SLOW Movement

Washington Post: Blue Chip, White Cotton - What Underwear Says About the Economy

Blue Chip, White Cotton: What Underwear Says About the Economy

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 31, 2009

For one answer to the nation's most pressing economic question -- when will the recession end? -- just take a peek inside the American man's underwear drawer.

There may be some new pairs there, judging by recent reports from retailers and analysts, and that could mean better days ahead for everyone.

Here's the theory, briefly: Sales of men's underwear typically are stable because they rank as a necessity. But during times of severe financial strain, men will try to stretch the time between buying new pairs, causing underwear sales to dip.

"It's a prolonged purchase," said Marshal Cohen, senior analyst with the consumer research firm NPD Group. "It's like trying to drive your car an extra 10,000 miles."

The growth in sales of men's underwear began to slow last year as the recession took hold, according to Mintel, another research firm. This year, Mintel expects sales to fall 2.3 percent, the first drop since the company started collecting data in 2003.

But the men's underwear index -- or, conveniently, MUI -- may also have a silver lining. Mintel predicts that next year, men's underwear sales will fall by 0.5 percent, and as with many economic indicators, a slowing of a decline can be welcomed as a step in the right direction. Retailers are reporting encouraging signs in the men's underwear department. Sears spokeswoman Amy Dimond said stores are beginning to see more sales. At Target, spokeswoman Jana O'Leary said sales of men's underwear have been stronger over the past two months and multi-pair packs are moving.

No less an oracle than former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has given this theory credence, as described in a report on NPR two years ago. But you don't have to take his word for it. Just ask Kenneth Sanford, 59, of Capitol Heights, about his underwear. He said he usually buys new boxers every three months or so in maroon, black or white. But he had to stop working for medical reasons, and now he's having a hard time finding a new job.

To save money, he doesn't go out for ribs with his friends and family as much anymore. And when he indulges, he gets one piña colada instead of two. He hasn't bought a new pair of underwear in at least eight months.

"It's been a while now," Sanford said. "I just don't ever go shopping."

Of course, there are more conventional indicators of the nation's economic health. The gross domestic product fell 1 percent during the second quarter. Consumer spending and consumer confidence have been on a roller coaster this year. Home sales show some signs of bottoming out. But sometimes it is the little things that can be the most telling.

Leonard Lauder, chairman of the cosmetics company Estee Lauder, famously looked to lipstick sales as a barometer of consumers' mind-set during the last downturn. He believed that women were looking for small indulgences to lift their spirits during a tough economic time, though that theory has not held up in this recession, as sales of lipstick at mass retailers fell 8 percent over the past year, according to the research firm Information Resources.

Others look to a reported rise in prescriptions of anti-depressants and sleep aids last year as a sign of consumers' fragile state.

But perhaps no other purchase is as intimate as underwear. Few, if any, other people see it, so it's an easy place to skimp. According to Mintel, men buy an average of 3.4 pairs of underwear in a year. But from 2004 to 2008, the proportion of men buying single pairs at a time increased from 5 percent to 8 percent, while the share of men opting for packs of four or more fell slightly, from 68 to 66 percent -- indicating that shoppers may be trying to save money by buying only when necessary.

"People still need underwear," said Michael Kleinmann, president of FreshPair.com, an online underwear retailer. "They just have less money to spend."

The company sells high-end men's underwear that can run as much as $30 per pair, along with brands that cost less than $10. Kleinmann said that such less expensive pairs have had double-digit-percentage sales growth recently, while demand for pricier pairs is slowing.

Cohen, of NPD, said he hopes the recent positive signs in men's underwear will spill over into other need-based purchases. With the recession nearing two years, shoppers are at the stage where their stuff is simply beginning to wear out, providing an incentive to return to the stores.

"The consumers may be down, but they're not out," said Cohen, who is bullish on an economic recovery. "If this were a true, deep, long, embedded recession, they wouldn't even be buying underwear."

See also: Economist: Lip Reading (Lipstick Index)

FT: Eye declare a lash war (Foodie had long lashes like Snuffleupagus Part 2)

Foodie had long lashes like Snuffleupagus... Nia! (Part 2)

I attended a beauty workshop organised by Discovery Channel and conducted by Shu Uemura on Thursday. All went well until we were told to try our hands on putting false lashes after the demonstration.

I have always been known to be nifty with my fingers when it comes to art and craft. However, my ego suffered a beating as I struggled to attach the false lash onto my eyelid. After struggling for ten minutes and with glue on my eyelids and lashes, the instructor helped me to put it on.

I do admit that at that moment, my eyes looked stunning. The girl in the mirror did not look like me at all... very glamourous but not to my liking :) I took it off after an hour or so. Though I wish I can have eyes like Snuffleupagus, the thought of having to fix false lashes on my lids just to look pretty is deem to be a hassle. I would rather catch a couple minutes of sleep than to wake up earlier just to put them on. For now, mascara can do the job! 

I now have a newfound respect for girls who put on false lashes every morning! *salute*

Foodie

===

Eye declare a lash war

By Anna-Marie Solowij

Published: April 4 2009 03:23 | Last updated: April 4 2009 04:01

To find the most popular sector of the make-up market, I look to see which product drawer in my filing cabinet is the fullest. Mascaras are brimming over to the extent that another drawer has just been annexed to accommodate the seemingly infinitesimal sub-categorisation that includes lifting, separating, volumising, building, curling and false lash effect mascaras, plus an ever-increasing product diversification from false lashes (sub-sub-category: designer false lashes), lash treatments and mascara removers.

Despite the patently non-scientific approach, my hunch about the booming eyelash market is borne out by official figures: Mintel reports an increase of 26.3 per cent in sales of mascara between 2006 and 2008, while the UK market alone is estimated to be worth £192 million. Who’d have thought that such a minuscule part of the face could inspire such realms of interest?

A combination of innovation, fashion and consumer demand has brought us to its current state, wherein it is completely normal to lie on a couch for two hours having hundreds of individual microfibre lash extensions glued on; or to buy Bourjois’ Volume Clubbing, a mascara especially for the dance floor that changes colour under UV light; or to have a mascara wand that vibrates to mimic the professional “wiggle” that make-up artists use in their application technique.

Establishing how the current lash obsession came about is less straightforward, although an analysis of the trajectory of the trend reveals that this is a business driven by fierce competition (and a few underhand practices).

As I recall, the lash wars commenced in 2006 when Max Factor launched Masterpiece mascara with its thermoplastic elastomer brush. The company cleverly sent out photography samples to magazines without the liquid element of the mascara, to ensure that the bright yellow brush would steal the show. At around the same time, Chanel upped the ante with its Inimitable mascara, boasting a similar brush but an innovative new formula.

I remember the tension at the time between these two beauty juggernauts – the mass market Max Factor versus super-chic Chanel. This face-off signalled the start of a race that still hasn’t reached a finishing line.

Previously, Shu Uemura had opened its Tokyo Lash Bar, part of the progression of the false lash phenomenon that had arrived from Asia with Jinnylash extensions – the hot beauty treatment of 2007 that lash extension expert Sue Marsh finessed with her Eye-tec bespoke lash extension service. Shu Uemura went on to adopt the couture approach by offering made-to-measure false lashes as well as collaborating with designers Viktor & Rolf to produce a range of fantastical couture lashes.

Meanwhile the battle of the wands continued with Lancôme, rated number one premium mascara brand, which upped its game by bringing out Virtuose, a curling and lengthening mascara. This added to Lancôme’s stable of 16 mascaras, including the best-selling Hypnose, its number one make-up product. In the meantime, mascaras from Avon to Maybelline to L’Oréal Paris joined the race.

. . .

In summer 2008, Guerlain brought out Le 2, a double-ended wand created by Danish designer Helle Damkjaer. The wand itself was the grandest statement so far: twice as long as most mascaras and inspired by the architecture of the soaring towers of the new Asian economies. Le 2 had two different brushes and the mascara was perfumed.

Just after this, Givenchy’s Phenomen’Eyes mascara further raised the stakes, with a brush designed by make-up artist Nicolas Degennes who had sat at home experimenting by cutting up toothbrush bristles and gluing them into a pom-pom-shaped brush. The low-tech approach nevertheless sent Givenchy mascara sales into the stratosphere.

Then just when it seemed there was nowhere else to go, Lancôme and Estée Lauder went head-to-head by introducing a new category: the power mascara. The ensuing conflict at the beauty counters, with Estée Lauder launching exclusively at Harrods and Lancôme teaming up with Selfridges, seemed to be the last battle in the mascara wars. By autumn 2008, things appeared to be calming down.

Several companies had been given what the tabloids called “a lashing” by the Advertising Standards Authority for misrepresenting or exaggerating the effects of their mascaras with false lashes and digital enhancement techniques being used in print and television advertisements.

But instead of retreating to lick its wounds, the lash market is on its second wind. As I write, I am currently testing new mascaras – one waterproof with a temperature-dependent formula that can be washed off with warm water; a prototype that comes with a mini-blow dryer so that each coat can be dried between applications; and a double brush affair that coats lashes twice in one sweep. It would appear that the war isn’t over yet.

Anna-Marie Solowij is a contributing editor at Vogue.
More columns at www.ft.com/annamariesolowij

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

NY Times: Site Wins Fashion Fans by Letting Them Design

July 27, 2009

Site Wins Fashion Fans by Letting Them Design

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

The fashion Web site Polyvore allows users to build collages with photos of clothing, accessories and models that they think go well together.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The fashion magazines Vogue, InStyle and Lucky may rule the newsstand racks. But online, they are also-rans, overlooked by the fashion-conscious in favor of Polyvore, an upstart Web site far from Fifth Avenue.

Polyvore is a user-generated fashion magazine filled with user-generated ads. The people who go to it play fashion editor and create collages featuring pictures of clothes, accessories and models from across the Web. Readers view the collages, which the site calls “sets,” and if they click on a dress or necklace, they are taken to the Web site that sells it.

Founded by three ex-Yahoo engineers, Polyvore has been focused on getting people to visit the site. It seems to be working. Polyvore had more than 835,000 unique visitors in June, almost 25 percent more than the traffic to Style.com, run by Vogue, and InStyle.com, according to Compete, a Web analytics firm. It is also far bigger than the Web sites of Lucky and Harper’s Bazaar. While other fashion magazine sites have been struggling to hold an online audience, Polyvore has tripled its traffic in the last year.

Now it is shifting its focus to making money. It runs ads, like the magazine sites do. But it also earns a commission when users click on or purchase clothes from certain e-commerce sites, though only about a quarter of outbound clicks make money for Polyvore. The company is now trying to forge relationships with clothing and accessories sites in return for uploading their product catalogues to the site.

“To compete with the Vogues and InStyles, it’s not just about transacting and maximizing the dollars per page view,” said Peter Fenton, a partner at Benchmark Capital, which invested $2.5 million in Polyvore. “There’s this aspirational side and entertainment side, which none of the sites up until now have done a good job at tapping into.”

At the same time, Polyvore is giving stale e-commerce sites a much-needed jolt of inspiration. “Online retail started around digital cameras. Now, sites are using the same engines to sell shirts, but that’s not the way they should be sold,” said Pasha Sadri, co-founder and chief executive of Polyvore. “Clothing is much more visual.” And unlike cameras or books, clothes and accessories are bought as part of a whole outfit, though many sites still show pieces of clothing individually.

Mr. Sadri, a corduroy-wearer who is not particularly fashion-forward himself, conceived the idea for Polyvore in 2007, while working at Yahoo. He was the software engineer behind Yahoo Pipes, a tool that allows people to pull together content from across the Web, similar to what Polyvore does.

When Polyvore users surf the Web, they use a tool called the Clipper, downloaded and saved on the toolbar, to select images and save them to Polyvore, where anyone can use them in a collage.

Brands and e-commerce sites can also upload their items to Polyvore, though today 95 percent of the images come from users. Polyvore attributes images with a hyperlink to the original site. (It gets about five requests a week, usually from photographers or painters, to remove images.)

To create a set, users drag and drop images and manipulate them. Polyvore also offers fonts for text, and audio clips from Amazon. Its 928,000 registered users create 28,000 new sets a day. A set inspired by Blake Lively, the “Gossip Girl” actress, includes a picture of her with a leather jacket similar to the one she is wearing, available on the Zadig & Voltaire Web site for $840. It also features accessories for the outfit, like Coach boots, Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and a T-Mobile Sidekick.

On a blog called Boutonnieres & Bow Ties, brides-to-be submit photos of their wedding dresses. Samantha Shih, owner of a menswear company called 9Tailor, uses Polyvore to create the groom’s outfit, complete with tie and cuff links, and uploads it to her blog.

