longchamp taschen China Escalates Trade Fight With Europe – NYTimes
China complained to the World Trade Organization on Thursday about antidumping duties imposed by the European Union on Chinese-made shoes, raising tensions between the trading giants.
Europe has grown increasingly concerned about China’s balance of trade and what some critics view as its artificially weak currency.
China, which joined the W.T.O. in 2001, filed its first unfair trade case against the European Union last July, also involving antidumping duties. The latest move appeared intended to increase pressure on the European Union, which had itself been sharply divided over extending the shoe tariffs.
In a statement issued by its mission in Geneva, where the W.T.O. is based, the Chinese government said Europe’s actions “violated various obligations under the W.T.O., and consequently caused damage to the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese exporters.”
It added that China “had repeatedly consulted” with the European Union but said that its concerns “had not been properly addressed or settled.”
In an eight-page legal complaint,longchamp taschen, the Chinese government requested consultations on both the original 2006 decision to impose the shoe duties and last year’s move to extend them.
Nuch Nazeer, a W.T.O. spokesman, confirmed that China had formally lodged a case.
In Brussels, John Clancy, acting spokesman for trade issues, said the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union,Longchamp Darshan, had taken note of the request. “Antidumping measures are not about protectionism,” Mr. Clancy said, “they’re about fighting unfair trade.”
While some European Union countries with footwear manufacturers, like Italy, have welcomed the antidumping duties, others support the position of large retailers that argue the duties hurt consumers by pushing up prices.
As a compromise, the European Union decided late last year on a 15-month extension of charges that add 9.7 percent to 16.5 percent to the import price of Chinese shoes and 10 percent to Vietnamese shoes.
The European Footwear Alliance, which represents several big global footwear brands, including Adidas, Ecco and Timberland, opposes the duties. It said in a statement that it “shares China’s view” that the European Union decision was based on flawed analysis. “Ironically the measure hurts European business and consumers the most,” it said.
In a letter sent last year to Catherine Ashton, then the European Union trade commissioner, the alliance said its members had paid around 800 million euros ($1.2 billion) in antidumping duties in the previous three and a half years, “and we fail to understand who has benefited.”
Until recently, China had made little use of the W.T.O. procedures in trade disputes with Europe. But in 2009, when the European Union applied antidumping tariffs on imports of iron and steel fasteners from China, Beijing dragged the European Union into the W.T.O. dispute settlement process for the first time.
Under W.T.O. rules, the European Union and China have 60 days to resolve the shoe dispute through bilateral consultations. If no deal is reached, China can ask the 153 members of the organization to establish a panel of three experts to examine the issue. Europe could block that once, but establishment is automatic if China makes a second request. A final decision can take 18 months or longer.
nederlands elftal shirt 2012 Cobbler’s Bench – NYTimes.com
ALYA KAZAKEVICH’S workshop cum store, a.b.k Custom Leather Craft, is an otherworldly atelier in deepest Chinatown. Surrounded by potted plants, old sewing machines and Russian army coats sent to her by her parents in Belarus,Chelsea Shirt 2012, Ms. Kazakevich,nederlands elftal shirt 2012, 28, makes bags, shoes, belts and other leather goods by hand, from tanning the leather herself to hammering each brass tack. She opened the store in November, paying for it with credit cards and tips from her job as a waitress at Vinegar Hill House in Brooklyn. After deciding not to pursue a career in finance, she learned shoemaking from Barbara Shaum, whose Grecian sandals have been a fixture on East Fourth Street since the ’60s. (”It sounds very Daniel Day-Lewis,” she jokes.) If you like the canvas bag with leather straps, you’ll have to be patient: everything is made to order. Prices range from $95 to $125 for belts; $275 and up for bags; and $375 to $425 for sandals and shoes. 105 Henry Street; (646) 479-6035. CHRISTINE MUHLKE
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN VON PAMER)
Calcio Italia Surrender Now – NYTimes.com
SOLDIERS of fashion won’t be marching in combat boots come spring. Five-inch heels are more like it,Maglia Calcio, and these by Gianvito Rossi for Altuzarra have just enough ammo to stop enemy combatants in their tracks; $1,130. At Barneys New York; (212) 826-8900. MELISSA VENTOSA MARTIN
PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY ALTUZARRA)
Advertising – Keds Campaign Claims a First, Then
WHEN marketing retro sneakers, marketers face a challenge: how do you sell them to consumers too young to be nostalgic for bygone eras?
