November 2011
12 posts
The Pluck of the Irish | Designer Orla Kiely's... →
This is funny:
Orla Kiely, the Irish designer known for her quirky, signature, retro stem prints, still gets excited when she sees someone wearing her brand. “It is nice that people like it enough to buy it,” she says, sipping black coffee at her London store in Covent Garden, the first one to open in Europe in 2005.
One thing she won’t ever do now, however, is stop random...
J. Crew's Mickey Drexler and Frank Muytjens Talk... →
One of the key moments in that acceleration may have been the company’s 2008 opening of the Liquor Store, its first men’s-only shop built in an old spirits seller in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood. It introduced a formula that has served as a clever template for the six J. Crew men’s shops that followed (including a newly opened space in Manhattan’s Columbus...
Four Steps to Develop a Successful Mobile Strategy →
Fashion and retails brands are rapidly realizing that they no longer have a choice but to provide their consumer with a mobile experiences because more people access content and information via mobile devices than on PCs. According to research by Tealeaf on online buying behavior, consumers want their mobile shopping experiences to be as good or better than online shopping on a computer.
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The Ultimate Social Search: How To Drive Clicks... →
Good article:
Before sharing a few best practices, I’ll let my colleague Chris Lightner (@clightner), VP Analytics at Edelman Digital, share a handful of retweetable SEO tips for Twitter:
Although Twitter allows for 140 characters, consider how re-tweetable your content is when writing your tweet and leave a little room for your Twitter handle. If someone re-tweets your content, will they have...
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Ignore Google at Your Peril →
+1 could fundamentally change the way we use the web. Anti-trust and privacy issues notwithstanding (and not to be underestimated), +1’s effect on search results may change user behaviors we’ve been seeing for nearly a decade. Transparently, users see that a friend has found a link valuable and are more likely to click on it; behind the scenes, Google may add this layer to the relevance of...
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When offshoring backfires | vox - Research-based... →
While politicians argue strategies to create jobs in the faltering global economy, the debate around offshoring has intensified. Once considered a clear competitive advantage in the fast-changing global market, manufacturers rushed to replace domestic labour forces with lower-cost workers in emerging markets. By 2002–03, about a quarter to half of the manufacturing companies in Western Europe...
October 2011
9 posts
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Fashion PR: Fashion Blogger Burnout? | PR Couture:... →
I’ve heard rumblings of fashion blogger backlash, appreciated even, the satirical attempts to poke fun at the poses, the affected speech, the same pair of wedges running standard. Despite this, I’ve spent several years educating major fashion brands on the value of developing partnerships with bloggers, jumping up and down (metaphorically, of course) until blue in the face about the value of...
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WatchThe future of social media
Kent Wang →
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Instablogging...definitely the way to be fast and...
As you can see, I’m on Tumblr, and it’s fabulous. Very quick work in posting new blogs:
“It’s the easiest way to blog,” describes Tumblr. With more than 21,317,680 blogs and counting, Tumblr is a social media platform allowing users to share content quickly by way of posting text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos to a platform similar to a traditional blog but with the ease...
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Chinese Economy slowing...?
As the American economy appears to teeter on the edge of another recession, Europe struggles with a financial crisis and emerging markets like Brazil and India show new weaknesses, China may appear to be in better shape than most countries, economists say. But “better” is relative.
On the surface, economists at the International Monetary Fund and most banks are still estimating China’s growth...
July 2011
10 posts
How can jeans cost so much...? Well, lemme see...
The Cone fabrics are shipped by truck or train to Los Angeles, where denim brands cut and sew them to their designs. Each part and bit of labor may ultimately be marked up five times or more before the pants reach retail stores. So the $23.30 spent for a Los Angeles-based seamstress to sew a pair of Super Ts will cost the consumer more than $100 at full price. Other notable costs include...
China inflation threat underestimated →
But, I see it in the pricing my former China-sourced customers are telling me about:
The era in which cheap Chinese exports helped to keep prices down is now behind us, according to the insurance giant’s fund division.
Instead, “as inflation becomes more and more of a concern in advanced economies, China is going to be making things worse,” said Brian Coulton, an emerging...
WatchIsn’t my dog cool?
Happy 4th of July weekend!!
Let’s not forget our troops!
June 2011
3 posts
The basic dress shirt wardrobe, per A Suitable... →
Competing With China →
There are few things more American than the hula hoop and the Frisbee. But for years, these icons of Americana have been made in China. That is ending, as their producer, Wham-O Inc., brought 50 percent of its production back to the United States last year. Wham-O is just the first sign of a developing trend, as firms such as NCR, General Electric, and Caterpillar are bringing jobs home from...
October 2010
7 posts
First Person | Viktor & Rolf say Flowerbomb was... →
Interesting behind the scenes on Viktor & Rolf:
These projects, Horsting says, “were very instinctive. We knew we had to do ready-to-wear, but we had no idea how to organise it all. But we knew it would be a logical follow up. We thought in a certain scale without knowing how to get there. We knew it wouldn’t be us organising it, we knew we would have to find a partner.” But through all...
British Fashion Site Asos Plans American →
Well, the costs could overwhelm him, unless his business figures a way out of that:
Figuring out the shipping-cost structure was an issue, especially since the youth mentality is all about “get it now.”
To that end, the company uses express mail that ships items within four business days at a flat fee of $6 to a customer. The company uses several different carriers to make that happen....
“Hate is just a cowards way of showing you they’re intimidated”
– (via xovb)
September 2010
3 posts
UGG Australia: Behind the Brand →
A money machine…and I still hate those shoes…
Last year, UGG Australia sold nearly $712 million of sheepskin footwear—more than Sam Adams sold beer ($415.1 million), Smith & Wesson sold guns ($334.9 million), the New York Yankees sold baseball ($375 million) and Marie Callender’s sold apple pie ($536 million). Extraordinary success when you consider that until recently in...
Oh yeah, I'll knock another 70% off my price too...
Then, we all go out of business, or maybe…you can buy me out…?
Teen stars can make life look effortless. Until the day it all comes crashing down.
That is the condition of Aeropostale, the teen-focused apparel retailer that posted over 10 straight years of rising sales and managed to thrive straight through the recession. The company’s gross margins rose about seven...
August 2010
10 posts
Institute of Fashion Law - there's no replacing... →
Chanel...is dusty?
Well, maybe so:
If my subjective impressions of a few windows and a couple of recent movies aren’t evidence enough of Chanel’s plight there is also the recent data from Millward Brown’s empirically based Brandz valuation. According to the company’s 2010 estimates the top three luxury brands - Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Gucci - all enjoyed significant increases in brand equity. But Chanel, at...
Learning from Nike...for fashion?
Interesting article…
Last month, to coincide with the start of the FIFA World Cup, Nike launched a three-minute film called “Write the Future”, featuring football superstars like Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba. According to web video analytics companyVisible Measures “Write the Future” clocked a record 7.8 million online views in its debut week, underscoring the power of creating...
Thread sizing - good article →
WatchYeah, I won’t be the Competition in one of these tees…I’ll be the drenching competition!
Street-Style Websites Turn Fashion's Focus to... →
Ms. Fedor and her business partner at BeautifulStranger, Abby Wallach, say their blog’s readers don’t care to see too many professional models, who will look good in anything. BeautifulStranger was launched three years ago by Ms. Fedor, a 47-year-old former editor at Glamour and other beauty magazines, and Ms. Wallach, a 44-year-old former cable-television producer.
They had been...