NYC Mercedes Benz Fashion Week

Our visit to New York City for Mercedes Benz fashion week (fall 2010) was a crazy 36 hour trip! Mary of Randolph Engineering and I took an early-ish Amtrak train down to NYC (luckily not at 630am train like normal!) and stayed in a brand new Holiday Inn.

Once we had checked into our awesome hotel, Mary and I went down the block to the Starbucks to meet with stylist Sandra Staayer. Sandra has done styling for everyone from Cingular Wireless commercials to aiding fashion designers with their fashion shows to working on the Sex and the City series. She had a lot of great ideas on where RE fits into the fashion world as well as ways to get RE celebrity seeding and on major TV. shows and movies.

That evening, we attended the Michael Bastian fall 2009 fashion show which was held in a loft in Chelsea. The show was really cool and very different from other shows- instead of having assigned seating, everyone stood around the runway and the show ran three times instead of just once. This allowed people to come and go as they pleased. After the first run through, we ran into Kanye West (Mary tried to get him sunglasses) and chatted with Michael and everyone at Michael Bastian. It was a fun night that ended with a big Italian dinner in the West Village- hopefully we will be back in the fall for the Spring 2009 show!

On Tuesday, we did a small media tour with a few trade publications in the morning and afternoon then heading back to Boston. Definitely a fun and fast trip!

Walter Payton Collection Launch Week

Talk about a crazy week! I just spent the past week traveling to Chicago and Tampa for the launch of the Walter Payton Collection from KangaROOS. The week started in Chicago with a party on Tuesday night hosted by the Walter Payton Foundation. The party was held at the Navy Pier and attended by members of the media, friends of the Payton family, and some ex-NFL players including Jerry Azumah.

Wednesday I spent all day in the Chicago airport due to a snow storm in Boston and finally made it back around midnight! Thursday was spent in the office preparing for the Superbowl launch party on Friday.

I ended up taking a 6am flight on Friday to Tampa, connecting through Washington DC. My flight was late getting into Tampa and since I always fear for the worst, I did not think that I would get everything set up in time for the event. So, while carrying McBody (our plastic male mannequin) and Walter (the poster) under my arms, I ran to the taxi area where I managed to get a cab in 2 minutes and arrived at the hotel 10 minutes later- only to find that everything had been set up for the event the night before. Perfect! I did not attend the Man of the Year luncheon (that happened before the launch party) so I sat in the other room for 2 hours before anyone came in to see the shoes- apparently Kurt Warner was running late and you can’t start lunch without Kurt! I got to meet all three Man of the Year nominees which was definitely cool. They all were really interested in the shoes and I believe we sent them each a pair or two. After the event, the Payton’s did a huge media run and gave out the extra gift bags to reporters- the sweat bands were a big hit!