To increase revenue, Polyvore is engaging fashion companies to sponsor content on the site. Tory Burch promoted its summer collection, which was inspired by Venice, by running a contest on Polyvore that asked users to create Venetian-themed sets using the new Tory Burch pieces.

Lori’s Shoes, a boutique in Chicago and online, recently noticed a surge of traffic coming from Polyvore, which John Coyle Steinbrunner, the company’s creative director, had not heard of.

Now Lori’s Shoes wants to advertise on Polyvore. “It just gets us a better customer than banner ads or cost-per-click ads, they’re just instantly more loyal,” Mr. Steinbrunner said. “As opposed to just being a customer, they get to help determine what the look and aesthetic of the shoe is.”

Some online retailers, including Charlotte Russe and Torrid, license Polyvore’s technology to use on their own sites. Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research, says she thinks licensing is the most promising use for Polyvore and competitors like Kaboodle.

“On the retail sites themselves, people are looking to be inspired and are down the funnel of the purchase process,” she said. But while using Polyvore’s site, “people are in a different mind-set, they’re looking to browse, they might not be looking to buy.”

Polyvore also plans to sell data on customer preferences it compiles on the site. It could potentially tell a retailer that a type of shoe is more popular in Manhattan than Los Angeles, so it would know where to stock the shoe. Or designers could upload images of new items before deciding to produce them to get input from fashion-savvy users.

It could also give buyers information about trends in real-time, faster than monthly magazines, said Jess Lee, Polyvore’s product manager. This fall, for example, watch for recent trends bubbling up on the site: exposed zippers, fingerless gloves and butterfly prints.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Lunch with the FT - Manolo Blahnik

Lunch with the FT: Manolo Blahnik

By Vanessa Friedman

Published: July 3 2009 22:08 | Last updated: July 4 2009 00:48

Milan, during the autumn/winter collections. The city is flooded with fashion people, so no one blinks an eye at the sight of lamé at 10am or Swarovski crystals at noon. This is especially true in the Four Seasons Hotel, the mink-lined home-away-from-home of the power crowd, such as US Vogue editor Anna Wintour, French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld, and Vanity Fair’s Michael Roberts. And yet even here, in the burnished centre of it all, Manolo Blahnik, shoe tsar and silver-haired dandy , is able to make an entrance.

“Ms Friedman!” I am in reception, attempting to call his room to say I have arrived, when the 66-year-old Blahnik suddenly materialises next to me, gasping for air and fanning himself with one hand. “Oh, I am so sorry to be late but I ran into Hamish Bowles [Vogue’s European editor at large] on the stairs and then we were” – his hands make little pincing motions – “and it was so hard to get away, but come, come, let us sit. Is that table OK? Let us go there, please.” He guides me over with hand gestures and then pulls out a chair.

Trendwatchers and coolhunters say we are on the verge of a new fashion era: after the “it” brand and the “it” bag, 2009 will mark the age of the “it” shoe. If that is true, if in a time of economic crisis people stop spending money on clothes in favour of accessories that can transform clothes, and if, of all accessories, shoes are the most accessible, then it seems one man should know more about it than any other, and that man is Manolo. (In public conversation he is always Manolo and his shoes are “Manolos”, despite such a highly developed code of personal propriety that he calls everyone by formal terms of address).

Before there was Christian Louboutin, before there was Jimmy Choo or Rupert Sanderson or Nicholas Kirkwood, there was Manolo, inventor of the kitten heel, the man who makes shoes so delicately, decoratively sensual – so caressing of the curve of a foot – that they don’t need a logo or a sole to identify them; they create their own walk. In Sex and the City, the show that did so much to popularise women’s obsession with shoes, Manolos were the original must-haves. Sitting next to him at lunch, I feel I am at ground zero.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lunch with the FT - Jun-12

The problem is that the conversation keeps floating away. “Are shoes so important?” he asks. “Really? If I was a woman, I would be dressed in the same thing for a month and just change my hat and gloves. Maybe my shoes too; yes, I see what you mean but, really, it’s jewels that change an outfit. And I do love gloves. And I adddore hats. There are toooo many shoes now. I always tell the children,” – Blahnik is an honorary professor at the Royal College of Art and the “children” are his students – “‘Don’t do shoes! Do hats!’ And the shoes are so strange, so vulgar. I hate these platforms that are all over the place today; they are all about grabbing attention. They are suburban! I never do a platform. Well, I did, in the 1970s, but that was a bad experience.”

Manolo, it seems, doesn’t much want to talk about shoes, or women’s relationship to shoes, or even men’s relationship to women’s shoes. It doesn’t interest him. The whole lunch becomes a game where I ask a question and his replies soar and skitter off in entirely opposite directions. This might be irritating, except he performs his verbal sleight of hand with such charm. If Manolo is a giant at shoes, he is a genius at evasion. Or maybe he’s just bored with the questions (yawn, shoes again!), and too polite to admit it.

He has, after all, been at this since 1971, after leaving his childhood home in the Canary Islands, where his Czech father and Spanish mother ran a banana plantation. He made his way to the UK via the University of Geneva and met the photographer Eric Boman, who took him to New York and introduced him to then US Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. She told him to “go make shoes”. Blahnik wanted to be a set designer but he never considered saying no to the legendary (and dictatorial) fashion-ista. Perhaps to compensate for the abandonment of his early theatrical dreams, he has portrayed himself as a character ever since: all the world’s his stage, and speech is a form of performance art; each sentence contains its own peaks and valleys.

Select words, thus, are trilled and stretched, so that it is never just “adore” but “adddddore”, never “detest” but “detessssst”. As Blahnik talks, he often leans in conspiratorially; at other times he will raise his eyebrows three times in quick succession for emphasis, which he knows is funny, and then chase the gesture with a little smile. He also has a deep desire for continuity, or the theatre of the familiar – he has been coming to the Four Seasons in Milan, for example, for the past 30 years and staying in the same room. In New York, he stays at the St Regis.

“I like going to the same places, knowing the people. Tradition! I love these traditional places,” Blahnik says, shaking hands with the waiters in the restaurant of the Four Seasons, all of whom not only know him but also his gastronomic needs: he is allergic to acetic acid, so can’t stomach wine or vinegar. He loves the white bean soup (“it’s divine”) and wants to order it even though it isn’t on the menu. After a brief discussion with the waitress, he settles for vegetable soup, and we return to the subject of shoes.

“I detest this period of fantasy we were in where you had something for three seconds and then you threw it away,” he says, opening his eyes wide in horror. “The last few years have been a nightmare! It’s one thing to have a dream, but this was overkill! I was in Los Angeles last year, because they were giving me that award where they can spit on you and stomp on you. What’s it called? A star on the Walk of Style?” He means the Rodeo Drive Walk of Style, a series of plaques awarded to fashion and style legends that are embedded into a Beverly Hills pavement. “Yes, the Walk of Style. They asked me who I wanted to give me the award: Chloë Sevigny? I said, ‘No, I don’t get her.’ Lucy Liu? Oh, she was divine, I looooove oriental girls. Do you love oriental girls? And she was wearing something by [Givenchy designer] Riccardo Tisci, who is my favourite boy – what were we talking about?”

Blahnik has a tendency to monologue, and will often stop himself and self-reflexively announce – “but I vomit! I vomit” – referring to the torrent of words coming out of his mouth. He pauses only when the free-association he engages in leads him to an upsetting story, such as the one about Yves Saint Laurent’s funeral. (“I will never go to a funeral again, it was too sad. I just don’t get death at all. Yes, it’s there. But I don’t get it.”) He also stops if a friend comes in, such as Karl Lagerfeld, at which point he pops out of his chair to shake hands in delight and then introduces me.

During the entire lunch, Blahnik manages to get only three or four spoonfuls of soup into his mouth and doesn’t touch the bread. I finish my entire salad before he has reached spoonful number two. “I eat a lot of chocolate,” he whispers when I express concern. “I looovve chocolate.” The only question that stumps him is the most basic: “Why shoes?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and shrugs. “I am used to them now.” He peeks at me to see if he can get away with that. “What is this pretty thing?” he says suddenly, grabbing at the broken elastic that is supposed to mark the page in my notebook but instead flops around like a misplaced bookmark. “I like it!”

I raise my eyebrows and remind him that we were discussing shoes. “Shoes?” Blahnik sighs. “I guess ... they have a life of their own,” he ventures. “They are independent. Dresses you have to wear. But I don’t think about it that much.”

Sometimes you get the feeling that Blahnik is too busy imagining his life to examine it. Blahnik is constantly in action, reading or watching television or drawing. At his home in the elegant Georgian city of Bath, in south-west England, he has piles and piles of books and DVDs (every Billy Wilder film, every Ernst Lubitsch), along with every shoe he has ever made. There are about 11,500 of them, hidden behind faux Georgian cabinets in the walls of his house and the house next door, which he bought to contain the overspill. “It’s a shoe mausoleum,” he says gleefully. “No matter how many Diptyque candles I burn, it smells of leather. But I have a mortgage now, I had to have a mortgage for the second house, and I am worried about the mortgage, so I went to my – what do you call them, the ones who gave the mortgage, the umm ... ummmmm ... ”

Bankers?

“Yes! I went to the bankers and they said, ‘But Mr Blahnik you are OK, you have no debt,’ and I said, ‘But I have a mortgage,’ and they told me I was OK but, still, I worry ... Is your house OK? This is what is so difficult about this crisis, I think of the workers in the factories who make my shoes and I worry, I worry. The orders are going down but we need to keep them occupied. I don’t really care if the shoes sell, you know, I don’t. I don’t give a damn. I never wanted this crazy success, except I have a responsibility to these people. Well, it’s OK, they are OK now. We opened a franchise in Dubai that is doing quite well and in Brown Thomas in Ireland, but most of the time the shoes I like best are not the ones that sell anyway.”

He knows what sells because he has 200 points of sale around the world and because he designs every shoe himself. His favourites have been a pair that he made in 1973 for Ossie Clark, which featured cherry blossoms and green suede leaves that twined up the leg; ones with gigantic buttons (“from my button period in the 1980s”); shoes made from coral and pony skin that appeared in an exhibit at the Design Museum in London in 2003; and shoes from this season’s collection called “Toubid”, high-heeled ankle-strap sandals featuring tiers of cut work around the arch of the foot. The ones his customers like best tend to be the court shoes, which he thinks are “very conventional”, especially when they come in “stupid colours like dusty pink. It’s the safe shoe!”

He makes all sorts of heels but says that his favourite height is 3cm, which is a mid-height. (He also does 5cm.) He is currently also very interested in flats because “they are the most difficult shoes to walk in and be divine and gracious – they make you walk like a reindeer. The last time women really knew how to walk well in flats was the 1950s. You can see it in the movies.

“It took me 10 years to really learn how to make a proper shoe and I’ve never made a perfect shoe,” he continues, waving away coffee and cookies. “I’ve come close, but never. I still have to do that. Oh, there is so much to do. I thought I would get more blasé over time but I have just gotten more neurotic. Do you know, I don’t watch the news any more? I refuse to lose my optimism ... ” And again, he is off, far, far from the product, covering the (bunion-ridden, calloused) reality underneath with a surface of silken, satin, sequinned words that roll and tumble over each other, on and on, as the restaurant gradually empties, and he is still talking as he escorts me to the door, and on to the next show.

Vanessa Friedman is the FT’s fashion editor

..................................................

La Veranda
Four Seasons Hotel, Milan, Italy

Mozzarella and asparagus salad €26.50
Vegetable soup €20.00
Sparking water €7.50
Still water €7.50
Total €61.50

..................................................

Bianca, Britney and other Manolo moments

US Vogue editor Anna Wintour swears by them. In a foreword to the book Manolo Blahnik Drawings, published by Thames & Hudson in May 2003, she writes: “I wear no shoes but his.”

In the same book, Madonna is quoted as saying: “Manolo Blahnik’s shoes are as good as sex ... and they last longer.”

By the 1990s, the word “Manolos” had entered popular culture as shorthand for expensive, stylish shoes. Each season’s styles whet the appetite of stylists and shoe enthusiasts everywhere. Here is a selection of Manolo Blahnik’s best pop culture moments:

An early sighting
To celebrate her 27th birthday in 1977, Bianca Jagger rode a white horse to the legendary New York disco hotspot Studio 54, wearing a full-length dress and bejewelled Manolo Blahnik sandals.

What a Carrie on
Manolos were thrust into the television limelight when columnist and shoe addict Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), heroine of the 1998-2004 series Sex and The City, was seen tottering around Manhattan in Blahnik stilettos.

They even formed the narrative basis of two episodes – in “What Goes Around Comes Around” (2000), Bradshaw is mugged for her shoes, while in “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (2003), she is invited to a party where guests are asked to take off their shoes – and someone makes off with her Manolos. In the mugging incident, Bradshaw pleads: “You can take my Fendi baguette, you can take my ring and my watch, but don’t take my Manolo Blahniks.”

