Some advice to the salesmen out there- be aggressive.
For my pipeline, current and past, I literally cold-called the C-suite at many of the companies I was trying to reach. I'm notoriously known for getting responses for my crafty and thought-out emails and cold-calls. If you have something interesting to say and you are able to tell the story in an interesting manner, people will generally listen to you. If people don't, you most likely suck at your story-telling, so you might have to revert to sending out GIFs and stalking people with odd gifts such as: trashcans, french fries and plane tickets. Don't worry, all of these odd gifts and GIFs have been used and tested by me in previous rejected cold attempts and have since proven to be successful. Don't be too proud to do any job or any mundane task; sometimes it sucks, but I'd like to think that most of the time those ridiculous requests and mundane tasks like to lead to good things. That's how business gets done. You've got to be aggressive and hunt. Fight til' the death and "Go to the Mattresses!" as they would say on The Godfather, or in my case, You've Got Mail.
I was on a cold-calling tangent for the past few years; specifically over the past year, I was reaching out to several contacts of mine, both cold and warm, that by the time these big-billion dollar retail companies were looking for something, I had already established relationships with them and we were given the shot at the game. Their businesses are complex, they are multi-dimensional and came with a wide variety of operational challenges. Technology is tilting; there's a gravitational pull that is shifting the entire way we do business today and it's fundamentally going to reshape the way we do business in the future, maybe as early as a few years from now.
Beware. Eyes open, guards up.
This has got to be one of my favorite photo shoots of all time. It just looks so street style; I love it! Thanks so my BFF for capturing it for me on our lunch break. It was actually freezing when we took these, so I took off my jacket and ran into the middle of the street to chase some light since New York become one, big grey cloud in the wintertime and after we went to eat at Panera Bread. So normal. I also love this outfit. It's a little weird, but oddly cool at the same time and fits my personality pretty well. I absolutely love Etro, as I'm sure most of you know, so the skirt is a nice balance to the denim top, which reminds me of growin up in Oklahoma, and the belt is screaming lux, but paired against sneakers it's quite weird, but works?
Coco wears a Bluemarine Embellished Denim Top, Etro Printed Skirt, Common Projects Sneakers, Judith Leiber Stone Belt. Photography: Bethany Habreich