January 19, 2017
Jorg Gray is a California-based brand of men’s and women’s watches. They are best known as the favored watch of U.S. President Barack Obama and the U.S. Secret Service. Jorg Gray was established as a watch line in 1998 by Logomark, Inc. based in Tustin, California. Originally Jorg Gray timepieces were manufactured as a high end promotional item for corporations and federal agencies. Jorg Gray became a retail only brand in 2009. The company has since expanded their line and launched a women’s collection in late 2013. There are currently over 250 authorized dealers the U.S. and the brand can be found in retail stores in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and South America.
President Obama received his original JG6500, the ‘official’ model of the Secret Service in 2007 as a birthday gift from his security team and has been documented wearing it. Shortly thereafter Jorg Gray created a commemorative edition of the timepiece. Each watch comes with an individualized serial number and an inscription, laser engraved on the case back. Other government agencies around the world, including the London Metropolitan Police, now also wear watches made by Jorg Gray.
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January 18, 2017
Mahjong is a four player game that originated in China during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). Three-player variations of the game can be found in South Korea and Japan. The game and its regional variants are widely played throughout Eastern and South Eastern Asia and have a small following in Western countries.
Similar to the Western card game rummy (though played with small tiles instead of playing cards), Mahjong is a game of skill, strategy, calculation, and luck. It is not known when the conversion from cards to tiles took place precisely but it most likely occurred in the middle of the 19th century. Traditionally, Mahjong tiles were made of bone, often backed with bamboo. Bone tiles are still available but most modern sets are constructed from various plastics such as bakelite, celluloid, and more recently nylon.
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January 16, 2017
Between 1880 and WWII, Coney Island (a peninsular neighborhood in southern Brooklyn) was the largest amusement area in the U.S., attracting several million visitors per year. At its height, it contained three competing major amusement parks, Luna Park, Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park, as well as many independent amusements. The area was also the center of new technological events, with electric lights, roller coasters, and baby incubators among the innovations showcased there in the 1900s.
Steeplechase Park was created by George C. Tilyou (1862–1914) and operated from 1897 to 1964. It was the first of the three original iconic Coney Island parks (Luna Park opened in 1903 and Dreamland opened the following year). Steeplechase was also Coney Island’s longest lasting park. Unlike Dreamland, which burned in a fire in 1911, and Luna Park which, despite early success, saw its profitability disappear during the Great Depression, Steeplechase had kept itself financially profitable. The Tilyou family had been able to adapt the park to the changing times, bringing in new rides and new amusements such as the Parachute Jump.
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December 7, 2016
Deregulation is the process of removing or reducing state regulations (rules and laws, etc.), typically in the economic sphere. It is the undoing or repeal of governmental controls on the economy. It became common in advanced industrial economies in the 1970s and 1980s, as a result of new trends in economic thinking about the inefficiencies of government regulation, and the risk that regulatory agencies would be controlled by the regulated industry to its benefit, and thereby hurt consumers and the wider economy.
The stated rationale for deregulation is often that fewer and simpler regulations will lead to a raised level of competitiveness, therefore higher productivity, more efficiency and lower prices overall. Opposition to deregulation may usually involve apprehension regarding environmental pollution and environmental quality standards (such as the removal of regulations on hazardous materials), financial uncertainty, and constraining monopolies.
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December 3, 2016
Champion, alternatively stylized ‘Champion U.S.A,’ is an American manufacturer of clothing, specializing in sportswear. The brand was founded in Rochester, New York in 1919 and acquired by the Sara Lee Corporation in 1989. Sara Lee had acquired the Hanes brand a decade earlier, and in 2006 it spun off all its clothing brands into a new company called HanesBrands Inc., of which Champion is still a subsidiary today.
Toby Thompson, acclaimed graphic designer who received the Kudos Award for his 1988 Olympic poster designs for Kodak, sketched the Champion Logo during a corporate meeting, but was never given credit for his design work.
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November 28, 2016
A subscription box is a recurring, physical delivery of niche-oriented products packaged as an experience and designed to offer additional value on top of the actual retail products contained in a box. Subscription boxes are a marketing strategy and a method of product distribution. Subscription boxes are used by subscription based ecommerce businesses, referred to as ‘subcom’ for short.
Subscription commerce falls into two categories: discovery commerce and convenience commerce. Both categories are meant to foster brand loyalty and increase sales, but discovery commerce is for customers who are looking to try something new, while convenience commerce caters to customers who want a specific product regularly and enjoy having them delivered.
