Baby Carrots - New Junk Food

Would it be possible to sell  baby carrots as a fun, extreme and even sexy snack? - Definitely. „Bunch of Carrot Farmers” - group of almost 50 American carrot producers - adopted advertising techniques usually used by junk food brands to encourage people to eat more carrots. The campaign entitled “Eat ‘Em Like Junk Food”  was created by Crispin Porter + Bogusky . The tactic was based on  belief that ”instead of scrapping fast food ads, health food companies should attempt to play them at their own game, creating exciting, humorous brands with strong youth appeal”. The carrots packed in bright chip-sized bags are sold in school vending machines. Slogans, such as "The original orange doodles" and "Crunchier than chips, orange-ier than cheese puffs" has been incorporated. Advertising includes vibrant billboards and flashy TV spots. The campaign even featured a carrot-crunch-powered iPhone and iPod Touch game, “Xtreme Xrunch Kart,” available as a free download at the iTunes store.

So far, the campaign has been extremely successful.  For Halloween, carrot producers lounched “Scarrots” - single-serve bags of baby carrots, offered in a master bag containing 25 servings in 3 unique designs and 25 temporary glow-in-the-dark tattoos!

http://www.babycarrots.com/

Pantone Universe

I simply love Pantone colours! I can never decide which one is my favourite. Pantone is a colour guru, a platform that provides standard color systems to almost all industries, including manufacturing, fashion and design. Pantone is growing and strenghtening it's position in a smart and organic way. It makes me think of how many oportunities the Polaroid waisted.

The Pantone brand is happily expanding its family and now the Pantone Universe also includes:

A cheerfull Pantone Hotel on Brussels’ Louise Avenue - the building features 59 rooms celebrating the brand’s iconic colors. On a rooftop lounge Pantone-colored cocktails are served, and you also can find a  store selling trademark company products.  

Seavees 09/63 PANTONE Sneaker Collection available in seven vintage colors from the original Pantone color guide - epitomizes the cool, casual style of California in 1963.

 Sonia Spencer Accessories Collection - Stainless Steel and Enamel Cufflinks and Key Rings Based on the Iconic PANTONE Chip Design.

Kitchenware Collection by Typhoon - include textiles, shopping trolleys, storage jars, mugs and salt and pepper mills.

Pantone Mugs by W2

Design items by Seletti

 

Photos from the websites: Pantone.com and Seletti.it

Made in Poland - INGLOT Cosmetics

With today blog I want to start a series MADE IN POLAND about Polish brands and products that I miss the most while my travelling and living abroad. About brands with Polish origins that are expanding on the international markets and Polish brands with a great potential to once become successful abroad.

Just like Polish make-up brand INGLOT Cosmetics. I never leave the Warsaw Frederik Chopin airport without INGLOT’s nail enamels (my favourite no 082) and a bunch of sleeks lip glosses packed in a funny lab-like vials or samplers. And they smell really good! Nail treatment products is a must too. And there’s probably not even one Polish woman without INGLOT eye shadows. INGLOT has one of the most extensive color ranges of  make-up cosmetic  in the world and can easly compete with such known brands as MAC cosmetics. When being on a budget you can fill up your MAC eyeshadow palette with INGLOT pans.

What I find important is INGLOT products are high quality, safe, not tasted on animals and reasonably priced (really good value). What's more, all of them are produced in the European Union and over 95% of them in INGLOT’s own manufacturing facilities in Poland - they are all Fair Trade products than.

INGLOT store in NY; Photo: Tom McCavera

INGLOT is a Polish-based cosmetics company established 20 years ago with over 250 stores in Europe, Canada, Australia, Dubai, and Asia. Last year INGLOT opened their first store in New York City’s Times Square.

INGLOT offers a rainbow of hues of lipsticks and gloss, shadows, blushes, cover-up, mascara and pencils that are mesmerizing. Probably INGLOT’s flagship product is the “Freedom System”, a collection of more than three billion color combinations, allowing happy clients to assemble a palette of their own color preferences. This encurages mixing and matching and customizing to your make-up preferences, including palette sizes and shapes, choosing between round, rectangular or square pans in a compact. It's a Make-up Heaven!

Source: http://inglotcosmetics.com/

EURO 2012 Tournament Identity

Euro 2012, the European Football Championship, will be hosted by Poland and Ukraine from 8 June to 1 July 2012. Obviously, as Polish I’m enthusiastic about such a big event being co-organised in my country. However I’m also very emotional about the tournament’s logo design and its brand identification.
Official logo and brand identity were created by Portuguese agency Brandia Central.

