Holes in the jeans

Ms Lam, a designer, went to Africa on her sabbatical leave from American Eagles outfitter, part of her Create for a Cause project.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1013/p07s01-lign.html

Her donated jeans got held up in Rwandan custom, to be “fumigated”  (there were holes in the jeans, so perhaps there had been termites?)

“Those cost a lot to buy”, exclaimed Lam while pointing to holes in her own jeans (good to know the designer was wearing her own creation i.e. mini black holes, hence no disconnect there between producer-consumer).

This reminds me of country singer Dolly Parton’s line “it costs me a lot to look this cheap!”.

I respect people who pay forward. Even when they end up drinking “Sam’s choice” coffee during this Depression.

On the profit front, paying forward means reinvesting into building the brand: Sam’s choice , Billy Mays’ pitching Jupiter’s hands-free , Paul Newman’s salad dressing, and

Colonel Sanders’ KFC . “This is it” is still performed by Michael Jackson (forever in the present tense).

I see no dead people.

And their children are still getting residual checks . Machines produce, dead people pitch, we buy, old money live on.

Who says there is a disconnect between producer and consumer! Branding is a high art, and more subtle than we have come to realize. This slow-boiled effect permeates the Market, just  like lava underneath our often trembling Earth.

I heard the White House come out saying that Fox News was no longer a news media outlet, but an advocacy journalism outfit. Business Week meanwhile gets folded into Bloomberg News (Bloomberg Week?) Let the public decide.

After all, America got talent.

But will America “Create for a Cause”?. A HBO comedian issued a challenge to the Vatican to sell off its now 900-million dollar property, to live humbly, and to feed the hungry whose meal tabs run up to about 4.4 billion a year.

It costs us a lot to look this cheap (the Walmart effect i.e. leveraging global supply chain to undercut local competitors)

Meanwhile, the public (among them 15 million unemployed and many more gave up looking ) rant and rave when hearing that Sachs made about 3 B during Q3. While there is no disconnect between producer and consume,

there is still a great divide, this time, not vertical in the classic sense ( Haves and Have-Nots), but among

NGO’s, Financial outfits and Exec Comp (BofA CEO’s full-year salary and bonus is being “recalled”).

It costs us a lot for those holes in the jeans (if you trace the journey of a T-shirt and pair of jeans in the global economy).

In “the Last Lecture”, RP said he was still a wear-til-tear kind of guy , since he had been raised that way.

We are all interconnected, way before the broadband overbuilt or failed Iridium and discontinued Concord.

You think brand built by now-dead people last beyond their graves. Think again. Random acts of kindness of strangers will outlast those brand extension any day.

I think  I’ll get myself one of those AE jeans.  Call it, Consume for a Cause. Would you like it pre-washed or pre-fumigated? Buy one, get the other 1/2 price. It costs less to look cheap during the economic downturn, albeit at somebody else’s expense.