of somebody with no attachment to it, it seems like it’s just ... kind of nothing now. “The community is the brand,” the website claims. Yeah. That’s because the community of people nostalgic for the brand are all the brand has going for it anymore. Can't be doing the brand too many favours because they certainly didn't help keep the store from going under. Twice. It reeks of somebody with little else to offer trying to cling to relevancy long after their ounce of cultural clout has dried up, and if you read REMOЯANDOM, you will not be able to escape it.

But the trivia is very good though, so 4/5 stars.

Please Note: This is a review of the REMOЯANDOM books. Background to the Remo store is provided as context and is not meant to be an endorsement or promotion of the business - bikerbuddy

A Personal Recollection

Remo was a large store on a corner block on Oxford Street. I passed it most days, on the bus between university at Broadway and my home in Bondi Junction. Apart from merchandise, they also had a café. We frequently stopped there for coffee, it was a convenient spot to meet friends, the coffee was good, and if you were alone, you could just sit and watch all the people walking by on Oxford Street.

But it was the store itself that was the main attraction. Almost everything Remo sold was appealing. It wasn’t like a department store, crowded with multiple choices for each object. Remo generally just had one choice, but it was always a beautifully styled or practical choice. And there was always a sign to explain why the object had been selected for the store. You could buy a set of Splayds, but not a full range of cutlery. You could buy Cuisenaire rods, but not other maths teaching aids. If I wanted a gift for someone, I could always find something I knew they’d love in Remo.

It must be around 30 years since the store front closed, but I still use some of the things I bought from there in my home. A set of cheap Chinese hand towels are one – they’re getting rather thin, but I still prefer them to other, thicker, hand towels. Mine are faded now, and no longer have the ‘good morning’ printed in red on the border, but I keep using them. The other item that springs to mind is my ‘Loved’ apron. Not ‘loved’ the past tense, as in ‘I was loved once’, but current tense, as in ‘I am loved’. They don’t seem to sell aprons anymore, but I found the Loved design on a T-shirt at their online store.

- Toriaz