You know the drill with traditional Delft china.  It’s white, high-quality, handmade china with unmistakable blue graphic treatments.  Made in Delft, Netherlands, it is collected worldwide.  (Delft was actually a copy of Ming-era porcelain from China, which the Dutch East India Co. began to import into Holland in the early 17th century.  The Dutch copies gained a reputation of their own, and Delftware became a highly desired species of pottery.)

Of course, imagery on Delftware is not street art.  It’s about as traditional as you can get.  So L&R took the Delft color palette and product silhouette and imposed New York graffiti imagery. The result is my favorite china.  It’s beautiful, formal, elegant. But it’s also gritty and provocative.  It makes you think about your preconceptions about art and taste and beauty.  It’s truly fascinating.

I was in my 20s when modern graffiti emerged in the U.S.  I remember going to New York during the days of the Subway Movement and watching the transformation. It was a wild time. The art exploded in a broken city. There was crime, economic collapse and crumbling infrastructure. New York was bankrupt.  And there was this incredible new form of expression … everywhere. Overnight.

The classic tableau for me — driving in from Boston — was a stripped car on the side of the West Side Highway, plundered to a skeleton, upside down like a dead bug, under a huge wall of graffiti.  It felt dangerous, and threatening, and new, and totally different. A doorway into a new and very uncertain era.

Having decided to feature the New York Delft china and having been led to recall the incredible energy of the graffiti movement, I thought we’d also offer a couple of books in the store to memorialize those times.  “Subway Art” by Cooper and Chalfant is a definitive book,  a great collection of subway photography.  Truly stunning.  Jon Naar’s book “The Birth of Graffiti” chronicles the birth of the movement. It originally was published with 40 museum-quality photos; in the reprints it has been expanded to incorporate many more. Both of these books are absolutely beautiful.

Taken together, these products now reflect an important piece of cultural history. Americans — having an uneasy relationship with street art and insurgency — have waged war on graffiti. Just last year, Shepard Fairey was Barack Obama’s official campaign artist. Yet when Fairey had an exhibition earlier this year at Boston’s Museum of Contemporary Art and put up some street art in Boston to celebrate it, he was arrested.  Los Angeles, the modern epicenter of urban art, has recently launched a new crackdown. The energy of underground art in public spaces provokes a strong counter-reaction.

Which is very different from the equilibrium in arguably more culturally mature European countries. I was in Germany this past summer.  Berlin is covered in graffiti — it is a graphic city.  The residents push strollers past walls of street art.  No one seems to mind and, for the most part, it seems to be viewed as a part of the city’s cultural rebuilding. I put together a little gallery of East Berlin graffiti photos, you can see them here.

As a result of the American attitude, the amazing imagery of New York graffiti is now almost entirely gone. Which is, in a very real way, a tragedy. At least we have these wonderful books to commemorate it. And we have Lovegrove & Repucci’s Delft china to give us a quite unexpected and fascinating perspective on that art form, and to make us think a little bit about the comparison to other art forms that, as a culture, we seem to consider more “respectable.”

Late one night during the brainstorming phase last summer, I was winding down by cruising Craigslist (no, not that part of Craigslist). I wound up in “bikes.”

Amid the $1,000 (and $10,000) titanium-framed, fully suspended, on- and off-road competition bikes for sale around bike-obsessed San Francisco, I stumbled onto this. A custom Sting Ray chopper re-creation. All chrome. With spiral/twisted fork … and high-density spoke wheel … and a steering wheel … and mufflers … and a spare tire, to top it off, carried in the back, like my granddad’s ’35 Ford.

I called the phone number the next day. I found myself talking to a young guy — a kid, the owner/builder. He lived in Richmond, an economically challenged city in the East Bay. At the end of my day at Salon, I drove across the Bay Bridge to have a look.

I drove up a street with no occupied houses, save for the one that was my destination. It was encircled by a high fence. There was a large dog in the yard. I honked the horn, walked up and met a Hispanic family. There were three kids playing in the yard and driveway, a well-kept house, and a garage full of projects with wheels. No English spoken here, save for the owner of the bike. Mom sat on the front stairs watching over everyone, friendly but guarded.

The bike builder was 16. He’d built the bike when he was 14. He’d spent months putting it together. Then he rode it to school every day for two years. At night he parked it inside, cleaned it and polished it. The bike led to other projects. He was now building go-karts, not just for himself but with a local shop. He was on a vocational track in school. He needed the dough out of the bike to buy parts for his new cart venture.

So, the bike, a little chrome conceit, a ghetto ornament, had started him on the road to a career. He was blessed with a strong mom who had created a fortress of a household. He was on his way, a fragile, hopeful contrast to the kids just blocks away in his sometimes incredibly sad city.

Two-hundred fifty dollars was a lot of money for a bike that had seen a pretty hard and well-used life, no matter how deeply it had been loved. The fork was loose; the wheel spokes had a patina of rust. But for a signpost, a memory of a hardworking family, doing their best against really bad odds? I paid him, and hoisted the bike into the back seat of my car. I asked if I could take their picture, and received an emphatic “no” from his protective mom. (Of course not — what was I thinking?) The bike now sits in the courtyard of our little house in Marin.

So, what does this have to do with Salon? It’s just this: Products — things — matter.

On the one hand: As consumers, we are drowning in an endless sea of bad and unnecessary products. Too much stuff being produced. Stuff that sucks resources away from more socially important needs. Products that, whether cheap or expensive, are awful. Devoid of ideas, sometimes even dangerous.

