Sparkley Drawers - oh Baby

I will be hitting Limmud again and I'm proud to be showing not only my stuff but work by two of my favorite Israeli brands.  I'll be at Warwick Sunday December 27th and Monday December 28th, stock is limited so come by early and you too can buy blue and white

We will of course have our crowd-pleasing knickers in their pretty pink boxes, BUY two pairs and we'll throw in a tank top for FREE and possibly the kitchen sink.

Shlomit's work is beautiful, affordable and sparkly which is why I love it so much.

Welcome to the World of  Shlomit Ofir's Jewelery, go to her website and work up an appetite for her pieces that encompass the best of Israeli chic.  She is an industrial design graduate and her influences include the city she lives in and the world she's traveled, so its like a killer combo the best of Tel Aviv with lots finesse and non of the attitude.  My favorite items are her head bands, her necklaces and her skinny leather belts.  She has made it to lookbook.nu (those of us in the know, know what this means).

5.5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Began My Wishy-Washy Career

This little beauty comes from JUDAIKITSCH with photographs by Dwight Eschilman 

Lists of the 5, 7, 12 things that you couldn't live without knowing until someone thoughtfully took the time to compile them in a neat ordered way, are a dime-a-dozen on my favorite social media platform.

I have two observations to make: Lists annoy the crap out of me but I inevitably ALWAYS click on the link - Wow 5 ways to make a million dollars with teeth whitening/acai berry trials - who can resist?

Here is my list for you before you embark on a career like mine otherwise known as "I do something very elusive that is hard to describe".  I was laid-off in January of this year.  About the same time I stopped watching Mad Men - this is not a coincidence.  Now I am a consultant which means I get paid by companies to do a job they don't think critical i.e worthy of a permanent staff position.  Mainly I love it and surprisingly I'm almost making a living but its a long way from my web 2.0 days of big budgets and technology so complicated that even programmers looked confused when you created a pretty diagram for them. So here are the 5.5 things I've learned from redundancy, read them carefully and take copious notes.

1. You own more cosmetics and body products than you think. At least I do. Every time you traveled for work and you popped into Duane Reade, Wholefoods or Bath and Bodyworks and picked up that little tube of lip gloss - well now is the time to dig it out from the recesses of your wheelie bag.  I thank God daily for Burts Bees, Badger and Target in equal measure. I honestly haven't needed to buy any beauty products for 12 months.
2. You can do so much more than you think you can.  Who knew that I could create a landing page and link multiple domains?  Who knew that I could fix (VERY) basic code on a client's blog? Who knew that I could run an effective e-mail campaign and who knew I could figure out which was the missing audio codec to get an AVI to play? I used to pay people to do these things, now I do them myself.  
3. It sucks.  I mean it is literally awful to readjust your life style and your spending to reflect a different financial reality however there are redeeming moments.  I don't meant to sound like a Hallmark card but I recently finished something small and low tech and the amazement on my client's face when I showed her how her brand might look if she were to, gasp ... take it ONLINE, priceless.
   
4. Escapism is very important.  In my darkest moments after coming back from the sweetest vacation in July and realizing that in this market the job I left was not coming my way anytime soon, what did I do?  Stayed up for 2 days straight and watched True Blood, every last drop of it. I dreamed about it, watched it, breathed it and I even found clips on youTube from Comic Con.  I have since read all the books, watched both seasons often and everytime I feel a little pang of OMG, guess what I re-watch?  (The same goes for Vampire Diaries and the New Moon series). In fact my current twitter faves are tied between Sookie a person pretending to be a True Blood character and BuzzEdition, everyone's favorite Social Media Maven.
   
5.  This is really 4.5. Money does matter.  Anyone who tells you that it doesn't, is either very wealthy or very stupid. This blow is lessened by the good news that there are other things that matter as well. 
6. I've been told that as a Marketing person in the current economic climate my lot is going to be tough.  I have two choices I can get a job that you can describe in a sentence. For example, "I'm a symbian programmer"  (Yawn) or "I do sales" (not going to happen).  Or I can ride this wave, learn my lessons and save more money when the market picks up in preparation for the next time round. Most importantly though, I can and I do thank my lucky stars for my sense of humour.

In case you are curious my previous title was Director of Productions and Branding ...

The biggest little whorehouse on the web

This image is from my new best-twitter-friend's Etsy Page. I got a mention for tweeting about this cool pillow | Truth is real kudos go to my real-life friend and sometimes business cohort Yitz Wolf who sends me beauties like this one.

Last week I saw a tweet that you can't call yourself a media specialist unless you have more than 200 followers on twitter. At last count, I have the grand total of 118 followers, I am on 4 lists and have tweeted less than 600 times, this makes me the poster child for twitter uncool. I immediately tweeted back that I can call myself whatever I want while smugly muttering that I'd never call myself a specialist of any sort. Then I re-read my linkedin profile, low and behold guess what word appeared? All of this got me thinking ... (of course I re-wrote my profile and then I thought).

Twitter is crazy but I love it. It's my only source of news ... in fact I finally asked someone what the big deal with Tiger Woods was, I hadn't clicked on any of those links because golf bores me to tears little did I know that I wasn't the one crying. I still get a little thrill of excitement when I get a bonafide new follower (that's not just spam) or when I get a mention or even better a retweet from someone I don't know, bloody hell it makes my day.

I've seen some great things on twitter: I thought Bites for Blood was brilliant, this competition and it's grass roots support from the people who pretend on twitter to be the characters of the Charlaine Harris/HBO Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood phenomenon was nothing short of incredible. A $10,000 donation from HBO to the Red Cross for 500,000 clicks gathered by people pretending to be TV characters who returned the favor with virtual kisses! Sweet as. If that aint a tribute to how twitter's changed the web then you've been sleeping.

So now that I'm decidedly not a specialist, I'm going to continue to aspire to twitter greatness while living twitter mediocrity. If in 140 characters you can bring a smile to my face, a tear to my eye or grab my attention, I will retweet you but don't worry no one else will notice...

7 Angry Days of the Week Underwear

I am very naughty, I haven't posted for ages. I still have around 500 pairs of unsold underwear and approximately 99 unsold "Israel at 60 tank tops". Israel is about to be 61, I think I might need to come up with buy one and get the tank-for-free scenario.

In the meantime, I have lots of time to work on my business but I find myself distracted. I have recently decided that Bitchiness is the new BLACK. With that in mind here is the complete set of mood-matching underwear, imagine it all printed on black:

SUNDAY: NO we're not going to be facebook friends (for my first ever proper boyfriend)

MONDAY: Congratulations - you got to be a slogan ... (for my last boss)

TUESDAY: Economic recessions are a latent form of male hysteria (my 2 cents on the recession)

WEDNESDAY: Wow! You CAN run (for the last man I dated, and the 5 or so prior to him as well)

THURSDAY: I'm not unemployed, I'm under-employed

FRIDAY: How's that working for you? (my favorite-ever response to everything)

SATURDAY: Thank G-d for me!