The following is excerpted from the UEFA website.
Visual identity
The purpose of the logo is to give UEFA EURO 2012™ a personality of its own, with the visual identity to be applied across a range of promotional applications from tickets to web banners. The objective is to help promote the tournament – one of the world’s biggest sporting events – by providing an easily recognisable identity with a flavour of the host nations. The logo takes its visual lead from ‘wycinanka’, the traditional art of paper cutting practised in rural areas of Poland and Ukraine, as a tribute to the fauna and flora of the region.

EURO bloom
The ‘bloom’ logo has a flower representing each of the co-host nations and a central ball symbolising the emotion and passion of the competition, while the stem denotes the structural aspect of the competition, UEFA and European football. Nature has inspired other features of the visual identity, with woodland green, sun yellow, aqua blue, sky blue and blackberry purple being the crucial tones of the palette of colours to figure in official tournament branding.

Uniting ethos
The event slogan, meanwhile, is ‘Creating History Together’. The staging of the UEFA European Championship finals in Poland and Ukraine, a first for Central and Eastern Europe, will have a place in the history books, with everyone involved in UEFA EURO 2012™ – organisers, host countries, host cities, players and fans – contributing to another exciting chapter of European football.

On a Cannes Lions International site I found this project’s applications for this year Cannes Lion Award . We read there:

Description of how you arrived at the final design:
The starting point was blending Wycinanki, a common art form in both hosting countries, and football. The result is an identity which is original, genuine and has a powerful message: Make football grow in every way.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market:
Success in the market: - The work that was developed so far for the logo and visual identity of the UEFA EURO 2012 is very bold and represents a major breakthrough in these type of events. Many top design publications and personalities have shown an interest in what we did and gave us praise for it. Both host countries and UEFA are very excited about the brand and people around the world, football fans and others, have embraced it.

In the host countries though, the logo design has got lots of criticism. In Ukraine they say, it brings up an association with the “chupa-chups” lollipops. Polish fans are complaining about the colours of the “Polish flower”. They say it is necessary to swap the colours on it, because on the Polish flag white goes first and red is after it. It is also not enough Polish as this form of Wycinanki incorporated into logo has Ukrainian origins.

To me, incorporating Wycinanki (Papercuts) into logo design was a good direction and really great idea. But its interpretation is too much literal. It could look much more sophisticated. In present form the logo looks more like an illustration and it’s too detailed.

Empire State of Mind - New York

Today I live in Buenos Aires. But I would rather move to New York City on the next occasion. There's something magical about NYC. The City where you don't grew old. The City of dreamers, achievers, survivors and wanna-bes... The City where girls run in high hills all day long, where you wrap your hands around a coffee cup to warm up freezing fingers, where you look up to the sky, where the sky is the limit...

In New York, Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
There's nothing you can’t do, Now you're in New York!!!
These streets will make you feel brand new,
the lights will inspire you,
Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York

One hand in the air for the big city,
Street lights, big dreams all looking pretty,
no place in the World that can compare,
Put your lighters in the air, everybody say yeaaahh
come on, come, yeah...

In New York...
"Empire State of Mind" Jay-Z | Alicia Keys

Sex Sells !!!

Diesel latest campaign for Spring 2010 is tagged "Sex Sells *Unfortunately We Sell Jeans". Maybe Diesel don’t, but someone else in the fashion industry does sell sex indeed. Designer and movie director Tom Ford is a man. He’s quite a brand building genius I must admit. He’s not just selling cloths, cosmetics and sunglasses, he’s representing and promoting a hedonistic lifestyle. His brand's modern design with sharp, sleek suits, appeals even to my boyfriend. He knows best how to shout for attention using sex and eroticism as an explosive marketing tool. Ford become one of most talked about designers of our times, his biography is impressive. He gave Gucci that famous eternal youth and the mysterious sexuality called the „Gucci sex factor”. In 2005 he created his own brand TOM FORD that became famous for stirring some controversy each time when releasing new ad campaign. His collaboration with a provocative photographer Terry Richardson resulted in “various fashion-forward, decadently deviant photographs”. And in 2008, Tom Ford outfitted gorgious Daniel Craig as James Bond in Quantum of Solace! Who can resist hot, steamy eroticism?! Sex truly Sells?

Polyvore - playing paper dolls or Vogue's fashion editor?