In last year’s movie version, a pair of blue satin Manolos plays a central role in the plot as the catalyst that reunites jilted bride Carrie with her fiancé Mr Big.

Pop go the divas
Britney Spears wears lace-up black patent leather Blahnik sandals with a pink Swarovski encrusted heel in the video for last year’s comeback single “Womanizer”. Jennifer Lopez sports Blahnik’s take on the famous Timberland boot in her video for her 2002 single “Jenny from the Block”. The same style graces Beyoncé’s feet in the 2003 video for her song “Bonnie & Clyde”.

Small screen, big presence
Apart from Sex and the City, Manolos have featured in many TV shows, notably in the British comedy Absolutely Fabulous (1992-2004), in which Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) often sports the designer’s shoes, and a 1991 episode of The Simpsons, in which Marge wears a pair of Manolo mules. In the 2005 TV movie The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s red shoes are Manolos. In US telenovella Ugly Betty, personal assistant Marc St James (Michael Urie) hears the ominous footsteps of the editor-in-chief walking down the corridor. His reaction encapsulates the designer’s status in the fashion world: “Manolo Blahnik fall 2008! Only one person in this office knows how to wear those shoes.”

Valentina Zannoni

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

WSJ: The Forgotten Market Online - Older Women

ON STYLE
MAY 21, 2009

The Forgotten Market Online: Older Women

New Fashion Sites Target Youth -- Though Most Web Apparel Sales Are to Women Over 35

By CHRISTINA BINKLEY

Here was my ideal outfit for Monday morning here in Los Angeles, according to my daily, personalized StyleCaster email: an oversized gray T-shirt and black tights.

Robert De Michiell

StyleCaster is among a new generation of Web sites that are trying to solve a stubborn problem: how to make fashion-shopping Web sites more than simply online catalogs. Using video and social-networking techniques, Stylecaster, ShopFlick, SmashingDarling and other sites aim to connect us with new indie designers, stylists and each other, all the while presenting items we can buy.

It's an intriguing idea. Fashion retailers went online back when Bill Gates had red hair, but few have improved on the catalog format perfected by Sears & Roebuck. StyleCaster offers daily personalized weather and fashion "forecasts," news and the opportunity to link to other users, who include stylists and designers. The site aims to serve as the "Facebook of fashion," says spokeswoman Fernanda Valente.

The idea sounds broad and accessible, as online shopping should be. Yet one group may not feel so welcome on StyleCaster: women over 35. The styles featured there appear to be largely designed by and for twentysomethings. The way the technology works, the outfit suggestions should improve as I click on more stuff I like -- but so far, the clothes have been so young and casual I haven't found much to click on.

Robert Di Michiell

Here lies a problem common to most of these otherwise forward-thinking fashion sites. After the initial fun is over, weather forecasts, friends' groups, and video can seem gimmicky, and when the sites present youthful styles like that pintucked T-shirt and tights to a grown woman headed to the office on Monday morning, they can seem downright disconnected.

David Grant, founder and CEO of the fashion-video-focused ShopFlick, told me over lunch recently that his target customer is between 18 and 34 years old. Mr. Grant is former president of Fox TV. Why target the under-34 crowd? "It felt right because it's what I've been doing all my career," said Mr. Grant, who is 53.

Are online marketers so youth-conscious -- because it feels right -- that they're ignoring lucrative markets just when they're most needed? The Internet is neither new nor young. The fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is women over 55, according to the Tracking Facebook blog. And the underlying assumption that young people are still the Web's most fertile market doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

In fact, 65% of online apparel sales go to women over age 35, according to market researcher NPD Group. Among these, the fastest-growing sales are to women between 55 and 64 years old -- a boomer population that has always been known for its willingness to indulge.

"It's so stupid," says David Wolfe, creative director of Doneger Group, fashion industry consultants. "The people doing the programming are still deluding themselves that the 18-to-34-year-old market is going to save them."

In fact, it's grandmothers who may save them. Online sales to women aged 25-34 fell 8% in the year ended in March, but sales to 55-to-64-year-olds rose 11% -- recession be damned.

The strength of the older market -- online and off -- is a key reason why Carmen Marc Valvo, the designer of elegant eveningwear, spent a weekend at a San Antonio AARP convention this month. "They are an overlooked demographic that is a primary customer for our brand," says the designer's spokesman, Frank Pulice.

At Saks.com, Saks Fifth Avenue's Web site, the average age of an online customer is 42, and she spends an average of $400 when she visits. "We wouldn't be getting that if we were limited to 18 to 34," says Denise Incandela, president of Saks's online division, which the company considers its second-biggest store after its New York flagship.

Of course, Stylecaster and the like didn't pioneer fashion's youth fixation, which has existed at least since the 1970s. (Indeed, that movement was launched by the same boomer generation that is now being overlooked.)

Moreover, the sites are still new and evolving. A spokeswoman for Stylecaster, which was launched earlier this year, says it doesn't "really have an age demographic," but it focuses on roughly 18 to 45. In the future, it may add a feature that would allow users to choose types of clothes, such as casual, formal or work-appropriate.

But selling to an older online audience may require a different tack. At Saks, which has been testing online videos of models moving in clothes, "we're not seeing as good results as we'd hoped" in sales, says Ms. Incandela. More effective for Saks is the capacity to show products from all angles -- including inside handbags -- when the cursor is waved over the photo, requiring fewer click-throughs. Among other new bells and whistles, there are "silhouette shots" of handbags and jewelry showing how things look on a silhouette of a body.

Another fashion Web site, MyShape.com, adds a dimension of old-school service to the Internet catalog model. After a customer types in a series of detailed body measurements -- about 20 minutes' worth of effort -- the site eliminates styles that won't work for a certain body type, suggesting workable pieces with surprising success. The shopping experience is more pleasurable because less time is wasted sleuthing through unworkable styles.

I'm in favor of Web surfing and social networking. I have a Facebook page, and I tweet on Twitter as BinkleyOnStyle. But when it comes to online shopping, there may be a self-fulfilling prophecy at work: I can't find much appeal in sites that market only to twentysomethings. Thus, when I don't buy from those sites, they may continue to believe that the "hasn't-bought-a-house-yet" demographic is their best bet.

Find me at christina.binkley@wsj.com, at Twitter.com/BinkleyOnStyle and, for subscribers only, at WSJ.com/Community.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D8

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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FT: A fortune coined from cheerfulness

A fortune coined from cheerfulness

By Rebecca Knight

Published: May 19 2009 20:05 | Last updated: May 19 2009 20:05

When brothers Bert and John Jacobs were in their early 20s, they bought a beat-up old Plymouth Voyager minivan – nicknamed “the Enterprise” – stocked it full of T-shirts they had designed, and went on road trips up and down the east coast selling their wares on college campuses.

They covered their costs selling the shirts for about $10 apiece, but it was a meagre existence. They slept in the van, lived on peanut butter and jam sandwiches and every so often would scrounge to buy a pizza or rely on one of their customers to sneak them into a school cafeteria.

“People say, ‘Oh that must have been tough.’ But it wasn’t that tough, we were young and strong,” shrugs John, the younger by three years. “There was a hope it would lead to something big, but we were doing something we liked to do. We were selling our artwork, travelling, meeting new people, and watching the girls go by. On slow days, if the weather was decent, we’d toss around a Frisbee.”

Twenty years later, the Jacobs brothers are still hawking T-shirts and still playing Frisbee. As co-founders of Life is Good, a ­Boston-based apparel and accessories company that last year had sales of $120m, the Jacobses unapologetic­ally peddle a message of optimism and an appreciation for the small pleasures of life.

Most of its merchandise – the company offers more than 980 items, including dog beds, travel mugs and tyre covers – features the company emblem, a stick figure named Jake, enjoying a range of outdoor pastimes: swimming, camping, fishing and golfing, to name a few. The core slogan is “Life is Good” but other taglines include: “Take your sweet time”, “Spread good vibes” and “Do what you like, like what you do”.

Charitable efforts for families whose lives are not so good

As company chiefs, John and Bert Jacobs have perfected the playful approach to doing business. As philanthropists, however, they are very serious about their work.

The company’s charitable efforts began after September 11 2001. The brothers lost friends in the terrorist attacks on the twin towers and company morale was low. “It was hard to go to work at a place like Life is Good when employees were asking: ‘Is life not good?’” says Bert. The company designed American flag T-shirts and donated the profits to United Way on behalf of families whose loved ones died in the attacks.

The following year the brothers chose two family-focused causes: Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with life-threatening diseases, and Project Joy, which offers play therapy to traumatised children.

They organised an outdoor festival with pie-eating contests, face painting and three-legged races. The Jacobs brothers view their festivals as the ultimate expression of the Life is Good brand. The events, often themed around pumpkins or watermelons, are free. They make money by selling food and T-shirts, and from donations. They have raised more than $4m for children’s charities.

The company has started its own foundation to distribute the money it raises and this year will hold a festival in Toronto, its first outside the US.

To cynical observers, this un­abashed message of cheerfulness may come across as trite. But the brothers – both of whom are six foot five and have a New England mountain-man look, with ruddy complexions and unruly heads of ginger hair – insist that this is a misinterpretation.

“The little things in life are the big things,” says Bert. “If you think you’ll be happier when you get that promotion or that two-car garage, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

Adds John: “It’s not: life is great, or life is perfect, or life is easy. It’s not an exclamation point. It’s acknowledging that there is bad in the world, but don’t harp on it.”

The brothers grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Their father worked in a machine shop; their mother was a homemaker who raised six children (they are the youngest siblings.) They lived in a small house with four bedrooms and describe their childhood as “happy chaos”.

“Despite having limited funds, Mom was always laughing and singing,” recalls Bert. “She is a big part of the inspiration for the brand.”

After college, the two began selling T-shirts at small-town street fairs and on college campuses, and supplemented their income by supply teaching. At first, selling the shirts, which featured abstract art or dancing figures, was just a bit of fun, a “financially accessible way to go into business”, according to John. “But we also wanted to communicate a message.”

During long days on the road, the two discussed bigger ideas. “We talked about the media inundating our culture with negative information. There’s no six o’clock news any more. There’s only the six o’clock murder report,” says Bert. “We wondered: is there something we could create that’s about what’s right with the world, rather than what was wrong? Could we create an icon that could be a symbol of optimism?”

In 1994, on a hiatus from one of their road trips, the Jacobses threw a keg party. At the time, they lived in a flat near Boston; their walls were covered with drawings and they encouraged guests to be as artistic as they wished.

The two noticed that their friends gravitated towards a simple sketch by John: a cartoon face wearing a black beret, a pair of sunglasses and a wide grin. Beneath the drawing, friends wrote things such as: “This guy has life figured out” and “My hero”.

They felt they were on to something but they needed more consumer research. Their solution: another kegger. They set up an easel in their living room and on it wrote 50 sample mottos for their cartoon figure. Once again they encouraged their friends to leave comments. “Life is good” was the clear winner.

The Jacobses printed 48 T-shirts with a picture of Jake and the winning motto. The next day they set up a booth at a street fair in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT. They sold out in 45 minutes.

“It was all different kinds of people who were buying them: skateboard punks, Harley-Davidson riders, suit-and-tie guys who worked in the financial district, schoolteachers. It was such a broad base,” says Bert.

“In five-and-a-half years of selling T-shirts, we hadn’t seen anything like it,” adds John. “Half-way through the pile, we looked at each other: it was scary. We’d finally found what we were looking for.”

After the initial success, the Jacobses took their idea direct to retailers and trade shows in New York City. They had done this before with previous T-shirt ventures but had had little success. This time, retailers were receptive.

They had found their niche, but had no idea how to run a business. They sent out shipments without invoices; they wrote orders on top of old pizza boxes in their flat; they did not even own a fax machine or a computer.

Kerrie Gross, a friend and neighbour who worked as a paralegal, helped computerise the brothers’ invoices and run their day-to-day operations. “We had a financial guy tell us we’d need to make $250,000 in sales in order to afford to hire an employee. He might as well have told us we’d need to make $50bn,” says John, because it seemed like such an impossibly large sum.

In its first year, the company made $260,000. They hired Ms Gross and a number of other friends who remain partners in the business, in which the Jacobses hold an 80 per cent stake. It earned $1.2m in 1997 and $2m in 1998. Today it has 4,500 distributors operating in 30 countries.

The brothers have no interest in selling their business, or taking it public. In the face of recession, they remain upbeat.

