Desi Today Magazine
Dolce & Gabbana appeals to aspirational consumers with crowdsourced photo album
Italian fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana is allowing users to submit their own family photos to its Web site to further fan interaction with the brand online. The #DGFamily project has created an online photo album of family photos that visitors can view. By creating an interactive, personal digital collage of photos, Dolce & Gabbana will likely increase user engagement on its Web site and endear itself to aspirational consumers.
Nordstrom Now Allowing Pinterest Users to Determine What Merchandise is Displayed in Stores
Pinterest was recently named the fastest-growing content sharing platform, and retailers are taking notice. Nordstrom is now using Pinterest to decide what items it will display in stores and is allowing the sharing service’s community to help influence these decisions. Nordstrom, which has almost 4.5 million users on the social network, began testing this new approach earlier this year and has finally put it into action.
The most popular items on Pinterest are now being marked with a red tag to identify them as popular items in the women’s shoe and handbag departments of Nordstrom’s 117 stores. Some of the items that are currently popular on Pinterest include a brown faux leather moto jacket, a nude and gold Burberry watch, a Kate Spade statement necklace and a pair of black and white Dolce Vita pumps.
They work until 11 at night, lug 40-pound garment bags throughout the city and get scolded for not adhering tape to mood boards correctly. And yet being a Condé Nast intern remains one of the most coveted, sought-after unpaid jobs in town. So you can imagine the surprise when, last month, Condé Nast announced it was terminating its internship program. Starting in 2014, Condé publications including Vogue, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair will no longer give students the opportunity to toil — and learn — in their hallowed halls.
The bold decision came on the heels of a lawsuit filed in June 2012 by two former Condé interns: Matthew Leib, who interned at The New Yorker in 2009 and 2010, and Lauren Ballinger, who worked at W magazine in 2009. The two sued the media conglomerate for failing to pay them minimum wage — claiming that their measly stipend amounted to less than $1 an hour for their unpaid internships.
Still, Condé’s decision to abolish its internship program is undoubtedly an industry game changer. Optimists say it will only open up more entry-level positions down the road, since someone, after all, needs to fetch Condé Nast editors’ coffee.
Hearst Publishing may not be so far away from killing its own internship program, or at least revamping it. After all, they were the first ones hit with a lawsuit — in February 2012 by Diana Wang, a former Harper’s Bazaar intern who complained that she was working up to 55 hours a week sans payment. Other media entities have come under fire recently, too, for their unpaid internship programs, including “The Charlie Rose Show,” which settled early on in the case, and Fox Searchlight Pictures, which was found guilty of violating minimum wage laws by failing to pay two interns who worked on the film “Black Swan.”
And while many people would say the experience is payment enough (or college credits, if you’re able to get them), some past interns say the experience is just a bunch of disappointment and missed opportunity.
Typically, New York City department stores unveil their holiday window displays with a lot of fanfare. Girl group Fifth Harmony performed for Lord & Taylor’s window debut, and Bravo’s Andy Cohen hosted the unveiling at Bergdorf Goodman’s. But Barneys New York took a different approach this year.
The NYC staple debuted its windows via its Instagram channel, @barneysnyofficial. Barneys released 10-second clips of each holiday window to highlight the interactive features. Many fashion brands of late have taken to social media channels to debut ad campaigns, Oscar de la Renta and Juicy Couture among them. This is the first time a major retailer has done so.
