Really quickly, and I acknowledge this is a weird way to jumpstart my blog again and I’m going to go ahead and promise absolutely nothing, I wanted to write about this brand I’ve never heard of and was wholly uninterested in until I did this year’s Sniffapalooza Fall Ball and the brand was at Bergdorf Goodman.
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I had the good fortune of trying Annick Goutal Rose Pompon (rose, black currant, and raspberry, though I personally got more peach and apricot accompanying the rose), the latest addition to the family, and celebrating it with my fellow noses last night.
Busy bee be real. Lots of things that have happened in the past week or so, so let’s start from the top!
1) I got a job! I work for FindSpark in Partner Sales and Community Development. Yay meaningful work! I’ve already done a bit of little things here and there during my training including this blog post: 5 Quotes from Shakeshack CEO Danny Meyer to Inspire Your Professional Journey
and more importantly, I’d like to push the FindSpark Fashion Conference happening this Saturday from 10AM-5PM! Read More
It’s a good day when you can kick back with the lovely people of Sniffapalooza and the NYC fragrance community and get buzzed on perfume.
Mr. Chokkattu and I stopped at Lladro first, but I forgot to take pictures of the pretty porcelain, brand new candles and a new votive. No matter, they had three new home fragrances. Gardens of Valencia and Mediterranean Beach are both florals, Mediterranean is heavier on the musk, and I Love You, Mom is a gourmand, floral on top of chocolate and honey.
The return of my mother and my brother from their time in Hong Kong, my productive breakfast at Lole Atelier, and a 5 minute conversation with a really nice dog owner with a 4-month-old black shiba puppy has been rejuvenating in a way I never really seem to expect, which is good, since it wouldn’t be so effective if I expected it to happen.
Highlights from:
Matt Archambault: Social media and branding
Actually called: Wix Breakfast: Life Attracts Life- Give Your Brand a Personality Boost! 
School’s getting closer, so I decided to retrain myself for it by going to bed ridiculously late and waking up ridiculously early for a lecture! Yay! I found it on Eventbrite while browsing and took a chance.
And I’m really glad I did. It was a really interesting seminar, a little on the short side, full of little tips I would have never thought of, like how important emotional touchstones, big and small (“anything from a big brand experience to a tweet”), are to a customer base. There are tons of examples of these connections with consumers that I can think of. Some smaller gestures include Xbox’s (T, F) and T-Mobile’s (T, F) avid usage of their twitter handles and Facebook support apps to annual events like Krispy Kreme’s Day of the Dozens, Talk Like a Pirate, and National Doughnut Days. Everyone remembers larger political gestures like Oreo’s support for gay pride, to well-established, company-wide policies like Starbucks’ C.A.F.E Practices (they work with Conservation International to keep the farming sustainable) and TOMS Shoes policy of donating a pair of shoes for every pair purchased. All of them work to improve the perception of the brand and endear its consumers to it, while actually decreasing a little of the bad in the world at the same time. And of course, little gestures like that are key for small business owners to create their own communities; Milk Sugar Love’s content on their Facebook page regularly attempts to engage users with questions and relatable expressions.
This is painted on the left wall.
I took a tour of the Mast Brothers’ factory on Friday. It was brilliant. I’ve taken “chocolate themed” tours before, and visited the Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco when I was a teenager, and neither of those visits made me feel as excited about chocolate as the ~45 minute walk around the factory watching things being made did. I feel more educated now, and not in the way Starbucks or Teavana wanted its employees to feel and to make the customers feel when I worked for them (apologies to the, honestly, really great people who complimented me on how genuine I was), but more like when we visited the Kitchen at Grove Station and talked to the guy serving Modcup coffee near the door about how cold it was to be right next to the door during a late autumn grand opening. I still need to try honey processed coffee.
Sorry for the potato.
I tried to take some pictures, but my new phone’s camera is kind of a potato (thought apparently an improvement on the old camera), and my hands are not the most stable. I should ask for a new camera for Christmas.
I like the wooden flag. The bags with the color on them are sugar and the bags with no visible markings are cocoa beans. I convinced my boyfriend not to go lay in them, somehow.
We weren’t allowed to take pictures after passing the counter, which is understandable, as the ideas behind any number of their machines is fairly simple and easy to steal with a few good pictures, and they have a policy of a human touch being most important, which means many of their machines aren’t perfect automatons. If they did, I’m sure someone with fantastic business sense and fewer ethics could probably drive them out with a few tweaks to make the machines perfect. Although the idea of keeping the machines imperfect and stressing out the employees is a little odd, they did make a comment about how the latest they’ve worked until was maybe midnight, made it sound outrageous, and confirmed that their job was way, way better than retail in that regard at least. Anyway, the machines obviously don’t hold them back. Read More
Pomelo girl thoughts 