“Whether the economy is up or down, or whether we’re at war, people need optimism,” Bert says. “I think it was Churchill who said: ‘I am optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else’.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

WSJ: High Anxiety in the Underwear Department

ON STYLE
MAY 14, 2009

High Anxiety in the Underwear Department

Men's Drawers Now Come in a Vexing Array of Cuts and Fabrics; One Shopper's Brief Tale

By CHRISTINA BINKLEY

Boxers or briefs? For decades, this choice has been considered a key to a man's inner self.

No more. Assailing men's identities are a jumble of underwear options, such as the boxer-brief and the gripper trunk, not to mention the Y-back thong.

Style columnist Christina Binkley recently dragged her husband underwear-shopping. Amidst a cacophony of colors, patterns, styles and something called "profile-enhancers," what's a grey-boxers-only type guy to do?

As my husband learned while shopping last week, men's underwear these days is a whole new fashion segment. Men's undies come in a variety of silhouettes (such as boxer, brief, or trunk), rises (such as low, mid or high), fit options (such as relaxed or slim), colors and patterns. The fabrics include not only the traditional woven or knit cotton but also Lycra, Spandex and various "microfiber" synthetics.

Jockey's 3D-Innovations Seamfree Microfiber undies have "eight-way stretch" and offer the service of "sculpting and supporting muscular movement" -- which sounds suspiciously like a men's version of the Spanx body-shapers. To further flatter the male physique, there are padded briefs and "profile-enhancing" briefs.

"What was once a commodity seems to have become a fashion accessory," says Alan Feldman, a cotton-boxers man who lives and shops in Las Vegas.

Men's underwear -- now a $3.1 billion U.S. market, according to market researcher NPD Group -- was once a staid area. Fathers passed their habits and brands along to their sons. A man who wore boxers in his twenties could expect to meet his maker in the same style.

Today, men are confronted with new styles in nearly every aspect of their lives, from shampoo to shoes. Newfangled materials and fashion-forward silhouettes encourage men to shop more, so the casual-clothes department is now a sea of grommets, shrunken jackets and flood-length pants.

The prices have changed, too. The Calvin Klein Steel Gripper Trunk is $24. At Target, a two-pack of men's Merona house-brand boxers is just $4. Many of the new undergarments arrive in fancy packaging such as mirrored cellophane and carry exotic, inscrutable names such as Calvin Klein's BXR-Matrix line, which sounds like a motorbike but is actually knit boxers.

"We're doing underwear with all of our energy and all of our creativity," says Bob Mazzoli, chief creative officer of Calvin Klein Underwear, which was an early leader in introducing stylish men's underwear.

Though its best sellers in the U.S. are the classic brief and the classic boxer-brief, Calvin Klein offers 15 underwear "groups," such as Steel and Pro-Stretch. Mr. Mazzoli says all the different styles seek to entice different types of customers, such as "comfort men" -- likely to go for briefs -- and "sports men" -- interested in such features as support and stretchy fabrics.

"We want to give him something that he can engage with and not be just that boring choice," Mr. Mazzoli says. "We don't think of it as just underwear."

My husband thinks of it as just underwear. When we went shopping last week, Jim planned to rush to an important meeting after grabbing a handful of his favorite boxer-briefs. He had 30 minutes in Macy's underwear department, which seemed like plenty of time.

Then he began shopping. He began opening boxes of "body-stretch lo-rise trunks" to ascertain whether they looked anything like the gray cotton knits he wears at home. Pondering a pair of trunks, he commented, "Somehow it looks just like a brief, doesn't it?" For the record, trunks are shorter than a knit boxer but longer than briefs. "I just want something in gray," he said several times.

Soon, Jim was pacing, brows knitted, with handfuls of underwear. Each rack offered a fresh discovery. Jockey's low-cut "Echelon" boxers came in gray, which pleased him, but then he began to consider shaking things up with white.

Often, men's fashion decisions get relegated to the women who love them -- women being accustomed to an array of choices. The vast majority of men's clothing in the U.S. is purchased by women, says Bridget Brennan, chief executive of Female Factor, a consulting agency focused on marketing to women. "In almost every society in the world, women bring procurement into the home," says Ms. Brennan, who buys her husband's underwear.

This is true in our home, too. Yet Jim seemed intrigued by the possibilities. Indeed, choice seemed to loosen Jim's natural reserve. He stopped at a rack of green and yellow Polo Ralph Lauren boxer shorts with hula girls and palm trees. "Would you get me these?" he asked. "Honestly?"

His attention was also arrested by a line called "sculptured support." He figured he could wear the undershirts on his daily runs until I blurted that they looked like ladies' shapewear. He sped away.

Thirty-five minutes later, Jim's shopping was unfinished and he was running late. He made a mad dash for the cash register.

Later, Jim discovered that a box claiming to contain a thigh-hugging gripper trunk actually held a pair of low-rise, button-front briefs. No matter. I tried them on, and I like them.

Lori Hawkins/Elaine Korn Ltd for The Wall Street Journal; Model:Greg Nalbone of Parts Models, NY

• Subscribers, please join my Journal Community, where you can share questions and ideas, at WSJ.com/Community. Twitterers can follow me at Twitter.com/BinkleyOnStyle.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D6

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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FT: Hand-crafted shoes made to last

Hand-crafted shoes made to last

By Alice Tozer

Published: April 25 2009 02:05 | Last updated: April 25 2009 02:05

Most women love shoes and shoe shopping. But if your feet are wide or narrow or differently sized, a shoemaking course to create a perfectly fitting pair may be more satisfying than buying your own.

My chosen course is held in the workshop of boutique shoe shop Black Truffle, on London’s Warren Street. I begin by getting acquainted with my last – a heavy plastic mould in my size that will dictate every angle of the ballerina pumps I’m about to make. I had the option to make a pair of mules but felt ballerina pumps were more en vogue.

Some old-fashioned girly fun begins. Melissa Needham, founder of the shop and our instructor, sends us rummaging through a treasure chest of material scraps. Soon, I’m “closing the upper”: pinning black-and-white tartan material and lining on to my last. In between bashes with a hammer, we hear how making lasts is a dying art, and get some insider anecdotes about Jimmy Choo.

Day two is dedicated to the sole. I insert a toe puff into the shoe and use the heat gun to mould it smooth. We race against the clock to add our ribbons and bows. I start to wonder how much my “designer” shoes would fetch on eBay, but can’t bear the thought of giving them away, especially now they are carefully wrapped in tissue paper in a box. They’re more comfortable than many pairs I’ve bought.

It turns out that several of my shoemaking companions intend to start their own shoe businesses; the enthusiasm was catching. Having invested in the know-how, I’d only need to buy a last and some technical tools and dust off the sewing machine to run up a few more pairs for myself.

...............

The details

Two-day classes (£266) twice a month in London, www.prescottandmackay.co.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Economist: Keeper of the flame - Zappos

FACE VALUE

Face value

Keeper of the flame

Apr 16th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Tony Hsieh of Zappos.com keeps the dotcom spirit alive

Zappos

VISITING the headquarters of Zappos.com in Henderson, near Las Vegas, is like entering a time warp that whisks you back ten years to the heyday of the internet boom. There are the outlandish decorations adorning walls and cubicles, including jungle creepers that hang from the ceiling and a menagerie of toy monkeys and other creatures. There are the boisterous employees, some of whom rattle cowbells, shake pompoms and bellow greetings as visitors pass their desks. And there are the accoutrements of a typical dotcom start-up, including a visiting masseuse and generous helpings of free food for “Zapponians”.

But this is no exercise in nostalgia. Instead, Zappos is the site of an ambitious business experiment led by Tony Hsieh, the firm’s 35-year-old boss. His goal is to create a corporate culture that allows Zappos to prosper by providing world-beating customer service, no matter what business it is involved in. From its origins as an online shoe-retailer founded in 1999, the company has expanded into selling clothes, consumer electronics and other items. Last year it rang up a record $1 billion in sales even as other retailers were struggling. Mr Hsieh muses out loud about the possibility that Zappos might one day enter the hotel or airline industries, perhaps in the offline world.

As a firm backed by venture capital—Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious investors, has a stake in the company—Zappos has an interest in talking up its future prospects. But Mr Hsieh genuinely seems to admire firms such as Britain’s Virgin Group, which has taken its reputation for being cool, gutsy and disruptive and applied it in many different industries. He reckons Zappos can cultivate a reputation for outstanding customer service to the point where it, too, can become a springboard into several markets. He once described Zappos as “a service company that just happens to sell shoes”.

In the flesh, however, Mr Hsieh is the antithesis of Sir Richard Branson, Virgin’s ebullient founder. Whereas Sir Richard is a charmer and a showman, Mr Hsieh is a reserved, soft-spoken computer-science graduate from Harvard University. But like Sir Richard he has a nose for a deal and a will to succeed. In 1998 Mr Hsieh sold LinkExchange, an online-advertising network that he had co-founded, to Microsoft for $265m. He used the proceeds to set up an investment fund, and one of the start-ups it backed was Zappos, a name inspired by zapatos, the Spanish word for shoes. Sensing the firm’s potential, Mr Hsieh moved across to become its chief executive in 2000.

Since then, he and his team have focused their efforts on creating a distinctive culture at the company. Among other things, Zappos has drawn up a set of ten values, including exhortations always to “deliver WOW through service” and to “create fun and a little weirdness”. Zappos publishes an annual “Culture Book” in which many of the firm’s 1,400 staff explain what its culture means to them. It may all sound tiresome and gimmicky, but the firm bases half of an employee’s performance review on how well each person has lived up to the company’s values.

The firm’s recruitment is also geared to identifying those with a Zappos frame of mind. Potential recruits are asked questions such as “Who is your favourite superhero, and why?” and “On a scale of one to ten, how lucky are you?” And in their first weeks with the company, new employees are offered $2,000 to quit—a significant sum for call-centre trainees who start on $11 per hour. The idea is to weed out anyone with doubts about whether Zappos is really for them. Last year just three people took the cash.

Zappos pays a lot of attention to recruitment and training because it then gives staff plenty of freedom to get on with their jobs. For instance, call-centre employees are urged to do whatever they think is appropriate to rectify a customer’s problems without having to seek a manager’s approval. “You have as much power to help a customer as Tony does himself,” says one employee. Although this laissez faire philosophy can cause chaos at times, the results are impressive: three-quarters of Zappos’s sales come from repeat customers and its revenues are still growing this year, albeit more slowly than before.

All this culture-building comes at a cost, however. After several years of just breaking even, Zappos was profitable in 2007 and again last year. But Mr Hsieh sees this “investment” as creating a platform for future growth. It is also designed to differentiate Zappos from other online retailers such as Amazon.com. His efforts have attracted the attention of other firms and Zappos is cashing in on this by launching a subscription-based service for those who want to learn about its unusual ethos and methods.

Tweets to woo

Mr Hsieh’s willingness to share information does not stop there. An avid user of Twitter, a micro-blogging service, he encourages his staff to tweet along with him (their collective postings are on display at twitter.zappos.com). As well as underlining the firm’s commitment to transparency, the tweeting helps bring Zappos to the attention of new customers and further cements its relations with existing ones, who can see the people behind what would otherwise be an impersonal online shop. Twitter can also be a useful outlet for employees: there was plenty of tweeting going on when Zappos had to lay off 124 staff last November because of the recession, for example. Staff say that the company’s open approach to communicating about the lay-offs and its generous severance packages helped to soften the blow.

Mr Hsieh must be hoping that the recession will not have a more lasting effect on shoppers’ habits. Although it has a site, 6pm.com, that sells heavily discounted merchandise, Zappos relies on people paying full price for most of the products it sells, in return for outstanding service. If shoppers become much more price-sensitive, Mr Hsieh’s model might come unstuck. But for now, Zappos is still all about delivering the WOW.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Unswing in men's clothing market

Upswing in men’s clothing market

By Charlie Porter

Published: April 11 2009 01:42 | Last updated: April 11 2009 01:42

London mayor Boris Johnson and French president Nicolas Sarkozy should be rejoicing: apparently, their exhortations to shop, shop, shop have not fallen on deaf ears after all. Women’s apparel sales fell 6 per cent to $15bn in the US during the first nine months of 2008 but, according to the High Net Worth report from market research agency Ledbury Research, men’s wear sales rose 1 per cent to $4bn. Apparently, when the going gets tough, the tough male ... buys clothes.

Tom Ford

This is spending that runs counter to what might be expected in a time of rising unemployment and curtailed bonuses. Men’s wear designers, tailors and retailers, in a mood of cautious optimism, tell of unexpectedly positive results.

“We’re pleased and happy,” says Tom Ford, who launched his men’s wear-only line (strong-shouldered, high-priced suits sold in stores that feel like private houses) in April 2007, towards the tail end of the economic boom. “We’re holding up well because our clothes are perceived as investments.”

