Fashion Notebook

Puma Pumps Up Its Hollywood Jam

Looks like Puma's going Hollywood. 

The fashion athletic company said that it's opening a new office dedicated to entertainment marketing in Los Angeles next month. The West Coast operation will be geared to increasing corporate partnerships and product interaction with music and film celebrities. Can we get a "Sexy Back Speedcat"??!!

Anyways, you know what new offices mean! More staff! Puma USA is adding new roles to fill up the cubes the L.A. office (hey, it might be fashion, but it's all work-a-day office aesthetics, or so we have to believe as we stretch beyond the limits of our three walled container). Ryan Babenzien joins as head of U.S. marketing operations. He was formerly the business development and strategy consultant for Oddcast, New York, a company that does web authoring tools or some other such beep-boop-beep. Ryan Ayanian, who previously worked as a consultant for marketing agency Antenna, Ontario, Canada, has been hired as music marketing manager. And last, but not least (though we admit we have no knowledge of how Puma's hierarchy works) Ed Choi, who joined Puma in 2006 following at stint at ID Agency, Manhattan Beach, Calif., has been named entertainment marketing manager.

For Barney Waters, Puma North America's vp-marketing, the new office is a move to go "fish where the fish are," though he did note that the brand has had a smaller marketing presence on the West Coast for some time.

"These moves represent a recommitment to entertainment marketing as a real driver for the Puma brand," Waters told us over email. "We're also evolving our approach, as there are so many more opportunities beyond product placement. Hollywood is a great place to develop relationships and brand driven content, which can help reach the people that may not be spending as much time looking at traditional media outlets."

Puma has been making inroads with celebrities over the past several years, working on design and advertising projects with rapper Ludacris and socialite-heiress Lydia Hearst-Shaw (we're not saying she's 100%, but she's definitely not like the other socialite-heiresses we can think of. Barf Tinsley Mortimer and Paris Hilton!), among others. This month, Puma unveiled its new TV campaign, featuring cute-but-disposable Scottish singer/songwriter Paolo Nutini (pictured, right, smoking something). Nutini's single, "New Shoes," is being used in Puma’s lifestyle campaign. We were wondering how long it would take for that to get snatched up by the commercial world.

In May, the company will begin promotional tie-ins with the film Speed Racer, which will include a signature shoe, product placement in the movie and worldwide in-store promotional campaigns. BTW... Does anyone remember what exactly Speed Racer, the show, was about, you know besides a boy racing, like, fast? We're trying to recall, but just can't seem to do it. Somehow, this didn't seem like a movie idea to us. But 'tevs, we're not filmmakers. But why not a He-Man movie? Hey, we're just sayin'.

No notes on what they'll be spending this year to pull off these tie-ins and tie-ons. In 2006, Puma spent $13 million on advertising in the U.S., excluding online, down 23% from $17 million in 2006, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.

Week in Review Pt. 2: In Which Gap Rethinks Marketing Spend, Reebok's CMO Moves Into the Driver's Seat, and Airwalk Taps MySpace Celebrities

Once again, we're sorry that we've been silent for so long! But we've been writing a lot for that dying industry: the print book. Hey, you gotta eat!

Anyhow, here's a brief recap of our stories from last week, and this week, along with that snarky commentary that you guys seem to love. So here's a few things that you might have missed.

And now... back to the recap. (We promise some new stories very, very soon!)

Gap Brand Forgoes Spring TV Spot, Amid Tightening Following Rough Quarter
After Gap reported fourth quarter sales of $4.67 billion, a 5% drop from last year, the company had some interesting news on the marketing front.

The company is actively looking to trim costs as it weathers a “volatile economic environment,” said CEO Glenn Murphy, in a conference call to analysts on Feb. 28.

The struggling retailer will reexamine its marketing plans for the second half of 2008, once it has a better understanding of its holiday efforts, said Murphy. “We’re very aware of the environment in which we’re operating in 2008, but not all of our marketing money is being revisited," he said. "Some portion is being re-looked at to make sure it’s being used appropriately, given that consumer sentiment is where it is, and that particularly applies at Old Navy.”

