It’s a perfect fall week in North Carolina. You’d never believe that a couple weeks ago we had a major storm come through. The pumpkins and mums are out everywhere and the NC State Fair is in full swing. For anyone who's looking for fun things to do in the Triangle, check out the Triangle Weekender, another great regional magazine. Which brings us to the star of the fall advertising campaigns, the Three Empires at the Museum of Art. Whoever is running the advertising for the show is doing an epic job. It’s $20 at the local museum and word of mouth buzz in downtown Raleigh just walking around is noticeable. For anyone who is not old enough to remember the late 90s/early 00s, there was a trend for a couple of years of Christian iconography exhibits. Shout out to the Mint Museum in Charlotte for riding that train. Regardless of your thoughts on crosses or religion, Mediterranean linen and tourist gear, especially Italian, definitely had an upswing in the South for people working in department stores and fashion venues. We don’t produce a Christmas resort collection currently, but if you were a menswear fashion brand, figure we’ll see a bunch of Roman Holiday men’s linen pants, suits, and both short and long-sleeve dress shirts come spring. Maybe classic leather items too. Ralph Lauren is set to cash in the spring. I just remember it because linen sells at a higher price point which directly effected my paycheck in retail sales days at Belks. We’ll have to see if there’s a Miami resort twist on it in the near future January-May 2025. What a gift to the menswear fashion industry.
Which brings you other good trends going on in sales and advertising, the return of indy newspapers in Raleigh. First noticed retired men reading them at bus stops and cafes, but it seems to be growing. The Triangle has 200-300+ indy newspapers, generally 24” x 36” folded in half for a final size of 18” x 24” or the size of what was traditionally the Wednesday special in traditional newsprint. The reason this is important from a business perspective is we’re seeing AI roll-out in catalog ads which is the general staple of the small flyers and indy newspapers. It tends to look best in uncluttered and clean ads, namely traditional Italian fashion, so next month want to take advantage of the technology to see if this would be something that businesses could practically use.
An excuse to dive into some of the new AI patternmaking software upgrades over Gerber which we are excited to see. As a designer aside, one of the big advertising mistakes we saw with Google glasses and Facebook Oculus Rift, or maybe an unrealized opportunity to cash in, was combining newspapers a decade ago for gamers and sports nerds. Small newspaper outfits might be able to grab revenue shares with indy school newspapers. This is obviously a CES advertising gimmick, but if one actually wanted to adopt gamer glasses, Xbox or X could probably still go after this line of revenue/coolness factor by doing a cross-over with a sporting ESPN or NFL revenue split. You see college kids using their phone to scan barcodes everyday. What you don’t see anyone do is integrate google glasses with a newspaper where the barcodes look like simple signs, but if you’re wearing a pair of premium glasses with a subscription, it prompts a visual replay of video of the game in glasses. How many dads would love something like this as a way to modernize betting, fantasy football, etc.? A way to one up their neighbors and relatives. Obviously, no idea the coding involved, but it’s fall college football season. Grilling and gaming are staples of the trash talk around the dinner table and out at sporting events. In this case, the print newspapers would be a form of tv advertising for ESPN or other outlets similar to the 80s tv guides for cable. If you do know how to code and like the idea, it’s yours. Alright off to read a bunch more indy newspapers. Next month we’re going to try out AI catalog tests for department ready-to-wear store items. Will it work or won’t it? We're all thinking of Harry Potter wizard newspapers that look normal to muggles and show video clips to wizards.