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Clothing Technology

“Retro” is the new “New”

I recently browsed through some old pictures my grandma has stored in a shoe box. Everyone kept telling me how much I look like my father in his 20’s, but I couldn’t help but notice the similarities were not only in the obvious consequences of parenthood but also in the clothes and accessories.

I recently bought an Olympus E-PL1 camera, my very first one (at least the first one I chose and payed for entirely), and many factors came into the decision of buying this particular model and brand. I know you must be thinking what does this have to do with the previous paragraph, but please bear with me until the end. First of all, I had good previous experience with the brand, both my father and uncle have Oly DSLR’s and my sister has a compact. They are reliable, have good lenses (we are talking about real photography so forget about megapixels) and give the best for the buck. The competition paled in comparison: Sony (NEX Series) doesn’t know the first thing about lenses and Panasonic (DMC-G Series) built a similar camera with lenses fully compatible. Nikon and Canon didn’t even bother with this sub-market. So look at them both:

Categories
Clothing

Stylish=Zara=Cheap?

Globalisation has reached a point where all the most important cities in the world are starting to look suprisingly alike. Of course you can’t copy the Tour Eiffel, oh wait! The japanese did just to prove that a taller one could be built (it’s just 8’6 meters, but it IS higher). Jokes apart, you can’t really copy the Tour Eiffel AND Notre-Dame AND the Seine. The commercial neighbourhoods, however, are really converging to clones of each other. Barcelona used to have the biggest widest variety of small stores downtown, but with increasing price competence and soaring rent rates nowadays you can only find big firms such as H&M or Zara.

Most of those stores belong to the Inditex Group. According to the website those stores are: “Zara, Pull & Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home and Uterqüe; boasting 4.907 stores in 77 countries.” I don’t have enough space nor interest and knowledge to analise the whole firm, but I wanted to introduce the environment of the flagship chain store: Zara.

Categories
Clothing Technology

Google.

This time there’s no fancy title. This firm has such a strong brand name that it makes the best headline possible. But we are here to talk about marketing strategies, what has Google to do with it? It’s all about inovation. They started with just a search engine with the simplest of outlines, backed up by a powerful searching and indexing algorithm. And with every new project, they have followed those guidelines. Take for example Gmail, it works perfectly, the design is superb yet very basic and has a source code that is a peace of art.

Of course some of their original ideas1 didn’t really stick, and others modelled after hyped products2 from the competitors failed as well, but by trying to cover everything, you are allowed to crash from time to time. They didn’t when approaching advertisement.

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