TO-GENKYO has designed an innovative hourglass shaped label for packaged meat which uses a special ink that changes color as ammonia is released inside the package.

Beyond IKEA’s continued allegiance to its core premise of offering affordable, well-designed furniture and household goods, they have maintained creative efforts to evolve their marketing and peripheral services around this central hub.
Useful services such as their bike-sharing program in Denmark, car sharing in France and their free water taxi in New York offer innovative ways to help their customers more easily access their stores. By making it as easy as possible to buy their products, IKEA closes the gap between intent and purchasing.
Lesson for Business:
Take a wider view of the shopping experience, making each step along the path to purchase [...]

London based Colman Architects recently won a competition sponsored by the International Council of Shopping Centers, Inc. (ICSC) to envision what the architectural innovations of the shopping center fifty years from now will be like. Colman’s idea is replacing individual stores with product galleries. They’ve created organic shaped theatres that contain a single product type, footwear for example, and provide space for multiple brands to display on tiered levels. Product information and customization areas are centrally located within each gallery.
Visually kind of interesting but not a huge leap forward in the way people shop in contrast to fifty years ago.

For men who would prefer not to ever step foot in a clothing store again, enter the Trunk Club: a new online service that pairs the customer with a female personal shopper who will select an outfit for him and have it delivered to his door. The service begins with a video chat consultation to take inventory of the man’s current wardrobe, and decide on what he might be willing to try. From there, the personal shopper will select around nine articles of clothing—of her own choosing—and have them delivered. The man then tries on the new wardrobe, receives feedback [...]

The anticipated collaboration between architect Zaha Hadid and sportswear brand Lacoste has finally taken shape, and it doesn’t disappoint. The shoes, rubberized structures that wrap around the leg (angle high for men and calf high for women) are as conceptual and beautiful as Hadid’s architectural creations themselves.
[via WWD - subscription req'd]

The fashion designer who brought “trucker chic” to the mainstream is now producing wine – and sources say it might actually be quite good. Ed Hardy is known mainly for loud, graffitied t-shirts, trucker hats, and jeans worn by the likes of Britney Spears (and her kids), but designer Christian Audigier is now betting that his very recognizable brand will help push bottles too.
[via Luxist]

The newest mainstream company to put on its green thumb is Payless, which has just brought organic shoe line zoe&zac to shelves. Following its string of extremely successful designer collaborations over the past few years, hopefully this will be one more step toward mainstreaming ethically sound consumerism.
[via Racked via Fashion Herald]

Sure it looks a lot like BAPE or a Kanye West album cover, but that’s what the kids want this summer. And we actually like how wearable and unpretentious Kidrobot’s new “KidPunk” line is, even if they do describe it as “combining 80’s punk edginess with KidRobot fun.”
[via STREEThing]

60BAGS is a line of disposable bags that can decompose in about 2 months. They are sturdy enough to be used repeatedly, but are made out of a specially designed material that will break down quickly when disposed of.
60BAG explains:
60BAGs are the perfect natural answer to the environment’s needs. They are biodegradable carrier bags made our of flax-viscose non-woven fabric. Its material was scientifically developed and manufactured in Poland. The flax-Viscose fabric is produced with flax fiber industrial waste, which means it doesn’t exploit any natural resources and requires minimal energy during its production. This highly innovative technology enables the [...]

If you still have the disposable income to buy Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Stella McCartney, you might also want to buy a plane ticket to Paris and visit a new store in the Marais called Merci. The shop is the brainchild of high-end childrenswear designers Bonpoint, who decided to use their fashion industry muscles to do a little good in the world. They’ve stocked their store with custom pieces by some of the world’s most coveted designers, donating 100% of the profit to a children’s cause in Madagascar (does anyone know which one? Would love a link).
We love to [...]

The one-for-one model isn’t working so well for OLPC, but it’s doing wonders for a small company called TOMS Shoes, which donates one pair of shoes for every pair sold. The shoes have a distinctly traditional look to them (they’re modeled after the traditional Argentinian alpargata, a simple slip-on canvas shoe), but they’ve certainly crossed over into the mainstream. As TOMS preps to launch its most recent design collaboration with Element Skateboards, PSFK talks to founder Blake Mycoskie about where the company came from, and where it’s going.
What was your original inspiration for TOMS and how did you turn it [...]

Competition? Mergers? Supply and demand? Find our what’s cooking at the Food Court. These are the kind of directions you’ll find as you make your way through the Saturday Morning Cartoons style website You Are Here, created by the Federal Trade Commission to teach kids how marketing and advertising are influencing the way they shop.
On the site, excuse me, “in the mall”, kids can create their own ads for shoes, hear directly from the cartoon doctor who endorses the vitamins at a nutritional emporium, and find out what happens when small retailers get bought up by bigger corporations. What’s most [...]

Valet Mag has a nice visual spread of the best men’s collections from the recently wrapped up New York Fashion Week. Most notable trend seems to be the lack of consistency between one show and the next, with style trends hardly discernable.
Marc Jacobs played it retro with quirky additions and something of a hip hop vibe.
Rag and Bone went simple and clean in shades of black and grey.
And Ducky Brown seemed uncharacteristically deconstructed, more like something you’d see from Comme des Garcons.
Valet Mag: The Fashion Week Spectrum

Eric Wilson writes an interesting piece in last week’s New York Times, “Change? It Wasn’t in Fashion” pointing out how in 2008, compared to the topsy turvy year in the American political arena, the fashion industry was decidedly more cautious (or in his words, stubborn). Marc Jacobs revived designs from earlier collaborations with Murakami and Steven Sprouse, even marketing them with tried and true imagery. Models from the 1990s are making a comeback. Trends which have been around for way too long (they are trends after all, meaning they’re supposed to shift and morph with significant timeliness) just won’t go [...]

When in London, it’s always a pleasure to wander around the hundreds of boutiques that dot the back streets between West Soho and Endell Street – you find such creative energy and individual style, they ache with signs of what could be next in retail, design, branding, marketing.