The immediate marketing plans for Old Navy and Banana Republic would remain similar in scope to last year’s, while the company has decided to forgo a spring TV campaign for the Gap brand, said evp/CFO Sabrina Simmons.

The primary focus of spring marketing for the namesake division will be print and in-store efforts for the retailer’s footwear collaboration with designer Pierre Hardy, due out in March. Additionally, Gap will launch a capsule T-shirt collection, a design collaboration with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which will hit retail stores in April.

Hmm... Doesn't sound good. And add that to the fact that, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, Gap already cut its ad spend in half for last year, spending an estimated $55 million (down from $117 million in 2006), per Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Old Navy spent an estimated $173 million on U.S. ads in 2007, down slightly from $200 million in 2006.

For the full story, click here.

Reebok CMO Uli Becker Moves Into the Driver's Seat as Prez/CEO Harrington Exits
Uli Becker got a jump last week, when the Reebok CMO was named president and CEO of the ailing brand, following the resignation (forced?) of top dog Paul Harrington, who had been with the company for 12 years.

This is actually something of a growing trend across industries, one that we've been keeping track of. In fact, wouldn't you know, we wrote something about it today. Check out that story, about CMOs migrating to the CEO and presidential roles, here.

Back to the relevance, Becker (photo, left) joined Reebok back in May 2006, following his duties as the head of global brand marketing for Adidas (Reebok's parent company) and managing director of Adidas International in Amsterdam. When he joined Reebok, Becker announced his intent to streamline marketing operations and to unify brand messaging, as the athletic footwear and apparel maker sought to turn its business around and reposition itself in the marketplace.

We like him. He's a straight shooting guy who's looking to get all of those mixed messages cleaned up and get the brand on the track to profitability, all with the kind of efficiency you'd expect from a German executive. So we expect good things, hopefully, and, it would appear, so does Adidas jefe principal Herbert Hainer.

"[Paul Harrington] played an instrumental role in managing the integration of Reebok into our group and laid the foundations for the repositioning of the Reebok brand worldwide," said Hainer, chairman and CEO of Adidas, in a statement. "Uli Becker's proven leadership and global marketing expertise make him uniquely qualified to take the revitalization of the Reebok brand to the next level, both internationally and in the US."

Reebok's marketing for 2008 would be focused on women's running and "American major league sports," underscored in the brand's forthcoming "Your Move" campaign, said Hainer. The campaign, previewed last year, aims to cast Reebok as the brand for individuals rather than hardcore athletes and is part of a larger effort for Reebok to capture the sport lifestyle market.

Details regarding a CMO replacement were not available.

McGarryBowen, New York, is the lead ad agency for Reebok. The company's latest ad campaign launched two weeks ago in conjunction with the release of its first "Freestyle World Tour" collection (but, of course, our readers already knew about that). The product line will include five new sneaker and apparel editions, which will roll out during the course of this year. "Freestyle Tokyo," which launched Feb. 21, will be followed by other editions that derive their name and design inspiration from cities like Paris, London, and New York.

For the full story, click here. For all of our Reebok-related posts, check here. 

Airwalk Looks at MySpace for Brand Models
In its spring 2008 campaign, which hits a variety of alterna- lifestyle titles in June (and it's not the 1990s anymore honey, so we're not talking about gay pubs, but rather the skate/surf/
snowboard glossies), Airwalk went to MySpace for part of its casting call.

In addition to leveraging images of its athletes, including Rodney Jones, the brand cast Lorene Drive, a band that creative director Jeff Buice found on MySpace, to be featured in their ads (check outtake spot, right). Even more interesting is that the ads feature mini-anecdotes from the talent, and directs readers to log onto Airwalk.com to see the full story, and then write in some stories of their own.

Buice told me that the idea is basically to make a social network around ad campaign creative. Yeah, it made us do a double take too. But Airwalk has been on the online game for sometime now, and this is just the latest way that they're engaging with the online market.

"We always do print ads because it still reaches tons of the demo that we’re going after. But the online component is growing massively, out of control, for our [consumers]," Buice told me. "The hook was finding a way to get people to correlate between the two, while still maintaining a focused, singular strategy."