“Men are loyal and tend to shop in a planned-out way,” continues Ford. “Women move from brand to brand depending on who has done a particular trend. Men go into a store and they will spend more money because they’ll buy for the whole season. They don’t look at shopping as a recreation the way women do.” A downturn, after all, makes the retail game much less fun. It should also be remembered that men still earn substantially more than women: UK government figures released in November 2008 put male full-time earnings at 17.1 per cent higher than women’s. So female shoppers feel the pinch first.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Style - Nov-24

“We’ve had 20 new clients in the past four weeks,” says Anda Rowland, owner of bespoke tailors Anderson & Sheppard. “That may not sound much, but for us it’s very strong, and a pleasant surprise. A good percentage are first-time bespoke buyers, and most are between 35 and 50. Hopefully they’ll be with us for a long while.” Rowland says that at least 60 per cent of the new clients are UK-based, so the increase isn’t just due to foreigners taking advantage of the weakened pound.

E. Tautz, the diffusion line from Norton & Sons

Other tailors tell similar stories. Huntsman, the oldest tailor on the Row, is 12 per cent up on sales so far in 2009. They point to dissatisfaction with the mass luxury market and a desire for quality as reasons for the upswing. In February, Norton & Sons had its best month since current owner Patrick Grant took over the then-dormant house in 2005. “There are times for exuberance in fashion and times for quiet elegance,” he says, “and I think right now the latter seems more appropriate. Savile Row excels at simple, understated style and enduring value, both of which I think are enormously relevant today.”

There are other signs of green shoots in the men’s wear luxury business. Ralph Lauren is about to launch its first range of watches, all using mechanical movements (unlike most other fashion brands); the cheapest, a steel chronograph, will cost £5,450. Berluti’s sales of high-end shoes for 2009 are so far said to be above those for 2008. And, at US department store Neiman Marcus, one of the biggest beauty stories of last year was a men’s-only grooming line called Alford & Hoff, which has been so successful it is now sold in both the men’s and women’s departments, so women can buy it for their partners. It’s bestselling item is a $155 serum that, when it launches at Space NK in the UK this month, will cost £140. “If a product works for a man, he will spend the money,” says Barry Alford, co-founder of the brand with Jefferson Hoffman.

Indeed, many in the men’s wear business see the downturn as a time of opportunity rather than retrenchment. “There is room for sustainable expansion in the men’s wear industry,” says Anna Zegna, image director of Ermenegildo Zegna. “The brands that are strong in this current climate should utilise the moment to gain market share.”

Berluti shoes

It is tempting to cast men’s wear as some sort of saviour of the fashion industry, but beware: even if men are spending money now, they are doing so in the same way that they have always done. “With men, it’s more about needs,” says Lucas Ossendrijver, the men’s wear designer for Lanvin’s increasingly influential and popular line. “If they buy something, it’s really because they need something.”

As a result, says Ossendrijver, “I don’t design a look, I design pieces. The pieces themselves should be special and should be able to carry the price. It’s not about a total outfit but the individual parts that make up a wardrobe.”

Men can be “schizophrenic” shoppers, according to Selfridges director of men’s wear, David Walker Smith.

“One week men will be cautious about buying suits, the next week they’ll come in and buy loads. It’s exciting as a business. It’s survival of the fittest.”

...................

Where to buy

www.tomford.com
www.anderson-sheppard.co.uk
www.h-huntsman.com
www.nortonandsons.co.uk
www.ralphlauren.com
www.berluti.com
www.alfordandhoff.com
www.neimanmarcus.com
www.spacenk.co.uk
www.zegna.com
www.lanvin.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: What to wear to the G20 summit

What to wear to the G20 summit

By Colin Cameron

Published: March 28 2009 00:38 | Last updated: March 28 2009 03:01

Although world leaders may have more pressing things than personal style on their minds during the G20 summit in London on April 2, what to wear in front of your international political counterparts remains, for many, a bone of contention. Do you use your clothes as an unspoken piece of diplomacy as did Gordon Brown, who matched Barack Obama blue tie for blue tie on his recent visit to Washington, or do you declare your independence with a loosening of the tie, or even a cuban heel, à la Nicolas Sarkozy?

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Style - Nov-24

“There are rules, and much of the proceedings are formal and very conservative,” says Roberto Girombelli of Italian tailor Duca Sartoria, which has ateliers in Milan, New York and Moscow. “Generally, I’d expect Americans to dress for comfort, Russians to favour cuts that underline the body’s natural shape, with Italians placing the highest premium on style, favouring styles that smooth over physical eccentricities.”

Girombelli believes the overcoat can be one of the best ways to express personal taste within the political forum, advising “something in natural fibres – wool or mohair, as cotton will crease too easily – with a cloth weight of no more than 200g. Dark blue is better than dark grey.”

As well as the coat, Girombelli suggests that some detail in the tie is a good way of revealing your personality, such as a light-blue design on a dark-blue background:“Different colours would be too much of a contrast,” he says.

The summit’s black-tie occasions are the ones that will offer the least scope for personal statements of style, Girombelli adds. “The tie must be black but could possibly include a jacquard design.”

Michael Booth, chairman of the shirtmakers Hilditch & Key, the long-time supplier of shirts to France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy, agrees with Girombelli that the “global uniform” of dark suits plus blue or white shirts that politicians favour is hard to personalise. Booth suggests those attending G20 opt for a brightly coloured tie to convey an upbeat approach. “A yellow tie can lift those around you as well as onlookers,” he says. “Indeed, I tend to think this way myself. During difficult times such as these, we do need brightening up.”

According to Booth, Sarkozy favours the same plain blue shirt with a dark blue tie for appearances both at home and abroad. “On camera, the tie can look almost black,” he warns, sensing that not even bankers want to dress in these traditional banking styles nowadays. “A red tie is no longer the colour favoured by the financial world. Of course, in politics your choice can have ideological implications,” he adds.

Timothy Everest, a London bespoke tailor who dresses Tom Cruise and David Cameron, has been asked to supply ties as commemorative gifts for those attending G20 in London, which may inspire Sarkozy to deviate from his traditional taste. Everest believes that of all the nations, the Japanese delegates set the sartorial standards, at least in terms of the official photographs. “The Japanese have always managed to look great in the V-zone of neck, shoulders and chest. They pay greater attention to the knot and understand that if you have a big head and face then you don’t want to have strong lapels or small shoulders. Another style they favour is a higher jacket lapel notch.”

Everest also believes that the Japanese have a good sense of casual style. Thanks to the success of the Japanese government’s “cool biz” campaign of 2005, which advocated tie-less meetings on the basis that air conditioning damaged the environment, Japan’s G20 delegates may be more inclined to loosen the standards, and let their ties, if not their hair, down just a touch.

And what about the style of the man we all have on the tip of our tongue? “Obama remains a natural athlete on whom clothes hang well,” says Everest. As for Gordon Brown, for whom he has made suits, Everest retains faith in the prime minister’s power to lift the mood with some seasonal suit lining. A flash of sky blue on the inside of his jacket and those watching might take the hint: here is a leader who sees clear skies ahead.

www.ducasartoria.com
www.hilditchandkey.co.uk
www.timothyeverest.co.uk

Colin Cameron’s book ‘You Bet: The Betfair Story’, published by HarperCollins this month

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Economist: The other Obama

Lexington The other Obama Mar 19th 2009 From The Economist print edition Let Michelle be Michelle Illustration by KAL BY ANY measure Michelle Obama is a remarkable first lady. She is highly educated, with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, and professionally accomplished, having worked for a top law firm, a big-city government and a big hospital. And she is the first first lady who is the direct descendant of slaves. Yet what have we heard about this paragon since her husband won the election? That she likes to display her “perfectly toned” arms in public. That she has a penchant for mixing designer clothes with J. Crew. That she and her husband had a romantic dinner together in a four-star Italian restaurant. Shortly after the election Rebecca Traister took aim in Salon, an online magazine, at the “momification of Michelle”. But since then Americans have been forced to endure the “Oprah-isation” and “Jackiefication” as well. Mrs Obama has graced the cover of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O, made several appearances on low-end talk shows and earned the sobriquets “America’s next top model” and “leader of the fashionable world”. The news stories about Mrs Obama are almost entirely devoted to fluff. CNN has run a segment on “how to get Michelle Obama’s toned arms”. Every fashion magazine worth the name has run pieces on “the secrets of Michelle’s style”. During the presidential campaign the New Yorker published a cover cartoon of Mrs Obama, complete with an Afro and a machine gun, exchanging a “terrorist fist jab” with her husband; the cover of the March 16th issue features the first lady strutting on the catwalk in three different outfits (none of them featuring bare arms). This is more than just a response to public demand. The White House has been doing its best to turn the first lady into a celebrity mother-cum-clothes-horse. Her White House website describes her “first and foremost” as “Malia and Sasha’s mom” before adding that, “before she was a mother”, she was “Fraser and Marian Robinson’s daughter”. The White House has even engaged in debates with the press about whether Mrs Obama ought to go bare-armed to formal events. It is not difficult to understand why the White House has chosen this tack. Hillary Clinton’s determination to act as a virtual co-president back in 1993 helped to create a backlash against her husband’s administration. It also raised uncomfortable questions about power and accountability. Given America’s continued neuroses about race, an outspoken black first lady might prove to be even more divisive than an outspoken white one. Mrs Obama is carrying a certain amount of baggage of her own—though not as much as Mrs Clinton. The Chicago hospital where she worked increased her salary from $122,000 to $317,000 shortly after her husband became a senator. She and her husband bought their $1.65m house with the help of a local property developer, Tony Rezko, who is now in prison. There is no shortage of conservative journalists who are willing to present her as “the bitter, anti-American, ungrateful, rude, crude, ghetto, angry Michelle Obama”, to quote one blogger. So why not just wrap her in designer clothes and be done with it? Mrs Obama’s favourability rating now stands at 63%, up from 32% a year ago. She has embraced an admirable collection of good causes—helping women balance their careers and their families, supporting military families and encouraging national service. And recession-racked America craves a bit of glamour. But there is a danger that the White House is overreacting to Mrs Clinton’s failures back in 1993-94, and a worry that all this fluff is both demeaning to Mrs Obama and disappointing for some of her husband’s most passionate supporters, particularly professional women. Mrs Obama did not campaign as a traditional first lady, staring at her husband with dewy-eyed admiration and limiting her comments to bland pleasantries. She criss-crossed the country giving her own speeches. And powerful speeches they were too: intelligent, substantive and well-delivered. She was particularly important in shoring up her husband’s support among blacks (who were suspicious at first of his exotic background) and professional women (who were attracted to Hillary Clinton), earning the nickname “the closer” from the campaign for her ability to get people to sign up with Mr Obama. Unleash her Mrs Obama has a unique ability to act as an advertisement for the virtues of hard work and stable families. She grew up in a solid working-class family on Chicago’s tough South Side, sitting down to family dinner every night, attending a local magnet school and following her brother to Princeton. She is now repeating this virtuous pattern with her own children. Mrs Obama also has a unique understanding of the precariousness of black life. Born six months before LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, she has benefited from the explosion of opportunities for blacks in both higher education and the professions. But, as a child of an area that became the subject of William Julius Wilson’s classic book “When Work Disappears”, she also knows the devastation that job losses, drugs, crime and family break-up have wrought on the black working class. More than 60% of black children these days are brought up without a father. It is arguable, of course, that Mrs Obama is already doing enough to inspire her fellow Americans without running the risks inherent in pronouncing on policy. But during the campaign she raised a lot of thought-provoking questions—about “the flimsy difference between success and failure” in America, about the removal of rungs from the ladder of opportunity, and about the plight of families at the bottom of the heap. It would be good to hear a bit more about what Mrs Obama thinks and a lot less about what she wears. Lexington now writes a blog, which is open for comment at Economist.com/blogs/lexington Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

FT: Custom-made for success

Custom-made for success

By Rebecca Knight

Published: March 17 2009 19:22 | Last updated: March 17 2009 19:22

At 6ft 3in and 190lbs, Joseph Skerritt is taller and lankier than the average man. For many years, it was his lot in life to be unable to find a well-fitting dress shirt.

“For jeans and T-shirts it’s not a big deal but dress shirts and suits? That is a pain,” says Mr Skerritt. “Either the neck is too big, the sleeves are too long, or it’s way too baggy around the waist.”

Two summers ago, during an in­ternship in China, Mr Skerritt (pictured above) visited Shanghai’s Fabric Market where hundreds of stalls peddle fabrics, threads, patterns and anything else needed to make clothes. He chose some col­ours, got measured by a tailor, and within a week he had a set of new, perfect-fitting shirts.

