Author: Brenda P. Salinas

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When a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.

“I hadn’t watched The Office,” Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.

This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.

The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a “face template,” and checking it against a database.

In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.

The software works even when people are wearing sunglasses, hats and scarves. Recent tests have found that facial hair, aging, or changes in weight or hair color do not affect the accuracy of the system.

The technology is being tested in a dozen undisclosed top stores and hotels in the U.S., the U.K., and the Far East. NEC hasn’t responded to NPR’s requests for an interview, so it hasn’t addressed why the stores that are testing the software are staying quiet about it.

Privacy Questions

Manolo Almagro, senior vice president of digital for retail agency TPN Inc., says the technology isn’t new, it is just a more sophisticated version of Google Images, which allows users to find photos that are similar to other images. But, he says, facial recognition verges on dangerous territory — Google had to remove facial recognition software from Google Glass over privacy concerns.

When Nordstrom disclosed that customers were being tracked through Wi-Fi signals on their smartphones, the retail chain faced serious backlash and had to stop. Brick-and-mortar stores are juggling privacy concerns with wanting to increase their revenue through analytics-based marketing.

Chris de Silva, vice president of IT Solutions at NEC, told the Sunday Times that the company had addressed privacy concerns and found that most high-profile customers are “quite happy to have their information available because they want a quicker service, a better-tailored service or a more personally tailored service.”

Too Gimmicky?

But retail consultant Almagro says the service is gimmicky — and not very cost-effective.

“There are so many easier ways to use things like a mobile phone, which everyone already has, in a retail location and do the same thing and actually get more information,” he says.

Stores like Family Dollar, Benetton and Warby Parker are using data from customers’ smartphones to analyze store layouts and offer customized coupons. Retailers argue that they are doing no more tracking than what’s routinely done online.

“The level of convenience may outweigh the privacy concerns,” Almagro says. “But I think there is going to have to be some legislation that has to catch up to it.” He says that ideally, tracking technology would have to be something customers opt in to.

He says he’s less concerned about stores keeping his information than who gets that information after the retailers do.

Back at the jewelry boutique, store manager Twisselman says she could never see it happening at her store, since there is nothing like old-fashioned customer service — for everyone.

“I like to think that we treat all our customers like VIPs,” Twisselman says.

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Mad Men‘s suave advertising executive Don Draper may have said it best: “Nostalgia: It’s delicate … but potent.”

Advertisers have been selling us back our childhood memories since the 1950s — and it is as powerful a strategy as ever. In a 2013 study, NBCUniversal Integrated Media noticed that brands that connected to the past shot to the top of its Brand Power Index.

Whiskey maker Jack Daniel’s launched a special edition to celebrate what would have been Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday. Microsoft Windows took ’90s kids on a flashback tour to promote the latest version of Internet Explorer. Herbal Essences brought back its classic ’90s “Shine and Smooth” collection, complete with floral fragrances and packaging (yes, yes, YES!), and Old Navy dropped cameos from Airplane and The A-Team stars into its current crop of ads.

A Sweet Comeback 

Brands are finding it effective to add a mix of retro-cool to their advertising campaigns, but the Twinkies comeback may be the first time that an iconic product has resurrected a faltering brand.

Enriched wheat flour, modified cornstarch, high fructose corn syrup — Twinkies have survived a whole foods revolution and a diet food craze (though at 120 calories a cake, you could certainly do worse).

When James Dewar introduced his Twinkie in 1931, he was simply looking for a use for pound cake that would appeal to shoppers long after berries were out of season. The two-for-a-nickel treats — initially injected with a banana filling — were an instant hit. Dewar himself admitted to eating three Twinkies a day for 50 years; he lived to be 88.

After a long tenure in American supermarkets and convenience stores, Hostess, the brand behind Twinkies, announced it was declaring bankruptcy in 2012. Some analysts criticizedthe company for failing to respond to Americans’ changing palates.

But changing with the times was the opposite of what consumers wanted. The Twinkies Cookbook: An Inventive And Unexpected Recipe Collection proclaims the processed pound cake as an Americana staple:

Perhaps it’s the nostalgia. From comic books to the silver screen, state fairs to science projects, legal legends to urban legends, artifacts to art exhibits, Howdy Doody to Archie Bunker — Twinkies have been baked into our national pop culture for generations.

After the announcement, Hostess was able to use an outpouring of public nostalgia to persuade an investment company, Metropoulous & Co., to fork over a check for $410 million.

The rescued company will relaunch the Twinkie on July 15 and restock supermarket shelves with creme-stuffed cakes made from the same recipe that consumers remember from their tin lunchboxes.

Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture

When Edwin H. Land introduced instant photography to consumers in 1949, it sparked a one-day sellout of every Polaroid camera leaving the production line.

It was more than two decades before Polaroid released its magnum opus, the foldable compact SLR SX-70. The release was huge news and was followed by the more affordable Swinger in 1965 and the popular OneStep in 1978.

By 2008, digital cameras had pushed Polaroid films into the past. Polaroid stopped making its signature film and declared bankruptcy — for the second time since 2001.

But aficionados were not ready to let it go. A group of Polaroid purists in Denmark, who go by the moniker The Impossible Project, bought a Polaroid factory and are making film that fans say keeps getting better and better.