Intrigued? Check out the full story, here. 

John Varvatos Goes Back to His Record Collection For Spring 2008 Campaign

It's always been clear where designer John Varvatos
gets his inspiration: his record collection.

Growing up in Detroit, Varvatos became infatuated with the slew of 1970s-era rockers that defined the music scene of the time (and, obvs, continued to influence for many years to come), and that infatuation has become the flashpoint of influence across not only his collections, but also his advertising creative. Recent spots have included Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop and Aerosmith's Joe Perry, alongside more modernist rock figures such as Chris Cornell, and the Scott Weiland-fronted and Slash-anchored Velvet Revolver.

So another season, another rocker and this time from the vinyl bin, Varvatos, and the team over at Yard, New York, have unearthed another vintage treat: Cheap Trick. Check out one of the spots above (click to enlarge), which feature members Bun E. Carlos, Rick Nielsen, Tom Petersson and Robin Zander (can you believe they're all still alive!) racing along on, what else, 1970s-era vintage two-seaters.

The creative, steered by Stephen Niedzwiecki, the creative director over at Yard, was inspired by boardwalk and carnival imagery (why do we always think Diane Arbus when we hear these words?) from the 1940s and 1950s.

"The Cheap Trick guys have an almost uncontainable energy," said Varvatos, in a statement. "This season is one that embodies a freewheeling style that is so quintessentially America. The campaign continues to be about iconic rock n ' rollers caught in real moments."

Real moments? I'd definitely classify this as stylized fantasy. I mean, honestly, when's the last time you saw a bunch of guys pushing into the stretches of old age racing around on bikes in full evening wear? (And if you have seen such a phenomenon, frequently, let me know where you live because it sounds like an interesting vacation spot!)

We also have to wonder if this campaign doesn't make Varvatos' brand feel too old. While we loved the campaign with Iggy Pop (who, let's face it, is no spring chicken himself, with wrinkles that recall Varvatos' own pricey, aged leather carry-alls), that campaign had a youthful exuberance that we just don't feel from the shock-white heads of the Cheap Trick-ers. This could also be a function of the fact that our eyes automatically gravitate to Rick Nielsen in the spot above; his bandmates do look more youthful on second consideration.

Regardless, the aging rocker-as-posterboy works for Varvatos, solidifying his brand's musical heritage, and, here's the big bonus: he'll never get accused of just tapping somebody because they of-the-moment (looking at you Versace with your robotic Jonathan Rhys Meyers ads). And double bonus: these guys probably come pretty cheap.

  You know what would make our day, though? If Varvatos' next campaign featured T. Rex's Marc Bolan (pictured, left). C'mon John, you know you love him too! This guy is the original unicorn... Just imagine that sex bomb in a Varvatos suit!

Lessons in Branding: A Night Out with Ben Sherman

Having attended many fashion parties that were no more
than an excuse to down a bunch of free drinks before going
out for your real night on the town, we must admit that most of them are throw-aways, except in the rare instance that they shed some light on some real branding work.

While such is by far the rarest of breed in the Fashion Week party line up, Ben Sherman's party Friday night at the brand's Soho flagship proved to be a rumination on the execution of a rebranding, if not a somewhat nostalgic trip down memory lane for us (pictures left, via LastNightsParty.com).

If you haven't checked in with Ben Sherman in a while you should, because it's likely very different than you remember. The U.S. vp-marketing, Dana Dynamite has been working to give the brand some serious hipster cred, starting out  first with a MySpace site several years ago (one of the first to jump on that now über-popular chuck wagon) and extending relationships with a series of downtown New York nightlife's more  prominent partiers (and all too often, party promoters by default... hey, even hipsters gotta eat!).

