How the next royal baby will boost the fashion industry and British economy – The Upcoming. How the next royal baby will boost the fashion industry and British economy With the second royal baby to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge due any day now, speculation is reaching a fever pitch, not more so than whether the new addition will be a boy or girl, or how he or she will be dressed. Bookies have given favourable odds for a baby girl, with Alice, Charlotte and Elizabeth as popular name guesses.
Descended from a long line of stylish, iconic women, the arrival of a little girl to the family has been suggested as being worth up to £1 billion across her lifetime, particularly benefiting fashion and retail industries. Since the arrival of Prince George in 2013, retailers have been inundated with demand from parents keen to replicate the young royal’s look, which is invariably an extension of his mother’s style and tastes. Within the childrenswear retail sector, infantwear (newborns and under 5s) has seen the most consistent and best performing trends in sales in recent years.
Uk-wages-grow-at-29--their-fastest-pace-in-six-years-10503240. A 400% rent hike is forcing london's fashion designers out of their studios. The Trampery's fashion incubator in London Fields is currently home to some of London's most vital designers, including James Long, Lou Dalton and Jonathan Saunders. After a year of negotiations with the landlord, rents were expected to go up this September from £125,000 to £230,000, but the landlord has just announced that the rent will in fact be increased by an enormous 400% to £500,000.
This blood-chilling rent rise has forced the Trampery's fashion incubator, as well as bike-shop-cum-coffee-house Look Mum, No Hands! , to close. With designers set to be booted out of their studios just weeks before showing their collections at London Fashion Week, the Trampery's fashion incubator is appealing to the retail industry to find alternative accommodation. "It is essential to us that The Trampery be found a new home," says British Fashion Council CEO Caroline Rush. "The Trampery is an incredible facility for start-up and developing designer fashion businesses. Find out how you can help here. You Can Now Drop Off Your Unwanted Clothes at Any Levi's Store. Need to free up some closet space? With the expansion of Levi Strauss’s clothing-recycling scheme, you can now drop off your unwanted clothing and shoes—regardless of brand—at any Levi’s mainline and outlet store in the United States.
The move is part of Levi’s wider plan to create the infrastructure necessary to support a “circular economy” for textiles. By partnering with I:Collect, the same garment-recycling firm employed by H&M, The North Face, and the City of San Francisco for their own take-back schemes, Levi’s hopes to disrupt the linear birth-to-death product life cycle that only results in landfill waste. “We’ll help divert some of the 24 billion pounds of clothing, shoes, and textiles Americans add to landfills every year,” Michael Kobori, vice president of social and environmental sustainability at Levi Strauss, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
RELATED | Save the Planet, Stop Washing Your Jeans, Says Levi’s CEO “We have a long way to go and we can’t do it alone,” Kobori said. Captured by cotton: Girls duped into bonded labour in India's textile mills. ERODE, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - From her two-room concrete home nestled among the lush coconut plantations of southern India, housewife Kavita has seen the region's textile industry flourish for a decade, thanks to the labour of poor, lower caste women like herself. Promising a better life, "agents" have for years visited these poor, rural parts of Tamil Nadu and taken a steady stream of girls and women to work in thousands of cotton spinning mills, part of a textile and clothing industry that is one of India's biggest employers and a major exporter. The image of women from remote hamlets going to work, staying in hostels and earning money spinning cotton as part of a booming global garment supply chain, should be empowering in a country like India, an emerging power still plagued by poverty and male domination.
"I tell all the women I meet not to go and work in the mills. I know what the agents promise and what is real. (Reporting by Nita Bhalla. Are Unpaid Internships Acceptable? | Opinion, Op Ed. NEW YORK, United States — Forget fringe. Accepting an unpaid internship and then suing after its completion for unpaid wages and overtime compensation is the newest movement in fashion and, as it turns out, Ashley Olsen and Mary-Kate Olsen’s award-winning brand, The Row, is right on trend. The 29-year-old twins, who took home their second Council of Fashion Designers of America Award this year, are the most recent designers to be sued in connection with an unpaid internship. According to plaintiff Shahista Lalani’s complaint, which was filed this month in New York state court, she worked for The Row for four months in 2012.
Lalani claims that as the “head intern” she performed the same work as “some full-time employees,” such as photocopying, sewing, cleaning, and running personal errands, including carrying “like 50 pounds worth of trench coats” in 100-degree weather, without receiving compensation or college credit. The unpaid internship is ubiquitous across America and beyond. Why customer service is key. Measuring the effects of sponsorship. Sponsorship can bring two brands together and give both of them wider exposure. But while the benefits of an association may seem obvious, the only way to really judge the success of a sponsorship programme is to measure it, as Jackie Fast of Slingshot Sponsorship explains Measuring sponsorship is one of the most important services a sponsorship agency can provide. With innumerable ways to measure marketing ROI, it is important that sponsorship provides the same value. It is also one of the crucial points that will decide whether or not to renew a sponsorship programme.
A sponsorship agency should not only help you deliver value, but it should also measure it. There are three key aspects to measuring sponsorship: Understand the audience This should go beyond standard demographic information and include insight on how the audience you are targeting engages with the brand. Lay the groundwork Provide valuable data Written by Jackie Fast of Slingshot Sponsorship.
More on this topic: London could have 'floating communities' in six months. London is desperately in need of more housing, but unfortunately the city is rapidly running out of usable space on which to build. That’s why New London Architecture, an innovative think tank, is looking for new ways to tackle the crisis. A floating house on the Regent’s Canal may only set you back £75,000 (Image: Flickr) New London recently launched a nationwide competition amongst notable firms to develop designs for effective way to house large number of people without arduous construction.
The building of a new ‘mega-city’ near the M25 and building homes on top of hospitals, schools and libraries have been proposed as solutions One firm, Baca Architects has ambitious plans to build 7,500 new fixed-placed floating homes on the city’s canal network. The ‘floating neighbourhoods’ also include lidos, open-air cinemas, workspaces, cafés and schools along London’s canals.
It is believed the project can be completed within six months. More information here. Forbes Welcome. PETA Strikes Victoria's Secret Off Its List of Cruelty-Free Brands. Photo by Sorbis/Shutterstock People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ has stricken Victoria’s Secret from its list of cruelty-free companies after the lingerie giant confirmed its decision to sell beauty products in mainland China. Although the Chinese government has, in recent years, relaxed its animal-test mandate for certain types of cosmetics that are produced and sold in the country, the new rules don’t cover imported or specialty products. American-based firms have been eager to capitalize on the Asian country’s $15-billion-and-growing cosmetics market, however, with several companies, most notably Avon, Mary Kay, and Esteé Lauder, reversing decades of “no animal testing” policies to do so. “Although the company fully understands the Chinese government’s requirements for tests on animals for cosmetics, it has chosen to enter this market anyway,” wrote PETA on its website.
RELATED | PETA’s Bunny Logo for Cruelty-Free Products Gets a Sleek Update.