The group has a new invention that will be hitting store shelves in August: The Instant Lab — a smartphone-to-instant-photo printing device. Starting with a Kickstarter goal of $250,000 to fund the project, the group ended up raising twice that. The device helps turn pictures from your smartphone into actual, physical instant photos. After a picture is loaded to the companion app, you place your phone face down onto the top of the device. The app then exposes the instant film with the photo you’re “printing.”

For its part, Polaroid did regroup — the company is solvent again. In 2009, it introduced a camera with an old-style look and a twist: The digital camera has abuilt-in instant printer.

New Old Music

During the CD age, vinyl was considered a relic of an earlier time in music. Many record labels closed their pressing plants, and the market largely ignored those music fans still clutching their LPs: college radio stations and electronic dance music DJs who argued that the discs’ grooves produced a warmth and depth unmatched by digital codes.

Now there is a rebirth of new record collectors — many of whom were born after the introduction of the Sony Discman. Musicians are insisting that their music be released on all formats: MP3s, CDs and LPs. Every major label releases vinyl records, and there has been an increase in new pressing plants around the country.

It’s a smart business move. Nielsen’s SoundScan — an industry measure of music sales —tracked 4.6 million domestic LP sales in 2012, an 18 percent increase from the previous year. And when French electronica duo Daft Punk released Random Access Memories on May 6, 6 percent of its first week’s sales were on vinyl.

There have also been recent vinyl reissues of a growing number of classic albums — the complete Beatles collection, early Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, to name a few. The comeback is big enough that indie star Carrie Brownstein (of Portlandia fame) jokingly played a vinyl enthusiast in an American Express commercial.

Why Retro Is Trendy

But for all its marketability, there is no consensus on why retro is cool.

It could be that we’re just running out of new things to flaunt — maybe our trendsetters are lazy. In fashion, cutting-edge clothes are much more risky than vintage looks; retro has already been tried and tested (perhaps that’s why Banana Republic keeps adding throwback collections).

More likely, we like retro things because we are holding on to a romanticized vision of an earlier time. It’s like playing dress-up — “new” old technologies help us pretend that everything about that earlier era was simple and good.

It’s easy to be cynical of the time we live in, when we can so easily whitewash the struggles of decades past.

After all, even fictional flappers wished they lived in the belle epoque.

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As thermometers start to creep up toward the triple digits, office menswear starts getting casual. It makes sense; having a thick ribbon tied around your neck in the sweltering heat is, by all accounts, a revolting experience.

Our very unscientific polling of the NPR newsroom revealed only 8 percent of men wear ties on hot, summer days. We wondered: Could we, humble fashion pioneers, be on the brink of a cutting-edge fashion trend?

We posed the question to a group of fashion experts. They all agreed that each industry experiences its own unique trends in office menswear. While men in creative fields are dressing more casually, the dress code in tech companies has been sharpening up. The uniforms in medicine, law and finance are as stiff as ever.

Choire Sicha blogs about men’s fashion for The Awl. Speaking on behalf of the creative sector, he says professionals in media, PR, advertising and architecture have started moving away from the suit-and-tie uniform, preferring slacks with a crisp, button-down shirt. “We’re allowed to push the boundaries of what we’re allowed to wear,” Sicha says.

Many men hang a neutral-colored sport coat in their office, to round out the look. Sicha recommends stashing a tie in your desk for after-hour events. “I will actually put on the dress shirt and tie, but pull the tie down and unbutton the top collar as if I have been suffering in a tie all day, yet I still look dressed up. It’s a good look,” he says.

Lu Verde says you would not believe the number of ties he sells every day at Bergdorf Goodman’s flagship store in New York City. He says lawyers, doctors and bankers are unfazed by the heat. “A man just walked in last night and picked out 20 ties for himself in five minutes, and you’re talking about $200 a tie,” Verde says.

He says a few years ago, some New York offices tried to make the dress code more casual, but it was a complete disaster. “Men did not know how to dress casually; they look very sloppily dressed when they try to just put on a pair of khakis and a polo shirt,” Verde says. “So a lot of these offices that went casual all went back to a dress code where they have to wear a suit, or a sports jacket and a tie and dress shirt to dress properly.”

Verde can think of only one type of white-collar employee who can get by without a tie — “the guys who work for Google.”

Those guys are precisely Joseph Rosenfeld’s client base. Rosenfeld is an image consultant in Silicon Valley; he calls it a success when he persuades them to wear button-down shirts and slacks. “The tech uniform used to be pull-up shorts, T-shirts and sandals.”

He says times have shifted; even startups are starting to polish up. If you want proof that there is a growing appetite for fashion and style in Silicon Valley, Rosenfeld says look no further than the the Westfield Valley Fair Mall. The big shopping center near San Jose, Calif., is attracting fashion-forward stores like Miu Miu and Prada.

Rosenfeld says he is nostalgic for the suit and tie, but it is more important for managers to reflect the culture of their teams in how they dress. “I love neckwear, but it has its time and its place,” he says. His Silicon Valley clients tend to save their suits for special occasions, such as meetings on the East Coast.

Once you have decided to wear a tie, then comes the problem of picking the right one. There are questions of fabric, colors, prints and even shapes.

As skinny ties have become more popular, designer Tom Ford has gone in the other direction, creating extra-wide ties.

Stefan Doyno, who writes about men’s fashion for The Manual, sees ties as an opportunity to express your individuality while wearing an otherwise boring suit. But you have to make sure that you are setting the right message with your neckwear.

He says to steer clear of bow ties unless you are wearing a tuxedo. “I’m not really a fan of those; they always look out of place,” he says.