An ad from 1939 at TheOriginalSneaker.com is from the current Keds campaign.
A modern print ad.
Keds, a 94-year-old brand owned by Collective Brands, thinks it has the answer with a new slogan, “the original sneaker,” and a Web site that had its debut on March 9. Created by the Night Agency, a digital marketing firm in Manhattan, TheOriginalSneaker.com features an opening page laid out like a monthly calendar that changes daily and features tidbits about the brand and cultural highlights from the last nine decades.
On Saturday, for example, clicking a photo of Albert Einstein at a blackboard revealed the statement that on that date in 1916, the scientist published his theory of relativity. Clicking other images revealed memorable video from the 1980s: clips from the film “The Breakfast Club” and “Jane Fonda’s Workout.” Other boxes featured shoes (and links for buying them online), as well as old advertisements for Keds.
Kristin Kohler Burrows, the president of Keds, said, “Our target consumers in attitude and personality are 24-year-old millennials who are attracted to creativity, a belief that they can make a difference in the world, openness and multiculturalism.”
Because those consumers have been tying their own laces for only two decades, the brand aimed to share its history without seeming like a lecture.
“We have deep roots and history, and the challenge is to make that relevant to consumers today rather than just be a retro brand,” Ms. Burrows said. “We had to tell the story on a platform that’s very today and very relevant and very engaged, and in a way that also highlights more modern times.”
Keds is not using the slogan “the original sneaker” qualitatively, as Dr Pepper once did in a campaign that suggested that choosing the soft drink made you “part of an original crowd,” but rather staking a historical claim.
“First manufactured by the U.S. Rubber Company (know as Uniroyal), Keds are the first shoes to be called sneakers,” the new Web site originally stated. “The term, coined in 1917 by Henry Nelson McKinney, an agent for the advertising firm N. W. Ayer & Son, refers to their soft noiseless rubber soles, which allow the wearer to ‘sneak’ up on unsuspecting friends or family.”
But that claim of coining the term sneaker ends up lacking something that is usually a given with those rubber soles: traction.
•
Grant Barrett, a lexicographer who is co-host of the syndicated public radio show “A Way With Words,” found evidence to the contrary.
Mr. Barrett pointed to an article in The New York Times in 1887 , which, quoting an article in The Boston Journal of Education, said, “It is only the harassed schoolmaster who can fully appreciate the pertinency of the name boys give to tennis shoes — sneakers.” He also pointed to an entry about “sneaker” on the Web site FirstMention.com, which features what purports to be an 1889 advertisement from Jordan Marsh, the former department store chain based in Boston, which was selling “500 pairs of men’s tennis oxfords (sneakers)” for 59 cents a pair.
Presented with these earlier citations, a representative for Keds said that the brand was the first to advertise using the term “sneakers” prominently, but then, although the company has a library of archival advertising and features dozens of ads on its site, could find only two passing mentions of the word in advertising for the first half of the last century — in 1922 and 1934.
Mr. McKinney, the advertising agent Keds claims coined the term, died in 1918, according to an obituary in The New York Times, while his agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, founded in Philadelphia in 1869 and responsible for such slogans as “Reach out and touch someone” and “Be all you can be,” closed in 2000.
On March 19, Keds revised the description on TheOriginalSneaker.com to acknowledge the earlier use of the term by Boston students, while still including the anecdote about Mr. McKinney and saying that Keds “took the term ‘sneaker’ to broader heights and established a new footwear category.”
That same day, on its official Facebook page, Keds revised a claim that said that in 1916, it “made the first shoe with a soft rubber sole and coined the term ‘sneaker,’ ” to say instead that “in 1916, Keds created an American Classic.” (Converse began making rubber-soled shoes before Keds, in 1908, according to the Converse Web site; in England, canvas footwear with rubber soles dates back to the 1830s).
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Keds’s primary site, Keds.com, however, had not dialed down claims as of Sunday, saying, “In 1916 we started a footwear revolution when we created the first sneaker,” and, elsewhere on that site, that it had made “the first shoe with a soft rubber sole and coined the term ‘sneaker.’ ”
Marshal Cohen, who follows the footwear industry as chief industry analyst of the NPD Group, a research firm, said the Internet has made it more important than ever for marketing claims to be watertight.
