SITC at Chico's?

Dazed and confused. This is the state of my brain when I passed Chico’s today and saw this sign in the window.

This is one of my all time favorite Carrie Bradshaw quotes from Sex in the City. I suppose this should not surprise me except for two things, 1) this is Chico’s not Bebe and 2) they did not give credit. SITC was a show for woman and retailers. For the record some of my most favorite fashion quotes from SITC

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Budgeting Female Style

When does a purchase not count in the budget? This is what men can’t seem to understand about female budgeting. This came to me today as my husband and I were discussing retail mark-ups. I was explaining that a $50 item sold for $100 is a 50% margin. He argued back~ no that is 100% mark-up. I used to have this same fight with a good friend~ also a finance person. Yes, in technical business school terms this is a 100% mark-up but in the retail world this is 50% period end of sentence. Some things in retail are just different.

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Brands

Today I walked by a window that stopped me in my tracks. It was all vintage items but they were all branded and it got me thinking about brands. In my opinion there are real brands and then what I call made up brands. These are the brands you sometimes see in Nordstrom or Macy's and make up a good part of the assortment at Kohl's and JC Penney. I don't have a real issue with these brands~ say Charter Club, Sonoma, Worthington or Trouve but they are not what I think of as real brands. Brands that people seek …

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Welcome to The Retail Rebel

In the business world everything is masked with a level of decorum and professionalism. The commentary people use to describe say~ a fashion miss, “Our customer did not embrace the new trends quite the way we had hoped” or mass lay-offs, “$600 mm in cost savings coming out of the stores and headquarters” is a bit dull. This is retail~ this is fashion. There are egos, mistakes, awful jobs stocking merchandise and customers who are entitled, demanding and rushed. Yet, we love it. Retail is never boring and the consumer never stops changing. With this blog we hope to cut …

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