So we become anti-consumer, anti-product, anti-retail. We look for ways, in a world filled with hardship, to simplify, to walk away from the avalanche of stuff.

But on the other hand: Products — the right products, designed with passion, for the right reasons, made responsibly — can be inspiring. They can be the embodiment of values and, indeed, of dreams. They can literally change people’s lives, both those who produce them and those who consume them.

A product may distill the conviction of a young designer, studying art, wanting to make a difference. Or it may represent the deeply held beliefs of an engineer who has spent a lifetime studying a need and developing a theory. Or it may embody the witty, fun imaginings of an inventor who just wants to make people smile. Or it may hold the hopes of a 14-year-old kid who can make something of chrome that embodies his loves and passions, that gives him a reason to work toward his future.

For the past decade or so, I’ve spent my life in retail, and around designers. I love it because of the creativity and the passion. There’s lots of uninspired crap, yes. But there are also companies that stand for something and products that mean something. You find it in small companies and large ones. Young designers turn out stunning products in their living rooms. Larger companies sometimes, out of the blue, and in shocking contravention to their prior history, come up with an impassioned, different approach.

So this is why I think that offering products for sale fits with Salon’s mission. Not every product fits with Salon. In fact, few do. But if a product is driven by ideas, by values, by dreams, then it fits. If it makes you smile or conveys a thought or gets you to reexamine the way you do something, then it’s as resonant as a political statement, a movie or a book. It’s an idea, and a very concrete one. A product isn’t an argument that can morph or shift or dodge or be reinterpreted. It sits there, and it means it. It is what it is.

The mission of the Salon Store is to find and showcase products that fit with Salon — because they embody ideas. As a starting point, we embraced three key words: smart, funny and progressive. The Salon Store is about finding products that fit these words, these filters, and giving them a stage. The idea is to create a virtuous circle — guiding you to great products, and thereby, helping designers with good ideas to build their companies.

With our holiday collection, I hope you can see some of these values reflected — the beginnings of this mission. It is just a start. And it’s a fluffy start. The holiday collection is a gift collection, things that we think are different in fun and interesting ways. We chose it in part based on the idea that the holidays can be terribly serious for many people, and that, of our three key words — smart, funny and progressive — at holiday time, the focus should be on funny, on helping you make someone smile.

Many of the things in this collection, however, actually also reflect some broader values — for example, because of where they’re made, or how, or by whom. Next year, as we add new things to the Store, you’ll see an expanding and serious emphasis on things that, in various ways, reflect and embody important social goals.

Last summer, on that evening in Richmond, before I drove off I asked the kid a question. I told him that I was in the process of starting a new e-commerce business. I said, “If I put a picture of your bike on my site, and, if someone wants one like it, would you be interested in making more?” Maybe, he said, guardedly.

I’ve carried this around with me since then. So, if you like the bike, write me. I’ll see if I can interest him in producing some bikes. Who knows, if we were to get some traction with it, it might even help get him through school.

And that would be exactly, precisely, reflective of why I wanted to do this in the first place.

A few provisos: The Salon Store showcases products, it does not have a massive warehouse in California stuffed with inventory. We’re guides and commentators, not shopkeepers in the traditional sense. We’ll guide you to a great collection of products and to good merchants from whom you can purchase these products. Strictly speaking, you don’t purchase from the Salon Store; you purchase through the Salon Store, from an affiliated merchant.

We think this structure frees everyone to do what they do best. Frankly, we get to do the fun things — finding great products, trying them out, selecting the ones that best fit Salon and writing about them. Our merchant partners have to do the heavy lifting — processing your order, shipping your product, apologizing when your order is late, managing the inventory.

I should also note that, because we will try to bring you different, interesting and somewhat rare products, many of them will necessarily be of limited availability. So, my apologies in advance if you find that the product you want is out of stock. I hope that you’ll view this as a necessary evil — a byproduct of our dedication to guiding you to truly different things — and therefore forgive us if the shelf is empty by the time you click to purchase.

We look forward to hearing what you think about this new experiment in online shopkeeping. As with any experiment, we’ll learn along the way. The store will evolve, the collections will change. We want it to be fun, different and surprising — and we want it to have a unique Salon voice. We look forward to your feedback and your suggestions. And, don’t forget, when you purchase through the Salon Store, it will help support Salon, and thus strengthen our efforts to present the voices that make us think, keep us informed, make us laugh.

Let me also introduce you to John Pound, who is leading our efforts with the store and who will be blogging copiously about his experiences in finding the interesting things we display on our virtual shelves.

When I first met John I was struck by two things: first, his love for Salon, and second, his deep but quirky love for aesthetically pleasing, fun and functional products. His background gives a better sense of who John is and why I think you will enjoy his perspective in bringing all this together. His first love was politics. That fell by the wayside as he became an economist and academic at a well-known university back in Cambridge. He spent 10 years teaching before becoming an investor and retailer.

Clearly, as John readily admits, it was a journey from the sublime to the ridiculous. When he was 14, his dad — an academic himself — told him, “You know, I thought that you would grow up to be a famous academic, but I think you’re going to grow up to be a buyer at Macy’s.” The frightening thing is that he was, basically, exactly right (except for the Macy’s part). John loves the creativity, the passion and the energy around a great product. And he loves ferreting out and helping the talented designers, artisans and smart companies that make them.

I hope you enjoy John and the Salon Store. Tell us what you think, today and every day.

Visit the Salon Store now.