“There is a significant segment of the population today that will go out and challenge any statement,” Mr. Cohen said. “With the reach of social media, the minute an ad campaign is challenged or can’t be substantiated, social media is going to spread that like wildfire. Before you make a statement, you have to be sure you can justify it and live up to it.”
polo hackett españa Advertising – ‘Crocs’ and ‘Style’ in the Same
IN a new television commercial for Crocs footwear, an actress wearing black high-heel shoes enters an apartment building and wearily climbs a flight of stairs. As she opens the door to her unit, two small red animated characters based on the Crocs original clog model, with stubby arms and legs and blinking ventilation holes representing eyes, scamper toward her like puppies.
Ads for Crocs introduce animated characters, modeled after the brand’s most popular shoe, who give foot massages.
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The characters cling to her ankles and then, as she sits on the couch to read her mail, they remove her shoes, massage her feet, and then slip a new style of Crocs flats onto her feet. “Meet Croslite,” says a voiceover toward the end of the 30-second spot, by Cramer-Krasselt in Chicago, “the loyal, loving, good-for-you technology, in every pair of Crocs.”
Croslite, the brand’s proprietary material that is soft, odor resistant and conforms to the shape of feet, is also what the new characters are called. The spot closes with the campaign’s tagline: “Feel the love.”
The new characters also are featured massaging models’ feet in print, outdoor and online ads, and on the brand’s Web site; seven-inch-tall three-dimensional versions will soon be displayed in stores.
While the characters resemble the original Crocs style, the objective of the ads is to highlight new styles like a men’s loafer and women’s flip-flops that look nothing like the original.
“First and foremost, what we want to do is establish Crocs as a brand and not that one shoe,” said Ken Chaplin, vice president for marketing at Crocs, referring to the original model. With newer loafer styles and flats, the company hopes to gain more of a year-round presence.
“Spring, summer — we own that,fred perry españa,” Mr. Chaplin said. “But we also have great shoes for back to school, fall and winter. There’s a lot of opportunity to expand wearing occasions and the seasons we play in.”
Since the company was founded just eight years ago, Crocs, which is based in Niwot, Colo., has sold more than 120 million pairs of shoes, most of them the original model, although with more than 120 styles the originals now account for just under half of the shoes sold, according to the company.
Though sold like other footwear in shoe and sporting goods stores, the brand took an outside-the-box approach — literally: Most models hang vertically from racks, which has allowed the brand to sell in nontraditional channels as well, like kiosks in malls.
The company has not had a profitable year since 2007, when revenue totaled $847.4 million, and it posted a profit of $168.2 million. Revenue fell to $721.6 million in 2008,polo hackett españa, when it posted a $185.1 million loss, and to $645.8 million in 2009, when it posted a $42.1 million loss.
The Crocs brand spent $4.3 million on advertising in 2009, one-third the $12.8 million it spent on advertising in 2008, according to Kantar Media.
As is the case with other comfortable yet odd-looking shoes, like the sandals from Dr. Scholl’s and Birkenstock as well as boots by Ugg, the classic Crocs have also been widely criticized on aesthetic grounds. Detractors often describe them as clownish.
The Web site IHateCrocs.com sells T-shirts with slogans like “For those about to Croc, we refute you” and “Friends don’t let friends wear Crocs,” while an anti-Crocs group on Facebook has more than 1.5 million fans.
In a 2005 campaign reminiscent of self-effacing Volkswagen Beetle ads in the 1960s (one VW print ad read, “It’s ugly but it gets you there”), Crocs made light of its quirky appearance by using the tagline “Ugly can be beautiful.”
The latest ads, however, do not intend to be in on the joke about the original Crocs appearance, or to dispute it.
“This campaign doesn’t work to reverse people on the negative side because the numbers tell us we don’t need to,” said Marshall Ross, chief creative officer of Cramer-Krasselt, which is undertaking its first Crocs campaign since it was named the company’s agency of record in November. “We have a lot of fans of that original clog, and if we got even a small percentage of them to add a style to their closets, that would sell a lot of shoes.”
Mr. Ross views the opposition to Crocs as inevitable.
“Every interesting idea has a polarizing effect,” he said. “Things that walk right down the middle don’t tend to get as much response.”
Stressing the shoes’ Croslite material, which also is used in the soles of the newer nonsandal styles (and for which the new mascots are named), the new campaign aims to counter that polarization by focusing on what makes the shoes comfortable rather than the original’s aesthetics.