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November 14, 2016
A snob is a pejorative term for a person who believes there is a correlation between social status and human worth. The term also refers to a person who judges, stigmatizes others and believes that some people are inherently inferior to others result from the perception of beliefs, values, intellect, creativity, talent, wealth, occupation, education, ancestry, ethnicity, relationship, power, religion, physical strength, class, taste, prestige, beauty, nationality, and fame. The word ‘snobbery’ came into use the first time in England during the 1820s.
English social commentator William Hazlitt observed, in a culture where deference to class was accepted as a positive and unifying principle, ‘Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid of being overtaken by it,’ adding subversively, ‘It is a sign the two things are not very far apart.’ The English novelist Bulwer-Lytton remarked in passing, ‘Ideas travel upwards, manners downwards.’ It was not the deeply ingrained and fundamentally accepted idea of ‘one’s betters’ that has marked snobbery in traditional European and American culture, but ‘aping one’s betters.’
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November 12, 2016
Populism is a political ideology that holds that virtuous citizens are mistreated by a small circle of elites, who can be overthrown if the people recognize the danger and work together. Populism depicts elites as trampling on the rights, values, and voice of the legitimate people.
Populist movements are found in many democratic nations. According to Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist who focuses on political extremism and populism in Europe: ‘Many observers have noted that populism is inherent to representative democracy; after all, do populists not juxtapose ‘the pure people’ against ‘the corrupt elite?”
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November 11, 2016
‘Don’t mourn, organize!‘ is an expression often incorrectly supposed to be the last words spoken by labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill, who was charged with murder and executed in Utah in 1915. In truth, the expression is part of a telegram sent to Bill Haywood, the founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in which Joe wrote, ‘Goodbye, Bill, I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!’ It wasn’t Joe’s last telegram; he sent another in which he implored Haywood, ‘Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.’
Since the death of Hill, the phrase has been used in association with other labor leaders’ deaths. The phrase has also been used in conjunction with a severe defeat and not the death of an individual.
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October 26, 2016
Birdwell, makers of Birdwell Beach Britches, is an American surf clothing company headquartered in Santa Ana, California. Founded by Carrie Birdwell Mann in 1961, the company manufactures and sells customized heavy-duty swimsuits, which are sold internationally. With four basic models, various fabrics, including Surfnyl, Tectyl, heavy nylon, sailcloth, and canvas, more than 40 colors, and various other options, the combinations that can be created are nearly endless. The company’s motto is ‘We don’t build 1000 things. We build one thing 1000 ways.’
The swimsuits themselves, which resemble board shorts, are paneled swimsuits, with waistbands resembling those of boxing trunks, always double-stitched, always with two layers of fabric. These shorts are known and favored among surfers, lifeguards, and paddleboarders, because of their quick-drying design and extreme durability; with an estimated 10 years for average use, and two to five years for more strenuous use. On all of the trunks there is a 2 square inch logo, of a stylized anthropomorphic surfboard, wearing, of course, Birdwell Beach Britches, nicknamed ‘Birdie.’
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October 11, 2016
Vanity sizing, or ‘size inflation,’ is the phenomenon of ready-to-wear clothing of the same nominal size becoming bigger in physical size over time. This has been documented primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom. Vanity sizing tends to occur where clothing sizes are not standardized, such as the U.S. market. In 2003, a study that measured over 1,000 pairs of women’s pants found that pants from more expensive brands tended to be smaller than those from cheaper brands with the same nominal size.
In Sears’s 1937 catalog, a size 14 dress had a bust size of 32 inches. In 1967, that bust size was used for size 8 dresses. In 2011, it was a size 0. Some argue that vanity sizing is designed to satisfy wearers’ wishes to appear thin and feel better about themselves. Designer Nicole Miller introduced size 0 because of its strong California presence and to satisfy the request of many Asian customers. However, the increasing size of clothing with the same nominal size caused Nicole Miller to introduce size 0, 00, or subzero sizes.
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September 27, 2016
A logo is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. Logos are either purely graphic (symbols/icons) or are composed of the name of the organization (a ‘logotype’ or ‘wordmark’).
In the days of hot metal typesetting, a logotype was one word cast as a single piece of type, e.g. ‘The’ (as opposed to a ‘ligature,’ which is two or more letters joined, but not forming a word). By extension, the term was also used for a uniquely set and arranged typeface or colophon (a brief description of the manuscript or book to which it is attached). At the level of mass communication and in common usage, a company’s logo is today often synonymous with its trademark or brand.
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