“That’s when I got my first taste of custom clothing,” says Mr Skerritt, 29, who recently finished an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Business. “I thought, ‘This is cool. What if I started a company that sold these over the internet?’ ”

Today, Mr Skerritt is the founder of Proper Cloth, a New York-based e-commerce dress shirt company that allows shoppers to mix and match fabrics, using computer-generated tailoring for the right fit. Its early success largely derives from being one of a growing number of start-ups that use blogging and social networking websites in place of conventional, more costly marketing. Revenues since launch last year have grown at a rate of 40 per cent a month, and it is on track to be profitable by July, with earnings of about $30,000 a month.

Mr Skerritt emptied his personal savings, scraped together about $50,000 of leftover student loan money, and racked up his credit card debt before raising about $100,000 in seed money from friends and family. He says that the use of social media, as well as being a less expensive form of marketing, provides an easy way for customers to interact with the company and each other. “We want to hear what our customers have to say,” he says. “It’s useful to us and lets our customers feel connected to and engaged with Proper Cloth.”

On Facebook, the company has more than 150 “fans”, which means that whenever the company posts a bulletin, or uploads a picture, it displays on the fans’ Facebook pages.  “It is convenient for them to see this information,” he says. “It’s also easy for them to ‘share’ anything they find interesting on Proper Cloth – such as shirt designs they like.”

Hustle, hard work and learning not to focus on VC funding

Joseph Skerritt, who goes by the diminutive of Seph, invested much of his own money in Proper Cloth because finding investors was difficult at first. Most venture capital and private equity firms he pitched to wanted to invest in pure technology-based companies. So his advice to budding entrepreneurs is to not pay too much heed to venture capitalists. “VCs are looking for the next ‘game changer’ and they’ll be unimpressed with your ‘small’ $100m opportunity,” he explains. “That’s OK. Not all start-ups are right for VC funding.

“The time you spend obsessing over each letter in your pitch deck is time you take away from building a real business. Success is not raising capital. It’s creating a profitable, sustainable business. If you can demonstrate the ability to do that, you’ll have plenty of interested investors. Meanwhile, prepare to bootstrap.”

He also stresses the hard work required. “Starting a company is not a nine to five activity. Get ready to work really hard – all the time,” he says. “And it’s about getting stuff done – not hanging out at the office – so learning how to stay focused and productive is critical. Your hustle is your edge.”

Twitter, the mini-blogging service that allows users to send and read other users’ real-time updates, also attracts prospective customers.

More unusual is the company’s own blog, written by Mr Skerritt and guest bloggers, which focuses on work, life and men’s fashion. It rec­eives about 6,000 hits a month.

Rachel Eisenberg, a business-school friend of Mr Skerritt who took on the company’s marketing plan, says it has used catchy, ac­tionable blog post titles that have a good chance of coming up in a typical Google search – an example of search-engine optimisation.

A post last month, for instance, “What to buy your boyfriend for Valentine’s Day” had 900 direct views, while “What to wear on New Year’s Eve” had 700 views. 

Other e-tailers that have had success with company blogs as marketing tools include Las Vegas-based Zappos.com, which sells shoes, clothing and other accessories, and grossed about $1bn in revenue last year. Last November, when the company laid off 124 employees, Tony Hsieh, chief executive and a popular Twitter user who has nearly 30,000 followers, broadcast the cuts – along with details about a generous severance package – in an e-mail, on his blog and with Twitter.

Mr Hsieh won plaudits from the blogosphere for the comprehensive way the lay-offs were explained to workers and customers. This level of engagement with customers usefully blurred the line between corporate communication and marketing.

Wine Library TV, which promotes straightforward wine tasting and links to an e-commerce site that sells wines by the bottle, has also used social media tools. The company’s zany chief executive Gary Vaynerchuk – dubbed a “social media sommelier” – runs a video blog that daily attracts more than 80,000 viewers, from sophisticated oenophiles to those with untrained palates. Devoted followers also convene on Wine Library’s active online forum. Last year, the company made about $55m in revenue, according to industry sources.

Meanwhile, the Student Loan Network, a website offering financial aid advice and student loan services, has increasingly used social media to its advantage. The company’s popular Financial Aid Podcast, a six-days-per-week show available on iTunes and other distribution services, gives advice on topics such as credit cards, international student issues and scholarships. According to industry obser­vers, the podcast is responsible for generating about $10m in loans for the company.

Mr Skerritt, who has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, knew that the key to his business was the website. He need­ed to create an engaging online shopping experience with detailed graphics, lush pictures and interactive 3D models. He hired software developers in eastern Europe to help build the applications.

With his website under construction, Mr Skerritt hooked up with a fabric supplier in North Carolina and enlisted advisers including social media entrepreneurs and Bill Sand, who ran Brooks Brothers’ domestic custom shirt production for 20 years.

Nevertheless, corporate lay-offs in the financial sector and down­sizing at other companies have been hitting Proper Cloth’s target demographic hard: young, professional males.

“Obviously, if this were 2006 and everyone who graduated from business school was signing on to jobs that paid $250,000 a year we’d have a lot of low-hanging fruit,” says Mr Skerritt. “We don’t have that.”

However, he says, the recession has expanded his customer profile, so that now “I’m selling shirts to government workers in Louisiana, and school teachers in Ohio”.

If the company is profitable by July as planned, Mr Skerritt and Ms Eisenberg will draw modest salaries. The business is in the process of securing an additional round of financing from an angel investor and plans to branch out into women’s clothing, men’s suits, and accessories within the next two years.

“Once you have a custom-fit shirt, you will never go back to off the rack,” Mr Skerritt says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Economist: Lip reading

Business

Cosmetics in the downturn

Lip reading

Jan 22nd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Do sales of lipstick really go up in difficult times?

RECESSIONS mean that Ferraris stay in showrooms and designer dresses on shop racks, but lipstick bucks the trend: in difficult times, women buy more of it, since it is an affordable indulgence. That, at least, is the idea behind the “lipstick index”, a term coined by Leonard Lauder, the chairman of Estée Lauder, a cosmetics firm, in the 2001 recession. In the gloomy autumn of 2001, lipstick sales in America increased by 11%.

Believers in the lipstick theory trace the phenomenon back to the Depression, when cosmetic sales increased by 25%, despite the convulsing economy. Some, like Dhaval Joshi of RAB Capital, an investment-management firm, point out that employment in the cosmetics industry has been known to rise as overall employment falls, suggesting that demand for cosmetics increases when consumer confidence is low. This was so in the recessions of 1990 and 2001, according to Mr Joshi’s recent report on what he calls the “lipstick effect”.

Not everyone is convinced. Reliable historical figures on lipstick sales are hard to find, and most lipstick believers can only point to isolated, anecdotal examples as evidence of the larger phenomenon. Data collected by Kline & Company, a market-research group, show that lipstick sales sometimes increase during times of economic distress, but have also been known to grow during periods of prosperity (see chart). In other words, there is no clear correlation.

Lipstick sales are merely the latest example of a single measure that has been seized upon because it supposedly reflects economic confidence, or lack of it. Hemlines, alcohol consumption, laxative sales and even who wins the Super Bowl have all been proposed as ways to chart recessions, with varying degrees of success. So is the lipstick index dead?

Karen Grant of the NPD Group, a market-research firm, suggests that it might make more sense to look at a wider “beauty index”, rather than lipstick alone, because she thinks it is beauty as a category that holds up well in recessions, whereas sub-categories (such as lipstick) tend to go in and out of style. Most women would sooner give up silk scarves or designer shoes than mascara or eye shadow, which they consider to be more essential. Men’s spending habits may follow a similar pattern, as they shift from spending on televisions and cars to less expensive luxuries, such as portable gadgets or personal accessories. Watch out: the “cufflink index” could be next.

FT: An open and shut case

An open and shut case

By Rhymer Rigby

Published: January 12 2009 20:33 | Last updated: January 12 2009 20:33

“I’m in the dotcom camp,” says Brent Hoberman, lastminute.com co-founder. “I don’t know many people who’d use a briefcase. For me, the most important thing is my computer so I have a blue computer sheath and I just stuff papers in that.”

Mr Hoberman’s experience is by no means unusual. A generation ago, suited men on the Clapham omnibus journeyed to work with their sandwiches and files in their regulation black briefcases. But now the briefcase is fast going the way of the bowler hat – the few still seen belong to those nearing retirement age. But what is replacing it?

Clive Gringras, a partner at the law firm Olswang, favours a rucksack, although “it’s a very smart Samsonite one”. His reasons for doing so are twofold: “On the one hand, legal papers today are measured in inches so anything meaningful would require a briefcase the size of a small house, and on the other, client confidentiality means that very few of us carry papers around anyway.”

Mr Gringras says he retired his briefcase years ago when he realised all he did with it was ferry to work and back journals that he never read. So it would seem that even briefs do not use briefcases these days.

Kevin Pratt, marketing manager of Cheapflights, the flight comparison website, prefers a brown leather over-the-shoulder man-bag. “It keeps my hands free when I’m travelling. I’ve got an iPod and a mobile and it’s big enough to carry a laptop and papers.”

He says the briefcase is impractical: “A lot of other people in our office use rucksacks because they cycle to work. But I don’t think there are any briefcases. I’m 42 and I’ve never considered carrying one.”

There have been a number of drivers contributing to the demise of the briefcase – the fact that presentations are stored on USB keys, the rise of mobiles and the BlackBerry. But the final nail in the briefcase’s coffin has probably been the relaxation of dress codes that accompanied the dotcom boom.

But while the briefcase may have been too stuffy to stay, many of its replacements have serious faults too.

Fashion designer Christian Blanken says: “Rucksacks look cute on 16-year-olds or those trekking in the Andes; record and messenger bags make you look very, very junior. As for man-bags, well, you have to feel very butch to take out something without a shoulder strap.”

Style guru Peter York takes a similar view: “I have a lovely old briefcase but it doesn’t get much use these days. I just stopped sometime in the 1990s. But I didn’t replace it with anything.”

Backpacks, he believes, make you look like you work outdoors or are going to the gym, while man-bags have never truly shaken off their alien Euro air. “I tried one once but I was never truly happy with it.” The trouble, he says, is that none of these pieces of male luggage has the kind of universal business acceptability that the briefcase once had.

For some, the solution is simply to carry nothing. Jason Gissing, Ocado co-founder, says he does not carry “a briefcase, backpack, satchel, man-bag or even a recycled biodegradable Ocado plastic bag. I only ever take my BlackBerry and a money clip with a few credit cards.”

However, Mr Gringras warns that while this might work in dressed-down companies where jeans are acceptable, in smarter offices, it is a fast route to holes in pockets, stretched trousers and ruined suits.

Mr York believes he has hit on the solution. “My answer to this is the lovely eco-friendly plastic bag – justifiable in these hard times. I carry a supermarket bag with me to all my meetings. The only qualifications are that it can’t be from a conspicuously smart shop or from an exotic place. Other than that, it’s completely serendipitous – it’s whatever I pull out of the cupboard.”

Mr Hoberman is also often spotted with a plastic bag. Yet it requires a fair amount of élan and confidence to carry off this kind of anti-style style statement.

Perhaps, suggests Mr Blanken, the solution lies in a fusion of the over-the-shoulder bag and that least lovely of all office luggage, the laptop bag. “I’ve got a Burberry leather bag that opens at the top and has some of the formality of a briefcase – it’s quite stiff and flat – but the ease of a messenger bag.”

All of which sounds like briefcase2.0, begging the question: could briefcases make a comeback? Mr Blanken thinks not. “I can certainly see more sophisticated over-the-shoulder leather bags. But a clip-open briefcase would be a very difficult proposal for a younger market.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

NY Times: What's Wrong With Vogue?

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January 1, 2009

Critic’s Notebook

What’s Wrong With Vogue?

By CATHY HORYN

NO one at Vogue, least of all its editor in chief, Anna Wintour, could have been seriously stung by a recent letter from a reader complaining that the magazine was in a rut. After all, Ms. Wintour chose to publish the letter, which chided the magazine for featuring the same women — “Gwyneth Paltrow, Caroline Trentini, Gisele Bündchen, Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, blah, blah, blah,” as the reader, Kathryn Williams of San Diego, said. “I could make a calendar of your cover girls, and it would probably repeat year after year.” She added: “Let’s face it: Vogue is getting a bit stale. It is a pity, too — because the magazine is still much better than the others.”

What is remarkable — given the rumors last month that Ms. Wintour was going to be replaced by the French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld — is that she was able to include not merely a critical view but one that accurately identifies the problem with the magazine. Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business. And it has happened in spite of a leader who “only cares what readers care about,” according to a long-time staff member.

