Ford Motor Company has teamed up with SHFT.com, the award-winning multimedia platform founded by actor and filmmaker Adrian Grenier and film producer Peter Glatzer. The automaker is intended to continue its efforts on smarter environmental decisions and the green lifestyle website will help inspiring people to go ‘greener’ through film, design, art, transportation and culture. 

Benetton, the international apparel brand, which is spreading the idea of love and unity across the globe with its hilarious promotional projects along with selling brightly colored sweaters and dresses, is now rolling out a new international campaign entitled UNHATE and launches a foundation of the same name to cultivate the principle of love and tolerance despite all religious, cultural, governmental, national and individual differences. The new multiplatform campaign developed by Fabrica Italy and 72andSunny includes a series of posters featuring modern political leaders from different ‘camps’ kissing each other (remember the legendary Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker’s smooch?) and an impressive 60-second spot by French director Laurent Chanez, which showcases the moments of love, kissing and embraces closely entwined with aggressiveness, fights and blood.

Burton Snowboards and PepsiCo’s Mountain Dew have partnered to work on improving sustainability in apparel and outerwear. The brands will be collaborating during the 2012 and 2013 product seasons to change the way outerwear and apparel are made and searching the ways of creating sustainable fabrics out of recycled plastic bottles. The created material will feature the new Burton gear collections.


We welcome your comments on the article written by Cheryl Swanson, Principal at Toniq, USA
Time magazine recently reported on “The Lipstick Index” (Time, Special Money Issue, October 10, 2011). Lipstick sales have long been an economic indicator; when the economy is down, lipstick sales have traditionally gone up. Women would rather spend on little luxuries when purse strings are tighter and the economy is uncertain— and lipstick has been that one affordable luxury that makes a women feel pampered and more confident. Afterall, when you feel beautiful, you are more likely to be optimistic. According to Time magazine, lipstick sales are up 14% in 2011. But what’s more interesting is that nail polish is up 54%. Nail polish is evidently becoming the new US economic index. So if nail polish is the new lipstick, what other new indicators are we seeing in this recessionary economy?