Last week I had a paper dolls story. Today - Polyvore, internet fashion and shopping platform, IS a lot like playing paper dolls but with pictures of real clothes. Or better, playing Vogue's fashion editor with so much more fun! You can spend hours working on your unique fashion collage, flicking through images of millions of clothing items, shoes, bags and accessories. You drag and drop items until you decide your set is ready, than you can e-mail it to a friend, post it on your Facebook, Twitter, blog or share it with the Polyvore fashion community and let them judge your personal style and taste. Feel free to judge mine. My set is here beneath:

Walking on a beach by Cashewnut featuring JLo accessories

Within 3 years, the site grew from 0 to 1.4 million registered users. Over 6 million unique visitors makes Polyvore the largest fashion community site consisting of trendsetters, shoppers and amateur stylists who put together thirty thousand sets a day and post them on all sorts of social networking sites. That buzz helps to score 140 million page views per month.
So what is Polyvore? It’s an innovating online shopping experience that facilitates mixing and matching products from any online store to create fashion collections. In fact it’s an outstanding e-commerce, merchandising and marketing tool that inspires millions of enthusiastic people like me:) It opens new ways of communicating with global fashion-oriented and fashion-forward consumers. It’s an excellent tool for monitoring fashion trends and spotting new talents. As a prove, in 2009 Polyvore entered partnerships with brands including Calvin Klein, Marc by Marc Jacobs,Gap, Lancome and Nike among others. Nike, for example, frequently host fashion contests for best fashion sets that include one particular Nike clothing item. It usually generates 2000 - 6000 contest entries. The prizes are worth $100 gift card.
Here I posted few rndom communty members' sets. Check them out:

Head over heels by Jozefien featuring Balenciaga bags

Silk charmeuse top, $767
Knotted suede trench coat, $3,995
Stella mccartney skirts KHAKI, 345 GBP
Buckle Slingback Sandal, $695
Arena Giant Covered Velo - Sahara, $1,795
BVLGARI Chains & Leather Cords | Chains & Leather Cords | Yellow Gold..., $1,150
Limited-Edition Spring Look Palette, $65
Morning Beauty | Lily Donaldson by Sølve Sundsbø | Fashion Gone Rogue

this is so me by Anquetta featuring Gucci shoes

chic and effortless by lisaLockhart featuring French Connection shoes

Polaroid's FAILURE

Polaroid founded in 1937 is one of the great iconic 20th century brands. Thanks to photos developed in your hands a while after the photo was taken, the Polaroid personality became “live for the moment” sort of brand. Unfortunately it’s also known as a failure band. Polaroid lose in touch with their customer and its market since the technology were shifting more rapidly than ever before. Other day I read “Polaroid could have been a major force in digital photography today... They just never went there.”
In 2001 Polaroid bankrupted and in 2008 closed their instant film factory. This spring the Polaroid Corporation is about to sell their unique collection of nearly 1300 photographs (out of 16,000) most of them taken by Andy Warhol and Chuck Close.

There are hundred thousands of Polaroid cameras still in use, stored on garage shelves, or put on sale on eBay, that could’ve never been used again. Fortunately a group called The Impossible Project decided to restart production of the actual film at a factory in Amsterdam. They re-engineered from the beginning the expensive instant film. Each piece of film is its own dark room. It has 6 distinct layers and it’s made up of 6 to 10 components, each of which must be used very precisely. It was indeed the Impossible Project.

View online Andy Warhol's Polaroids at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York. In this post you find a selection of my personal favorites.
If you like this post check the previous one -> Polaroid LOVE

City Marketing - Warsaw - The European Capital of Culture

Nowadays, every country and a city is forced by global competition to develop it’s own brand in order to encourage tourism, attract inward migration of residents or enable business relocation. City marketing proved any city can become a marketable product able to participate in competition for attracting international events such as the Olympic Games. Other times is about awarding a title like for example The European Capital of Culture. A city designated by the European Union for a period of one calendar year is given a chance to show its cultural life and cultural development. As Pole once living in Warsaw, I’m observing competition between Polish cities and race for winning ECC 2016. I must say I’m a big fan of Warsaw. It’s definitely not the most marvelous city you can visit, but meanwhile there is something tempting about it. Warsaw is the one of the fastest growing cities in Europe. It is taking full advantage of the tremendous and unique opportunities arising from the emergence of free market and the development of democracy. With it’s chic upscale bars and clubs, with it’s Business District that is like continuous construction site, with it’s bohemian arty East Side… I like it.
Here you find two movie clips from a campaign promoting Warsaw as the Capital of Culture.

The Fun Theory by Volkswagen

Volkswagen believes that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for better. It's about surprising people, creating something inconvenient, something that increases people's curiosity and creativity. Doing something good too. The Piano Staircase, The world's deepest bin and Bottle Bank Archade Machine are only few examples... The agency DDB Stockholm turned subway stairs into a real life piano and thus encuraged people to use them. The number of people using stairs increased by 66%. It was a brilliant brand campaign for VW as milions of people watch a movie clip from this experiment on Youtube. It was also very well planed, well-thought-out, consistent social campain.