Inside Scoop

In the August 2008 issue of Wired, there’s a feature article about Hollywood’s efforts to get online:
Top writer-producers in television live like pampered pets, the kind that get caviar for breakfast. [...] Some of them think of Web video as a sort of farm club for TV: Why spend $2 million to make a half-hour [...]

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Sales of U.S. fashion magazines plummeted in the first half of 2008.
Vogue’s newsstand sales dropped 14.8%. Marie Claire’s dropped 12.1%. W was down 10.4%. Allure was down 9.6%; Glamour 9.2%; Elle 6.3% and Cosmopolitan 6.1%.
Lucky was luckier than most, dropping only 5.0% at the newsstand — but a figure like that is hardly cause [...]

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Image: Brendan Landis via Flickr

When we heard the rumors that Steve & Barry’s 2007 earnings were $20 million, from sales approaching $1 billion, we gave silent thanks that our business doesn’t need inventory, stores or a great bevy of staff.
With Steve & Barry’s 2% sales-to-earnings ratio, they might as well be a semiconductor company. If [...]

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The mild slowdown in clothing retail seems isolated to bricks and mortar - but online sales are booming.
According to Forrester’s latest online retailing report, $26.6 billion of clothing sold online in 2007, up from $22.7 billion the previous year. This accounted for a 12% share of US clothing sales, up from a 10% share in [...]

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Next time you’re passing a busy supermarket, just watch a minute – you’ll see dozens of people entering and leaving. What do you notice about the ones going out? That’s right, they’ve all bought something.
Now do the same thing outside a clothing store. How many people leave empty-handed? Why do you think so? No, it’s [...]

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As one of “Australia’s Top 100 female bloggers” (their words, not mine; I guess I’m on a list somewhere), I received this invitation today:
We would like to invite you to join our new site: A Pampered Life (”APL”) which is an online community, where you can share your knowledge, experiences, tips and advice.
A Pampered Life [...]

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has revealed that apparel was top of his list when he first looked at setting up in the mid-90s. He told Conde Nast Portfolio magazine (June 2008, p.126) that Amazon’s early research into catalog sales found apparel was the best category, followed by gourmet food.
And where do you think books came [...]

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…say BOO!
For those fortunate enough not to get the joke, boo.com was the first, most expensive, most hyped and least successful startup attempt ever in the online fashion space. BOO is still the story that grown-up investors choose to scare their children into line.
The founders of BOO managed to burn through over $150 million while [...]

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Gandhi said to ‘be the change you wish to see’. For us, this entails the humble and unassuming goal of…oh, being the fulcrum around which the entire retail clothing industry will turn.
How so? By changing the way clothing sales work. By rewriting the relationship between clothing buyers and clothing sellers.
Think that’s too much to ask? [...]

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