August 2010
Axe Wants to Be Your Wingman in the Mating Game
“Axe is all about being a guy’s wingman and helping him as he navigates the mating game.†-Mark Dwyer, Unilever marketing director
As Gawker commenters point out, a true wingman would probably encourage less Axe, but the brand is finding success with the strategy. Once the 18-24 target crowd finds out that mating means babies, we’re not sure if that’s the game they’ll want to play, but trading off of the prospect of heightened romantic interest has made Axe products a category leader.
Emma Watson’s Royal Fair Trade
In February, Emma Watson paired up with British fair trade clothing retailer People Tree to create a line designed by the actress. After a successful spring/summer season, Watson’s fall collection will debut next week before she heads back to Brown University for her fall semester. A sneak preview of the collection in London’s Evening Standard hints at a comfy, thick knits paired with colors that are bit bolder than Watson’s previous designs.
Facebook Places Marks Entry Into The Location Game
It’s been talked about for quite some time, and now it’s finally happening. Facebook will allow users to check-in at locations straight from Facebook. The social network is partnering with the major location-based services–Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, and Booya (makers of MyTown)–to bring check-ins to the masses. Well, at least the masses that have smartphones or other touchscreen devices.
The service is called Facebook Places, and will be available via both the iPhone app and touch.facebook.com. Android, WebOS and BlackBerry users will have to be satisfied with touch.facebook.com for the moment. It will roll out gradually, but should be reaching all Facebook users soon. Presumably, it should work either way for those who use the iPhone app, it would be rather senseless to have an option for an app that you can’t use yet.
How Fashionable is Your iPad? Oscar de la Renta Unveils New iPad Accessory
We’ve been keeping you up to date with the all the new technologies emerging left and right- along with the fashionable accessories designed to complement them!
The newest must-have gadget, the iPad, now has sleek, trendy and stylish accessories from major designers. If you don’t want to scratch your diamond studded iPad, Louis Vuitton has a case coming in 2011, Gucci’s taking pre-orders for their version now, and Hermes is putting together “special order” versions with matching headphone holders. Oscar de la Renta, however, beat them all to the punch when he sold iPad covers on his website.
T-Mobile G2 HSPA Smartphone Announced
On a stark white page with no images, T-Mobile announced the G2, a successor to the G1 which was the first Android powered smartphone. T-Mobile sold 1 million phones within the first 6 months of an October 2008 launch. With the iPhone continuing to inspire pandemonium and flashier Android competitors from HTC and Motorola driving buzz – not to mention sales, for Verizon and Sprint, it’s high time for a flagship phone for T-Mobile.
Blog Post Leads MAC to Cancel Rodarte’s Anticipated Mexican Inspired Line
If you think fashion bloggers have little to no power or clout in the industry, get this: one fashion blogger created enough buzz to cause the cancellation of M.A.C.’s expected Rodarte makeup line, which was to be launched September 15.
Torch Sees Poor Launch Sales, Drops To Half Price On Amazon
It was just a few days ago RIM launched the BlackBerry Torch, the fist BlackBerry to run the new BlackBerry 6 OS. We liked the design of the new OS, and are fans of the social networking integration, but it seems that’s not enough to entice others to buy the Torch. Now, a few days after the launch some unconfirmed numbers from the launch are emerging.
Going to Zero: The Designers Looking to Cut Fashion Waste
Fact: It costs less money for clothing manufacturers to throw away the scraps from their cutting room floors than to recycle them.
Fiction: Not a single designer in the world of fashion cares.
Though the Times says 15-20 percent of the fabric used to create clothing ends up in landfills, a “small but impassioned†group of designers including Mark Liu, Julian Roberts and Zandra Rhodes, in addition to students at Parsons, have dedicated themselves to working toward a “zero-waste†policy in fashion – meaning not a single scrap of fabric thrown out.
Oh Snap! Apple Pulls Top Selling Camera App Over Easter Egg Feature
We’ve all heard stories about how draconian the App Store policies can be. There was the whole debacle over political cartoons when Apple realized that satire wasn’t defacing public figures. There’s also the fact that even magazines like Playboy have to remove any hint of nudity from apps in order to get the approved. Now we have Apple pulling an excellent camera app because it put in an extra feature to use the volume buttons as shutter buttons.