CHICAGO – The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Bonwit Teller will be coming back. It will come back as a boutique, now that revitalization company River West Brands of Chicago has bought the brand and intellectual property. Chicago-based River West Brands is a company that specializes in brand re-launches, and theMORE HERE
Our memory of this place is totally gone. But apparently there was a Village Inn Pizza chain that had arcades. It was a big enough operation that individual franchises had their own game tokens. Here, a token from the Norfolk, Virginia location at the Janaf Shopping Center. We had itMORE HERE
The excellent blog The Agitator, for non-profits, had a great post on bringing old charity brands back to life. Fascinating. Here at BrandlandUSA, we always MISSED that United Way was no longer Community Chest. Community Chest will have free advertising in perpetuity because of Hasbro’s game, Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. LookingMORE HERE
In the 1960s and 70s, television provided hours of entertaining but educational fare for kids. Things like ABC’s Schoolhouse Rock. The best of the best was In the News, a CBS Saturday morning news segment for kids. It was only one news segment, but it was slickly produced and toldMORE HERE
The idea of a brand-life cycle is (mostly) flat-out wrong. Certainly, brands have phases and iterations, but the wholesale jettisoning of old brands by large conglomerates is wasteful, especially in an era when much manufacturing has been sent abroad and licensing, sales and distribution are the remaining competencies of manyMORE HERE
Miss those pneumatic airline audio programs? There was a time not so long ago when airline music and audio came from what were basically stethoscopes. It was the era of the pneumatic airline headset. The music was piped in through an air tube. The airline had plastic headphones, with rubberMORE HERE
We are gloomy and cry when thinking about American manufacturing and electronics. But it is always instructive to look back. One top product electronics product of the late 1950s was the Zenith Trans-Oceanic, or Royal 1000. To this day, it is seen as one of the top consumer radios ofMORE HERE
A great brand can be a regional brand.And it does not have to be fancy or sophisticated. Ice. Beverages. Gas. What else do you need? It can be a ship’s store and a fishing tackle shop on a small island, like Gasparilla Island, Florida. Here, Whidden’s in Boca Grande. Whidden’sMORE HERE
BrandlandUSA reader and freelance writer Lee Gimpel informs us that the Abingdon, Virginia grocery chain Food City has brought back some regional grocery brands including Kern’s Bread, a regional brand from Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s a smart strategy for regional grocery store chains. These chains are in desperate need of wellMORE HERE
GM is going to get rid of the Hummer. Good riddance! Pretty much. Here’s why BrandlandUSA thinks it isn’t such a bad idea for GM jettison the brand. Because General Motors spent millions on a crazy scheme to build up Hummer around the same time that it killed off Oldsmobile,MORE HERE