I've written a whole chapter elsewhere about Maine's actual moose economy: you can't buy the meat, because wild game can't be sold - it moves by lottery permit and by knowing somebody, through church-hall game suppers, like referrals. And most visitors to Maine never see a living moose at all. Which makes it funny and completely logical that one of the most reliable retail operations in the state is Cool As A Moose - a souvenir chain born in Bar Harbor some forty years ago, now on Fore Street in Portland and Maine Street in Brunswick, selling the moose on shirts, hats, and everything else, to people who will drive home having never seen one.
Email Russell Read the Maine chaptersThe real moose and the souvenir moose obey completely different rules, and the gap between them is where the store lives.
Moose meat reaches a Maine dinner table by exactly two routes: winning the state permit lottery, or knowing somebody who did. It cannot be bought at any price, which makes it the most relationship-distributed food in New England - and, as I've argued in the ebook, a nearly perfect model of how legal referrals actually move.
What it teaches: the most valuable things in a market are often the ones that structurally can't be purchased - only earned through relationships.
The moose on the shirt has none of the animal's constraints. It never runs out, never requires a lottery win, and sells year-round in three towns to tourists who came for a coastline the actual moose avoids. Cool As A Moose has run four decades on the difference between the animal and its image.
What it teaches: when the real thing can't be bought, a market appears for its symbol - reliably, and profitably. There's nothing wrong with that market as long as everyone knows which one they're standing in.
Nobody buying a moose hoodie on Fore Street believes they've acquired a moose. The shirt is doing a different job: it's proof of the trip, a way to carry the idea of Maine home. The store isn't tricking anyone - it's selling exactly what it appears to sell, which is the symbol, honestly priced as a symbol.
What it teaches: symbols are legitimate products. The trouble only starts when someone pays symbol prices believing they bought the animal.
A law firm's market has the same two economies running side by side. The animal is the real thing: a reputation among the people who'd know, referrals that move like game-supper invitations, results in actual courtrooms in front of actual judges. None of it can be bought directly - it's lottery-and-relationship distributed, accumulated over years. The shirt is the symbol economy: the "Top Lawyer" badges, the paid directory laurels, the award logos in the website footer, the vanity metrics in a vendor's monthly report. Infinite supply, always in stock, available to any firm with a credit card.
The badge isn't the reputation, the same way the shirt isn't the moose. Both are fine to own - as long as you never confuse which one you're holding, or pay animal prices for fabric.
Here's the part that matters commercially: clients mostly can't tell the difference at a glance, but the systems that increasingly route them can. A referral source knows which firm actually gets results in that courthouse. And the AI systems that clients now ask for lawyer recommendations are getting better at weighing the animal - real cases, real specifics, real footprint - over the purchasable symbol. A firm whose entire trophy shelf is shirts is about to have a hard decade. A firm holding the actual animal just needs to make sure the machines and the humans can both see it - which is, more or less, my whole job description.
Store details verified against Cool As A Moose's own site and current listings: born in Bar Harbor roughly 40 years ago; locations at 118 Main St, Bar Harbor; 388 Fore St, Portland; and 128 Maine St, Brunswick. The moose-distribution economics are covered at length in Three States, Three Markets, chapter 9.
Real reputation can't be purchased, only earned and then made visible. I help with the visible part.
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