Because of her intimidating presence, heightened by an almost unvarying personal style — the bob, the sunglasses, the extra armor of her Cheeverish clothes — Ms. Wintour, 59, is considered the ultimate fashion editor. In fact, her instincts are really those of a journalist. She has periodically updated Vogue over the last 20 years to reflect changes in the world and in women’s lives. She has introduced new photographers, beginning in the late 1980s with Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel. At the same time she has a deep respect for the work of Irving Penn, as if she knows that Mr. Penn, however contemporary his pictures, is part of the mysterious link to Vogue’s — and fashion’s — past.

“That’s the main reason I keep looking in the magazine, to see a photograph by Penn,” said Magnus Berger, an editor in his 30s who, with Tenzin Wild, recently started a publication called The Last Magazine, an oversize journal that is a blend of art book and newspaper and which its founders hope will be a platform for young talent.

This sense of history, which enriches Vogue, is much less evident today in other fashion glossies. It has been nearly wiped away at Harper’s Bazaar.

An avid follower of politics, as well as sports, she has broadened Vogue’s coverage in both arenas and put a first lady on the cover. It was one of the first national publications to write about Sarah Palin. For all the fantasy in Vogue, especially the fairy-tale kind produced by Grace Coddington, the creative director, and Annie Leibovitz, the magazine is actually quite serious. There are things to read, long pieces, from writers with distinct voices: Julia Reed on politics, Jeffrey Steingarten on food, Sarah Mower on the Paris collections.

And unlike many of her rivals, Ms. Wintour, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has largely resisted the pressure to break down content to lists and small bites. Though this faster, drive-thru approach to editorial consumption may be what more people want.

According to a writer at Condé Nast, who requested anonymity because he works at a sister publication, “Anna’s two great talents are that she understands her readers and she speaks with this incredible authority to advertisers.” Indeed, as the writer points out, Condé Nast, having monopolized high-end magazines, has a rather odd relationship with luxury advertisers — which is that these advertisers cannot afford to go somewhere else, bad economy or not. Luxury brands haven’t yet found a formula for success in digital media. Their relationship, then, with Condé Nast creates an “interesting ecology,” as the writer put it. “They keep each other in business.”

Meanwhile, though, many people have all but abandoned traditional media for Web sites and blogs. This is the locus of Ms. Wintour’s harshest critics and where rumors first surfaced that she was going to be replaced by the 50ish Ms. Roitfeld, who has made French Vogue exciting in part by drawing on the sexiness of her own act. She knows how to play with fashion’s self-referential habits.

The rumors were silly — Ms. Roitfeld runs a magazine with a circulation of 133,000, in contrast to American Vogue’s 1.2 million. But silly or not, they were extravagantly denied by Condé Nast, which took out a two-page ad in The New York Times to show Ms. Wintour’s record. It cited figures showing that Vogue had the highest number of advertising pages of any fashion magazine. Yet, in 2008, Vogue’s ad pages were down 9.6 percent, Mediaweek said, compared with an average 8 percent decline for other fashion magazines. Rivals like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, which have adopted a pell-mell style that encourages value-for-money nibbling, have fared better. The very qualities that set Vogue apart — consummate fashion judgment, a comfortableness with ideas in the shallow pool of celebrity and weight-loss articles — now seem to be narrowing its view, like an aperture shutting down.

There are too many stories about socialites — or, at any rate, too few such stories that sufficiently demonstrate why we should care about these creatures. What once felt like a jolly skip through Bergdorf now feels like an intravenous feed. To read Vogue in recent years is to wonder about the peculiar fascination for the “villa in Tuscany” story. Ditto staff-member accounts of spa treatments and haircuts.

It’s embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession. For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the “charms” of Wal-Mart and Target. A similar obtuseness permeates a fashion spread in the January issue, where a model and a child are portrayed on a weekend outing with a Superman figure. Is a ’50s suburban frock emblematic of the mortgage meltdown?

To ask what works in Vogue is in a sense to ask the same of all fashion magazines. Many do not seem to know how to relate to women in their 20s, except to throw celebrity pictures and clothes at them. Although the median age of its readers has hovered around 34 since Ms. Wintour became editor, in 1988, you don’t feel that the magazine has considered how changes like social networks and Web-based subcultures have influenced women’s ideas about themselves. This lack of awareness is reflected in Vogue’s pages.

Also, people are likely to be short of money in the coming years. Vogue, along with the fashion industry, must find a way to deal with this reality, said Grace Mirabella, who ran Vogue for 17 years until she was replaced by Ms. Wintour. “You’ve got a fashion market that doesn’t know how to do good, inexpensive clothes,” she said. “That is something which should stop whether there is a recession or not.”

The critic Vince Aletti, who is a curator of “Weird Beauty,” an exhibition of recent fashion images that will open this month at the International Center of Photography, thinks that Vogue under Ms. Wintour is still the leader in a lot of ways. “For me any magazine that publishes Penn is great, and she has been publishing some amazing work by Annie Leibovitz,” he said. Referring to Condé Nast, he added: “I think they would be crazy to get rid of Wintour, although I think the magazine needs something different. I don’t think it’s a bad-looking magazine, but it hasn’t changed in quite some time in a significant way.”

To people inside Condé Nast, like Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair and a friend of Ms. Wintour’s, it’s hard to imagine that Ms. Roitfeld would be in line to replace her unless, as he said, someone “has spiked the Kool-Aid.” If such an event were to happen, he said: “There’s a whole financial machine that would come crashing down, I would say. I’d like to see Carine talking to the people from North Beach Leather or St. John knits. It’s all very professional and businesslike at American Vogue.” As Ms. Roitfeld herself once said, with typical candor, “I’m not a business girl.”

But there is something more in Ms. Wintour’s background that makes it hard to replace her, though, inevitably, it will happen. “In newspaper terms, she is old news — the Nuclear Wintour story,” Mr. Roberts said wearily. Editors of Ms. Wintour’s generation, like the designers they champion and the photographers they protect, have a depth of knowledge not easily reproduced. Mr. Roberts said: “I’ve never seen anything from Carine that astonishes me the way that I have in American Vogue. I’ve seen kinky, sexy but not astonishing. But I did see astonishing in Vogue when Anna published a picture of Nadia Auermann having sex with a swan.” He was referring to the Helmut Newton picture from the early ’90s. That kind of subversion made American Vogue really cutting edge, Mr. Roberts said. “He’s never been replaced.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Economist: The scent of a man

Excerpt:

If you have made a good genetic choice of partner (ie, someone with a significantly different MHC), then the theory suggests that you should not be able to choose something that smells nice to them based on your own preferences. You might, though, have better luck choosing for a close relation, because she would probably have an MHC similar to your own.

Perhaps, in a world of olfactory fakery, this is one tip for the wise. If your partner has a strange knack of being able to pick out all the right perfumes, this may not be a good sign at all. And that, of course, means that the best you can hope for this Christmas is that he has bought you a perfume that you absolutely hate.

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Perfume science

The scent of a man

Dec 18th 2008
From The Economist print edition

To attract a woman by wearing scent, a man must first attract himself

Getty Images

THE very word “perfume” has feminine overtones to many male ears. Men can be sold “deodorant” and possibly “aftershave”, but the idea of all those dinky little bottles with their fussy paraphernalia is too much for the sensitive male ego. Yet no industry can afford to neglect half its potential market, and perfume-makers are ever keen to crack the shell of male reticence. Now they may know how to do so.

Craig Roberts of the University of Liverpool and his colleagues—working with a team from Unilever’s research laboratory at nearby Port Sunlight—have been investigating the problem. They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.

Half of Dr Roberts’s volunteers were given an aerosol spray containing a commercial formulation of fragrance and antimicrobial agents. The other half were given a spray identical in appearance but lacking active ingredients. The study was arranged so that the researchers did not know who had received the scent and who the dummy. Each participant obviously knew what he was spraying on himself, since he could smell it. But since no one was told the true purpose of the experiment, those who got the dummy did not realise they were being matched against people with a properly smelly aerosol.

Over the course of several days, Dr Roberts’s team conducted a battery of psychological tests on both groups of volunteers. They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. Not that surprising, perhaps. What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. The women in question were shown short, silent videos of the volunteers. They deemed the men wearing the deodorant more attractive. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.

For Unilever and other manufacturers of men’s scent, this is an important discovery. The firm’s marketing of its main product in this area, a deodorant called Lynx, plays up the so-called “Lynx Effect”—which is supposed to make men irresistibly attractive to women. Dr Roberts’s experiment, however, suggests that the advertised “Born chicka wah wah” of the product may have nothing to do with a woman’s appreciation of the smell, and everything to do with its psychological effect on the man wearing it.

Nor is this the only example of science illuminating the true role of perfumes. How they work to make people attractive is, as this example shows, not as obvious as it might seem.

Born chicka wah, ker-ching chicka ching

There are three broad theories of perfume use. One is that people employ it to mask body odours that they perceive as bad. The second is that some perfumes contain chemicals that mimic human pheromones—elusive, mysterious (and possibly mythical) substances believed by some to play a role in mating. The third is that people use it to heighten or fortify natural scent, and thus advertise sexual attractiveness or availability.

All three theories could be true. In particular, the role of perfume as an olfactory disguise is obvious. Even here, however, there are some subtle twists. Bad smells are not just a matter of poor hygiene. Illness and old age both bring characteristic odours of their own, and neither state makes people more attractive. Perfumes may spoof these messages. Hence the marketing of a new scent called Ageless Fantasy, by Harvey Prince, which claims its product disguises the “odour of ageing”, suggested to be caused by the breakdown of a particular fatty acid in the skin.

As to pheromones, whether humans have these is questionable. A pheromone is a chemical that elicits a specific behavioural response at a distance. Some insects, for example, can release sex pheromones that will attract a mate from many kilometres away. The most likely human candidate is a substance called androstadienone. This is a derivative of testosterone that is found in men’s sweat and is known, from brain-scanning studies, to promote activity in parts of women’s brains. That this results in changes in behaviour has not, however, been clearly demonstrated.

Terri Molnar, a spokeswoman for the Sense of Smell Institute, a research organisation in New York tied to the fragrance industry, says of human pheromones, “I think we believe they exist but they do not function as an attractant. They will elevate one’s mood but not attract a mate.”

The fallen sons of Eve?

The most interesting area, though, is the interaction between perfumes and natural scents that carry messages but do not have the specific properties of pheromones. Odours co-ordinate a wide range of human behaviour. Mothers can recognise their children by smell. Children can recognise each other. Relatives can be distinguished from non-relatives, even to the extent of understanding who is genetically different enough from the smeller to be a good choice of mate. The sexes themselves smell different, too, and women can glean information about a man’s social status from his smell alone.

As long ago as the 1950s, a perfumer called Paul Jellinek noted that several ingredients of incense resembled scents of the human body. It was not until 2001, however, that Manfred Milinski and Claus Wedekind of the University of Bern wondered whether there was a correlation between the perfume a woman preferred and her own natural scent. They found that there is.

The correlation is with the genes of what is known as the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). This region of the genome encodes part of the immune system. It turns out that one of the most important aspects of mate choice in mammals, humans included, is to make sure that your mate’s MHC is different from your own. Mixing up MHCs makes the immune system more effective. The MHC is also thought to act as a proxy for general outbreeding, with all the hybrid vigour that can bring. Fortunately, then, evolution has equipped mammals with the ability to detect by smell chemicals whose concentrations vary with differences in the MHC of the producer.

That means people are able to sniff out suitable MHC genomes in prospective partners. A woman, for instance, will prefer the smell of T-shirts that have been worn by men whose MHC genes are appropriately different from their own. Dr Milinski and Dr Wedekind also found an association between a woman’s MHC genes and some of her preferences for perfume. Perception of musk, rose and cardamom is correlated with the MHC. Perception of castoreum and cedar is not.

Women, it seems, choose not the kind of smell they would like on a partner, or even one that might mask a nasty odour of their own, but rather something that matches their MHC. In other words, they are advertising their own scent.

There are many useful inferences that might be drawn from this research. One would be that a woman’s choice of perfume will resist the vagaries of fashion. This may explain why most innovation in the industry involves changes in packaging and marketing, producing all that fussy paraphernalia, rather than changing what is in the bottle.

Another implication, says Dr Roberts, is that it is probably best that people choose perfumes for themselves rather than for someone else—unless they happen to know what the recipient likes. If you have made a good genetic choice of partner (ie, someone with a significantly different MHC), then the theory suggests that you should not be able to choose something that smells nice to them based on your own preferences. You might, though, have better luck choosing for a close relation, because she would probably have an MHC similar to your own.

The research also raises the question of what so-called unisex perfumes are for. In any genetically successful love match, one of the partners ought to hate a unisex perfume. Perhaps, in a world of olfactory fakery, this is one tip for the wise. If your partner has a strange knack of being able to pick out all the right perfumes, this may not be a good sign at all. And that, of course, means that the best you can hope for this Christmas is that he has bought you a perfume that you absolutely hate.

