by Pamela Skaist-Levy ; Gela Nash-Taylor with Booth Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2014
A feel-good American success story recounted with candor, heart and attitude.
With the assistance of Moore, the founders of Juicy Couture chronicle their real-life fairy tale in a “part memoir, part how-to-manual and part fashion industry field guide.”
Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor became friends in 1988 “while folding the guest towels that went on the sink in the bathroom” of the boutique where they worked. “We started gossiping and then got into deeper stuff. It was instant chemistry, like magnets, like we had been friends forever.” They quickly discovered their shared love of fashion. Their first venture, started with $200, was in the niche market of maternity wear, which they discovered was stuck in a fashion time warp and “was a very specific targeted idea, which is the best way to start something.” So they created cool maternity jeans and then moved on to T-shirts with the idea of perfecting the fit, fabric and color. The authors learned as they went along, constantly trying new ideas and products, failing on some but always building a work environment that was both enjoyable and financially viable. By the end of 1996, Juicy Couture had sales of $5 million. In 2003, Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor sold Juicy Couture to the Liz Claiborne corporation for “$56 million plus an eventual $200 million earnout” and began with a new line. The authors lace the fast-paced back story of the company with tips for the budding entrepreneur, including Learn From a Starter Business, Dos and Don’ts of Hands-On Branding, Competition Can Be Healthy, Build Your Staff Like a Family, Coping with Growth, the Problem You Want to Have (“If your infrastructure can handle it, spin out ideas for new products to meet demand”), and How to Prepare Your Business to Sell.
A feel-good American success story recounted with candor, heart and attitude.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-809-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
by Enrico Moretti ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2012
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's...
A fresh, provocative analysis of the debate on education and employment.
Up-and-coming economist Moretti (Economics/Univ. of California, Berkeley) takes issue with the “[w]idespread misconception…that the problem of inequality in the United States is all about the gap between the top one percent and the remaining 99 percent.” The most important aspect of inequality today, he writes, is the widening gap between the 45 million workers with college degrees and the 80 million without—a difference he claims affects every area of peoples' lives. The college-educated part of the population underpins the growth of America's economy of innovation in life sciences, information technology, media and other areas of globally leading research work. Moretti studies the relationship among geographic concentration, innovation and workplace education levels to identify the direct and indirect benefits. He shows that this clustering favors the promotion of self-feeding processes of growth, directly affecting wage levels, both in the innovative industries as well as the sectors that service them. Indirect benefits also accrue from knowledge and other spillovers, which accompany clustering in innovation hubs. Moretti presents research-based evidence supporting his view that the public and private economic benefits of education and research are such that increased federal subsidies would more than pay for themselves. The author fears the development of geographic segregation and Balkanization along education lines if these issues of long-term economic benefits are left inadequately addressed.
A welcome contribution from a newcomer who provides both a different view and balance in addressing one of the country's more profound problems.Pub Date: May 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-75011-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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