Most recently, the brand inked a partnership with Merlin Bronques, a downtown scene photographer á la, but predating MisShapes (R.I.P.) and The Cobra Snake (we're fairly sure about this, facts about these guys are usually anecdotal at best) as well as newcomers like Nicky Digital (if you don't know these names, you're either over 35 years old or need to seriously re-read your Hipster Handbook). Bronques produced a series of stills—in k eeping with his hipster verité styles—of downtown's denizens that were used for a Christmas OOH campaign here in New York.  Alongside Bronques came a slew of other night-lifers, such as the DJ/comic (huh?) Mike Nouveau (who's really a web marketing and ad sales guy for Paper, and prior to that held similar duties over at Rolling Stone, pictured, left, with friends) and DJ Jess (the skinny, seemingly sexually ambidextrous DJ who used to, and perhaps still does, spin at Rififfi, where you can expect to hear "Kids in America" and "Common People" about 1.75 times each hour).

So, at the party, it all became clear how these kids—we have to laugh here a little bit, since we've seen them evolve over the past four years from awkward kids our friends used to hook up with to something of legitimate (?) nightlife figures, and speaking of Merlin, why did you lose the wig!!??—have been perfectly deployed to revamp this aged British apparel brand both on and offline (they all promote each other via MySpace pages).

The party was thronged with young kids (check out all the images, here.), which isn't such a surprising thing at fashion events, particularly during Fashion Week. But it was thronged with the kinds of people that we recognize, obviously a direct appeal to young twentysomethings who make the rounds at various clubs decked out in DIY and bargain fashions. The walls were splattered with images from the current campaign, and the room packed with a bunch of young, mod-ish looking pretties that posed for Bronques' pictures. (Though due diligence requires us to report that there were some aging club queens out as well, but that's par for the course around downtown NYC. It wouldn't feel like home without them.)

And while our friend did note that the new outdoor campaign looked like "American Apparel Lite" (which, to be fair, is, itself pretty much "1970s-Era Gym Porn Lite"), Ben Sherman was effectively communicating its new message. After being off of our radar for years, Ben Sherman suddenly felt hip. And the product wasn't—particularly the party dresses—bad either.

And it's not just our musings either. Agyness Deyn, that pixie-faced model you've been seeing in nearly everyone's campaigns this year, popped into the party, wearing some super high shouldered blue jacket and with a mini-entourage of bottle blonds in tow.  That  surely says something, whether she was comp'ed  for the night or not. Though I'm starting to worry about Agyness as a brand spokesperson—seems she's been a bit of the village bicycle lately and while we love her look, we have to wonder how much Agyness we'll have to see before we get fatigue and move on.

And speaking of moving on, while we love the 1980s, I think it's time we stopped LITERALLY reinterpreting the decadent decade. Seriously, there's a way to pull off hip without being a literal reproduction of a Salt N' Peppa album cover. Cheap, clunky gold chain and patent purses were always passé people!

Financial Desk: H&M Powers Through Another Impressive Quarter

H&M continues its charge through the fashion world
with another strong earnings season.

Per the company's quarterly, and annual, earnings report released this morning, fourth quarter sales grew 17% to $3.57 billion in domestic currency (at current exchange rates), and profits jumped 14% to roughly $975 million.

Though the company did seem to feel a similar slump in the month of December, where sales decreased by 10% over the previous year, sales through Jan. 29 (one has to marvel at the efficiency that can include sales figures from as recently as two days ago in such a report!), sales have increased 16%. Results for the U.S. market, specifically, were not provided.

Full-year results for fiscal 2006/2007 were similarly positive, with sales climbing 15% to $12.3 billion, and profits resting solidly at the $3.0 billion mark, an increase of 21%.

The company plans to control roughly 190 stores for the next fiscal year, focusing its efforts in 2008 on building up markets in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Oman. Stores are expected to open in the Russian market in 2009.

The retailer is currently gearing up for the release of its "Fashion Against AIDS" collection, which bows tomorrow. The group of t-shirts, tank tops and hooded sweaters were designed in conjunction with Designers Against AIDS (DAA) and music industry celebrities including Rihanna, Timbaland, Rufus Wainwright (pictured in the spot above), Scissor Sisters, and Ziggy Marley, and Good Charlotte, among others. Twenty-five percent of sales from the line, priced at roughly $16-$40 (at current exchange) will go to various HIV/AIDS prevention projects at non-profits worldwide.

In 2006, H&M spent $17 million on measured media advertising in the U.S. market, and through November 2007, has spent $18 million, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.