Parody of Dove's 'Campaign for real beauty'

Take Dove's ever-so-worthy 'Campaign for real beauty' and apply it to chickens. That's what the warped minds at Foster Farms did, and the result is this brilliant parody of the Dove 'Evolution' spot that showed a model being made over for a fashion shoot. Foster Farms created the film to show that in the poultry world, 'natural' may not be what it seems. It's still cute, though - Digital Media March 2008

FT: Taking a hard line on soft soap

Taking a hard line on soft soap

By Michael Skapinker

Published: July 6 2008 15:25 | Last updated: July 6 2008 15:25

In 2003, Patrick Cescau sat down with fellow Unilever directors to hear a presentation from the Dove soap and cleansing products team. The Dove people had an idea for an advertising campaign that would feature women of all shapes and sizes rather than svelte models.

They showed the directors a film of girls talking about the pressure to look perfect, and how disappointed they were when they didn’t. The girls in the film were the directors’ daughters. Mr Cescau says watching his own teenager talk about her worries greatly affected him. He had no idea the Dove team had interviewed her, although his wife knew.

“It suddenly becomes personal,” he says. “You realise your own children are impacted by the beauty industry, how stressed they are by this image of unattainable beauty which is imposed on them every day – and the loss of self- esteem and other trouble going with it, anorexia and all of that.”

The Dove campaign, which won two Grand Prix Cannes Advertising Awards, is touted by Unilever as an example of its philosophy of “doing well by doing good” – improving women’s self-image while still selling plenty of soap and cleanser.

When he became chief executive of Unilever two years later, Mr Cescau was determined to take the responsible business philosophy even further. Not everyone approv­ed. He recalls the time of his first annual meeting in the role. “The company was not doing well. There was an article – I don’t think it was in the FT – saying that I was draping myself in a flag of corporate social responsibility to excuse poor performance. I was so angry with that.”

We are talking in 59-year-old Mr Cescau’s office in Unilever House, the food and consumer goods group’s newly refurbished London headquarters. Although Unilever’s roots go back to Victorian times, Mr Cescau is its first sole chief ex­ec­utive. The group previously had two – one based in the UK and one in the Netherlands.

While Mr Cescau, in open-necked pink shirt and dark blue jacket with elegant red check, is distinctly French, he is a Unilever lifer. After joining Unilever France 35 years ago, his career has taken him to Germany, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Portugal and the US. His multinational executive team has no British or Dutch nationals.

Yet his view of what he wishes to achieve harks back to Unilever’s past. “I want to be remembered as the first CEO, the one that transformed Unilever and brought it back to its former glory,” he says. What had Unilever lost before he took over? “We had forgotten some of our values, who we are, what makes us a different company. Our commitment to sustainability, to vitality, was always there but we were not recognising it as a source of strength and source of difference the way we do it today,” he says.

Unilever has been known for its community involvement since William Hesketh Lever, founder of Lever Brothers, began building a garden village for his workers at Port Sunlight on the River Mersey in 1888. When Lever Brothers mer­ged with Margarine Unie of the Netherlands to form Unilever in 1930, that philanthropic tradition continued.

In keeping with the modern trend, “sustainability” is the word Mr Cescau uses rather than philanthropy or even corporate social responsibility. “The point is sustainability cannot be simply about being nice. It has to be about business logic,” he says.

First, Unilever cannot thrive in a degraded natural environment. “As I used to say: ‘No fish, no fish finger. No water, no detergent powder.’ ” The “used to say” is because the fish business was sold in 2006.

Unilever’s concentrated detergent powder is a good example of both helping the environment and improving profitability. “Yes, the margins are better for us. However, along the value chain of this product we use less water, less space, less plastic, less chemicals and packaging.”

Second, the past few years have seen the rise of the “conscience consumer”, someone who wants to know goods have been produced in ways that do not damage the environment or use child labour. Consumers, Mr Cescau says, are increasingly looking behind the brand. “Our children are becoming much more discerning in the way they use the internet, so they have a point of view on the company. Building reputational capital in this area is critical.”

In pursuit of the conscience consumer, Unilever wants all the tea it buys to be certified as sustainable by the Rainforest Alliance. About half the tea it sells in the UK is now Rainforest Alliance-certified.

Third, Unilever expects much of its growth to come from developing-world consumers. The company has been influenced by CK Prahalad, the Indian-born, US-based business academic who has encouraged companies to look for the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”.

Unilever has long sold sachets rather than whole, unaffordable containers of detergent in Indian villages, where it has helped distributors set up in business. Prof Prahalad recently joined Mr Cescau as a non-executive director of Pearson, owner of the Financial Times.

Not everyone accepts Unilever’s good faith. Greenpeace activists occupied Unilever House and other company sites in April in protest against the group’s alleged damage to the Indonesian rainforests in pursuit of palm oil. “We have been working very seriously for the past couple of years to align industry behind palm oil sustainability. So being hit by the Greenpeace people was painful,” Mr Cescau says.

Unilever has worked with non-governmental organisations before. It asked Oxfam to assess its impact on the Indonesian economy, for ex­ample, and Mr Cescau hopes Greenpeace will become the company’s partner on sustainable palm oil.

“We are going to see now whether they are going to work with us on this, because it is easier to be outside and criticise than to be inside and make choices and compromise to get results.”

Will rising prices see the conscience consumers melt away? “It’s a very good question, because at the same time as we see the conscience consumer rising, we equally see some finding difficulty paying a higher price.” What will that do to Rainforest Alliance tea, which is presumably more expensive? “We’re doing this for the long term,” Mr Cescau insists.

And what about the doing well part? Isn’t Unilever often seen as being in the shadow of Procter & Gamble? After comfortably talking about sustainability, Mr Cescau does not much like this corporate turn in the conversation. “I knew the FT would be back,” he smiles grimly. “As a matter of fact, over the past three years our total shareholder return performance has been better than Procter’s.”

Unilever places its bets on the power of emerging economies

With so many of Unilever’s hopes for growth focused on the developing world, chief executive Patrick Cescau insists economies such as India and China are in better shape than many people realise, writes Michael Skapinker. “Their macro-economic policies have been very stable, there is huge domestic demand, a middle class and a considerable increase in investment. There also has been a change in the flow and pattern of exports.”

Emerging economies trade far more with each other, he says. “The story [of trade] between Brazil and China, for example, is just unbelievable. And because commodity prices have remained very high, there has continued to be money to invest into that trade. So while clearly there is going to be an impact, I think the idea that emerging markets are weak is a bit exaggerated.”

However, rising energy prices are affecting Unilever. “It impacts the input cost of our product substantially – fuel directly, and indirectly the petrochemicals that we use in the active ingredients for our shampoos and our deter

gents. Packaging is affected, fertilisers. And then, of course, all of our suppliers experience these cost increases themselves and see their margins being reduced, and hence look at the opportunity themselves to recover costs.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

FT: An unusual model for good causes

An unusual model for good causes

By Andrew Jack

Published: June 4 2008 19:46 | Last updated: June 4 2008 19:46

Images of a glamorous, scantily clad woman with a finger suggestively touching her lips might seem a curious way to raise funds for those affected by HIV, but nothing is conventional about either the person or the product she is endorsing.

Dita Von Teese, the high-profile burlesque American model in question, pictured right, is two years into a highly unusual advertising campaign: her image is used to market the Viva Glam lipstick range of the cosmetics company MAC, on which it gives away all sales to HIV causes.

“I have followed Viva Glam since it was first launched,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of money then, but I could certainly afford a little lipstick. I didn’t even think about it twice when they approached me to take part. It’s a terrific idea: every penny you spend goes to help someone.”

From its modest beginnings 14 years ago, Viva Glam has grown into one of the world’s boldest and largest examples of “cause-related marketing”, the practice of boosting sales by pledging a share of proceeds to non-profit activities. To date, it has allowed MAC to give away $100m (£51m, €64m) to HIV groups.

American Express coined the expression when it supported the restoration of the Statue of Liberty with an innovative project in 1983. It generated $19m by making a 1 cent contribution for each transaction made on a special credit card, substantially swelling customer numbers and purchases in the process.

The approach has since been used in green campaigns and in raising money for cancer. In 2006 American Express was a founding partner of Product Red, a corporate alliance that gives a share of profits from branded products to the Global Fund to fight Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.

Pitfalls of selling a selling chaitable product

Sponsorship on cause-related marketing in the US reached $1.5bn in 2008, up from $120m in 1990, according to IEG, a Chicago-based consultancy.

David Hessekiel, president of the Cause Marketing Forum, believes the real figure is much higher if one includes activities such as in-kind contributions and employee volunteer work. But some efforts can backfire. Mr Hessekiel gives the following guidelines for a successful campaign:

Transparency. Many causes raise suspicion because buyers are unclear what percentage of sales or profits ends up with the associated cause.

Align the cause and business. If consumers cannot easily and quickly see the connection, or do not empathise, it will fail.

Communication. The campaign will not reap the best rewards unless consumers are aware of it.

A long-term perspective. It takes time to build successful partnerships, so short-term projects will fail to prove effective and can confuse consumers.

Due diligence. Ensure there are no big contradictions between the cause and the company, and that beneficiary partners are effective and ethical.

Sincerity. The company should be committed to the cause or it is unlikely to work. “If it’s just a way to prop up sales, there are probably safer ways to achieve the aim, like cutting prices.”

If cause-related marketing has many advocates, it has also sparked concerns, with critics arguing that it can confuse or irritate consumers, make the recipient non-profit organisations too dependent, and backfire on companies judged insincere in their endorsement or the extent of their support.

When Estée Lauder fully acquired MAC in 1998, it inherited Viva Glam, already firmly established as a brand explicitly designed to support the MAC Aids Fund. Executives had to decide whether its highly unusual approach was compatible with a much larger group, whether it would dissuade customers, and how it would need to change.

“MAC was a very small, albeit successful, business with a grassroots, kitchen cabinet organisation,” recalls John Demsey, MAC’s global president. “It has had such a fundamental transition since then. It probably only worked because it started from something that was very small.”

Founded in 1994 by the Toronto-based make-up artist Frank Toskan and his partner Frank Angelo, who owned a chain of hair salons, Make-up Art Cosmetics, soon shortened to MAC, was quick to add a philanthropic aspect to its work.

Mr Toskan’s sister Julie, and her husband, Victor Casale, who was originally hired to MAC as a chemist and later became managing director, helped devise lipsticks designed for professional models who required more intense colours to offset the effect of studio lights.

The company relied for sales on word of mouth, through its powerful association with models to whom it gave the materials for free. Yet the executives made an exception for Viva Glam, using advertising to raise sales among a still wider customer base.

Unlike Red’s model, which pledges an unspecified percentage of profits towards “safer”, more politically acceptable themes related to HIV, the MAC Aids Fund often hands over all Viva Glam sales to more delicate causes, with even its operating costs absorbed by the company.

These unusual circumstances could have been threatened after the takeover, not least because, as Nancy Mahon, the fund’s current director, puts it: “We support issues which are often less appealing to other donors on religious or moral grounds.” That includes support to drug users and gay men at risk from infection.

Instead of downgrading the old approach, Estée Lauder embraced it. New Viva Glam products were launched, marketing intensified and a larger and more professional staff was brought in to boost sales and charitable disbursements alike. Ms Mahon is one example, reporting directly to Mr Demsey.

“It’s love us or leave us,” he says, acknowledging that the model may not be as easy to apply to other companies, products and causes. “You can’t operate with the people we do and expect it not to garner controversy. And Viva Glam definitely has image benefits for the overall company.”

On the back of annual advertising spending of $2.5m on 16 celebrity models, plus $1m from in-store promotion, all of it stressing that sales will support the MAC Aids Fund, Viva Glam sales account for 1-2 per cent of MAC’s global sales.

But Mr Demsey says one or more of the products are consistently among the top 10 individual brands sold by MAC, and that the attention they garner has strengthened sales across the entire company rather than deterring customers.

He also argues that the existence of the Fund has broader internal benefits by helping motivate staff, allowing MAC to benefit from far lower employee turnover than in the cosmetics industry. “With hindsight, the MAC Aids fund was one of the defining aspects of the company. It was part of its moral fibre, and the biggest risk of all would have been to stop it.”

One issue is how far MAC’s cause-related model can work outside the US and the UK, where it both raises and donates most via Viva Glam to HIV. “Charity messaging is a very Anglo-American idea,” he says, admitting that customers and commentators are less convinced in some of the company’s fastest growing markets in Russia, the Middle East and Asia.

He is more relaxed when asked about his response to scepticism over MAC’s motivations for being so involved. “It’s like being green. If someone benefits and no one is hurt in the process, why not?”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008