“A lot of people who first bought into the brand didn’t know what they were buying into,” Mr. Ross said. “It was kind of a bandwagon fad, but the real story of Crocs and why they are so comfortable never got told because it never really had to — the shoe just sold and sold and sold.”
handbags love PULSE – The Height of Romance – NYTimes.com
KNOWN for her richly textured,handbags love, towering shoes that are made by hand to order, the Miami-based artist and Bastion designer Ramona Boucher has become a go-to for stylists and fashion editors looking for a little oomph. Basic flats are simply not her thing. ”There’s something that comes out that’s pure romance when you’re wearing heels,” said Ms. Boucher,michael kors Crossbody Bags, who swears to spending 10 hours a day in her own 7 1/2-inch creations — designed, she notes, with gel insoles. Her platform sandals and wedges, which were seen most recently at the Suno fall fashion show, can be custom-ordered in a range of materials (suede, velvet, snakeskin) and take two to four weeks to make. As for height, 3 1/2 inches is as low as she’ll go.
Bastion shoes, $950 and up, can be ordered starting May 23 at Visual Therapy, 24 West 57th Street, (212) 315-2233; visual-therapy.com.
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Burberry Tshirt Glow In the Dark Makeup Is a Thing Now
Photo: courtesy of Make Up For Ever
Going to a Halloween party (or rave) where there will be UV lights? Reveal a spooky glow with Make Up For Ever’s limited-edition Fluo Night translucent powder. It’s invisible to the naked eye in the daylight, but venture to the dark side and—voila!—you’ll light up the room (talk about being the center of attention). Use it alone or blend it with your favorite cream,Burberry Tshirt, powder, or gel; the pigment is suitable for eyes, lips,Polo Fred Perry, cheeks, hair, and body.
Browsing – Jump Sneakers Plans Dumbo Pop-Up Store
VICTOR HSU, above, who calls himself the chief propagandist for the sneaker brand Jump, is getting the word out with a pop-up store in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn; it is called Jumbo, an acronym for Jump Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Jumbo will have its opening party Thursday from 6:30 to 10 p.m.
Jump offerings run from flashy sneakers with patent leather and gold accents, a collaboration with Taboo of the Black Eyed Peas ($298), to the Vanquish, an elegant version of the high-top sneaker ($125 to $298). “We try to do something a guy can wear on stage, a performance sneaker, and we also have a core assortment with an interesting silhouette, maybe not always in bright colors,” said Mr. Hsu, who is officially the head of marketing and sales.
The store will be open until July 25; after that it will be a men’s store outpost of the nearby NOS Shoe Boutique, which is a partner in Jumbo. Jumbo, 165 Front Street (Jay Street), Brooklyn; (718) 422-0095, Jumbopopup.blogspot.com.
michael kors bags Browsing – Rag and Bone Puts the Wedge Back in He
SUFFERING from a wedge deficit? Rag & Bone’s collection,michael kors bags, including the Lyle (right, $360) with an approximately four-inch heel, is a popular option this summer. The Lyle in nude, a rarity, may be restocked by August. The Sahara, a lace-up Oxford with an open toe, is available in nude ($390).
Rag & Bone stores are at 119 Mercer Street (at Prince Street),michael kors Clutches, (212) 219-2204; and 104 Christopher Street (near Bleecker Street), (212) 727-2990; a new location is scheduled to open in the beginning of July at the corner of Elizabeth and Houston Streets.
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longchamp kaufen Taylor Tomasi Hill to Moda Operandi
Photo: Getty Images
Last night,Longchamp Footprint Stampa, the New York Times announced big news for Moda Operandi, the sort of virtual trunk show founded by Lauren Santo Domingo and Aslaug Magnusdottir last year. The shopping site, which allows you to order looks (including those that may not be produced) straight off the runway months before they hit stores,longchamp kaufen, has hired Roopal Patel and Taylor Tomasi Hill.
Patel’s been the fashion market director at Neiman Marcus for years, and is one of ten or so buyers who’s achieved a sort of fashion industry fame; she’ll be the site’s merchandising director. Tomasi Hill was most recently the style and accessories director at Marie Claire and is one of fashions’ biggest street style stars; she’s taking on the newly established role of artistic director at Moda Operandi.
The Times writes that “as the business grows, there will be more magazine-like displays to guide customers, ‘to identify the items they absolutely can’t miss,’” according to Magnusdottir. In September, the average sale on the easy-to-navigate, but not-at-all-flashy, site was for $1,800. So with a concentrated effort on creativity and editorial content, it’ll only expand exponentially.