With advertisements from The Gap, Amazon’s Kindle and JCPenney acclimating the public eye to seeing frank images of same-sex couples, it’s easy to conclude that we’re simply seeing the product…
James Cash Penney, the son of a Baptist minister and founder of one of America’s enduring retail empires, probably rolled over in his grave. Tucked in the glossy pages of JCPenney’s…
Life has never been a bowl of peaches for canned-food brands. Even if you look past the fact that canning arose as a cheap and easy way for Napoleon to…
Humans have been washing clothes as long as they’ve worn them, a fact that’s made laundry the oldest, most tedious chore in history. No surprise, then, that forward-thinking entrepreneurs gave…
Not long after the end of WWII, a farmer named Maurice Wilks was using a battered jeep to do some work on his farm on the Welsh island of Anglesey.…
With The Great Gatsby in theaters and everyone suddenly falling in love with the glamor of the 1920s, now’s a fitting time to take a look at one of the…
The law doesn’t allow for the trademarking of a great view, but there’s nothing wrong with branding it. Just ask the marketing folks at the Empire State Building. The 1931…
The fact is largely forgotten, but first lady Eleanor Roosevelt used to host a weekly radio show sponsored by the Simmons mattress company—a cultural footnote immortalized by Cole Porter in…
For the next few weeks, the shopper who steps through the doors of the Brooks Brothers New York flagship store is bound to marvel over what seems like a nifty…
For every industry whose marketing has undergone a revolution over the years, it’s always amusing to find the relative handful for whom time seems to have stood still. Case in…
