This morning I received a wonderful note from a woman who’d just read my More magazine piece about Harold, his purple crayon and me. She said she’d never written to a journalist before, but that the piece, which appeared in December, “struck me deeply… I feel exuberant!”
Harold always makes me feel exuberant. So glad to spread the word.
Here are a few images of the shirt I designed via www.blank-label.com — complete with my own made-up label, “Live Free or Die.”
The handsome model is related to me. And he likes the shirt, even though his mom made it.
If the shirt fits...
Live Free or Die
THE idea was never to try to supplant retail, says Fan Bi, the 22-year-old chief executive of Blank Label. Sometimes you need a dress shirt right now, and at those times, Mr. Bi says approvingly, “you can get it right now at Nordstrom.”
But what about those times when you get a hankering not to wear the same thing that 10,000 other men are wearing? Or when you wish you could have the fabric, collar, pockets and lining you’ve always wanted — not what some fashion buyer has chosen for this season? What if you could design that shirt yourself and hang it in your closet for about the same price as a mass-produced button-down?
“The value proposition of customization at retail prices was a cornerstone of our company from the very start,” Mr. Bi tells me by phone from Shanghai, where Blank Label shirts are sewn to customers’ specifications and delivered anywhere in the world in about four weeks. But Blank Label, his Web start-up based in Boston, offers something else that off-the-rack doesn’t: “the emotional value proposition: how expressive something is.”
“People really like a Blank Label shirt because they can say, ‘I had a part in creating this.’ ”
Since last Halloween, when the company’s dress shirt design application made its debut at www.blank-label.com, Mr. Bi and his three partners — ages 19, 22 and 30 — have joined a small but growing co-creation movement that uses the Internet to let consumers have a hand in making the products they buy. Web ventures have already popped up that allow shoppers to customize granola (MeAndGoji.com), jewelry (gemvara.com), chocolate (CreateMyChocolate.com), handbags (LaudiVidni.com) and clothing for girls ages 6 to 12 (FashionPlaytes.com). There are also online competitors selling design-your-own shirts, while Brooks Brothers is one major retailer that offers the service on its Web site. Click to continue »
Originally appeared in April 2010 More
By Amy Wallace
Photographs spill out of big manila envelopes, making a mess of Dana Delany’s coffee table. There’s one of Dana at about age five, chubby and jubilant, a Mexican hat on her head and dish of M&M’s in her hand. There’s the actress at 16, with frosted hair, and another snap taken a few years later, after she opted for a perm. She grimaces, but fondly, as she appraises them: the head shots (doe-eyed ingenue, strong-jawed heroine, and one that she calls her Shannen Doherty look); the captured moments from her film, theater and TV work; the Polaroids from countless photo shoots and a pile of candids with her family and friends.
As she shows me a group portrait of her father, uncle and paternal grandfather (“I identify with all of them. We’re all Irishmen”), I start to divine a pattern, which continues to emerge as she offers up shots from her fiftieth birthday party four years ago, which was hosted by her best friend, who happens to be male. “I was his best man at his wedding,” she says, and I’m tempted to comment, but Delany beats me to it.
“The thing I notice is I’m hanging with the boys,” she says, fanning the photos in front of her. Only later will I realize she is leading up to the most surprising moment of our interview. Click to continue »
In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” Thorstein Veblen (who I quote in tomorrow’s New York Times) coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people, rich or poor, acquire cool stuff to impress and to establish a pecking order.
Here are a few pictures of the cool stuff (specifically high-end cell phones) that I write about…
IN 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”
As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Mr. Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.
A sought-after public speaker, Mr. Nuovo logged about 200,000 miles a year on planes and was often inter viewed by journalists, one of whom, in a profile in The New Yorker, called him “the Henry Ford — or at least the Calvin Klein — of cellular communication.”
But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Mr. Nuovo was experiencing. Click to continue »
Just got word that “An Epidemic of Fear,” my Wired story on vaccines, will be in “Best American Science Writing 2010,” to be published soon… Very exciting.
Originally published in the New York Times 3/21/10
By AMY WALLACE
JEN BILIK sells wit for a living.
Since 2002, when she founded her gift and stationery products company, Knock Knock, with a $750,000 windfall from a Manhattan apartment sale, Ms. Bilik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur, has been churning out cleverness in abundance. There are the sticky notes saying things like “Useless Info” and “When Pigs Fly”; list pads titled “All Out Of” and “Things You Must Do to Make Me Happy”; flashcards for parenting, slang use and sex; and kits to aid in decision-making, dating, and even decision-making during dating.
She has also written “The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You” and designed a series of guided journals with names like “I Can’t Sleep” and “My Dysfunctions.”
Along the way, her annual revenue has grown to more than $6.3 million. Her company motto is, “We put the fun in functional,” but she acknowledges that the company’s voice is more confessional than practical.
“A core aspect of Knock Knock’s identity is justifying my own inadequacies, which has, I think, struck a chord in our customers,” she says, sitting in Knock Knock’s headquarters in Venice, Calif.
But oh, the lessons she’s learned. Like this one: “Great, creative inspiration feels so good. But translating that into a good business decision — well, it’ll probably take longer than your inspiration did.” Click to continue »
Has Dana Delany ever looked better? I don’t think so.
Peggy Sirota took it. 
I wrote the accompanying story. It’s in the April issue…
