A couple of weeks ago, I took a great leap of faith and ordered a sweater online. It was this really nice sweater, from 66º North, with fancy diamond stitching around the neck. To be clear, the sweater wasn’t for me; it was a birthday present for my wife. When it arrived, the first surprise was that it was sent all the way from Iceland. The second surprise was that it didn’t have the fancy diamond stitching around the neck. It did have some stitching on the shoulder, but it just wasn’t what was pictured on the website (image).

The third surprise was that when I called customer service, a woman answered the phone in Icelandic. This was a refreshing switch from Bangalore, but not at all what I expected. She converted to English in a heartbeat, fortunately. I’m thinking, man, this isn’t going to be good. But the nice lady on the phone slowly unraveled the mystery: They had sent the men’s version of the sweater by mistake. It had been shipped from Iceland because it was out of stock in America.

She then suggested they ship a size medium instead of a small, because Americans are so fat. No, actually what she said was, they run small. Anyway, she had the old sweater picked up so I wouldn’t have to make a trip to UPS (as much as I like going there). When the new sweater arrived, it was perfect. To be honest, 66º North isn’t the most organized organization in the world. But the bumbling had its charm, its warmth. It’s a reminder that the human touch, with all its flaws, is a powerful thing indeed. That’s just as true at retail as it is in real life.

"Men tend to see shopping as less of an indulgence than women -- which meant they did not cut back as much during the downturn," report Christina Passariello and Ray A. Smith in the Wall Street Journal (2/11/10). An October survey by the American Affluence Research Center says, "Twenty-three percent of male respondents said they hadn't reduced overall spending since the recession started, compared with 14 percent of women." A study by NPD Group meanwhile says that, last year, about "75 percent of men shopped for themselves last year, compared with just 52 percent of men in 1995."

Because more men are shopping for themselves, without women helping them, retailers, are picking up on this, with Hermes, Coach, Ralph Lauren and others opening up boutiques especially for men. Hermes, for instance, has opened Hermes Man, across the street from its flagship women's boutique in New York. Not surprisingly, it features plenty of wood paneling. For the opening, the retailer also offered "an $8,500 baseball glove in a signature Hermes red (image)." Coach's new men's store similarly will feature "leather club seats."

But the main thing is that men have their own stores. "Men don't like to enter a men's and women's store to find their products at the back of the store," says Michele Norsa, ceo of Ferragamo, which is also opening special stores for men. Retailers also see big male opportunities in "emerging markets such as Russia and China," where newly wealthy men tend to spend on themselves before their women. Indeed, in South Korea, sales of men's apparel was up 48 percent between 2004 and 2009, compared with 7 percent for women's" reports Euromonitor International.

It's a rude awakening when the Abercrombie & Fitch billboard goes up on London's legendary Savile Row, reports Nancy deWolf Smith in the Wall Street Journal (2/12/10). The moment is captured in a documentary called "Savile Row" which aired recently on the Sundance Channel. The giant, garish billboard heralds the arrival of an A&F flagship store, and "the irony -- that A&F used to have a nice pedigree as an outfitter of the sporting man" is not lost on the tailors.

They still think of their 'hood as "the tribal home of the gentleman ... a tiny community of craftsmen (who) make the best men's suits in the world." A place where, as the documentary narrator says, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame emerges looking like Justin Timberlake." Maybe that's the problem. But Savile Row, which earns 70 percent of its income from American customers, do indeed have "a record of dressing the world's most glamorous and discerning people." No need for billboards, then.

"We're a household name in the households you want to be known in," says one tailor. Here's hoping, when suits run about $4,000, with those in superfine wool costing upwards of $15,000. But certainly not when the neighborhood is "being invaded by a huge American jeans and T-shirt retailer whose magnetic presence may drive rents up and them out." The Savile tailors must hope the documentary narrator is right when he says, "Labels say you're one of the boys -- but a bespoke suit says, 'You are the man.'"

When he first started, Jake Burton figured that all he needed to do was make and sell 50 snowboards a day, reports Bruce Horovitz in USA Today (2/8/10). The problem was, he sold just 350 for the year, which was 1977. He did manage to double that the following year, and was doing fine until his bank cut off his financing in 1984 "when its executive decided snowboarding was a passing fad." So, Jake became a "one-man cheerleading squad for the sport. He visited hundreds of ski hills that had banned snowboarding," and persuaded them to allow it at their resorts.

This wasn't part of Jake's original vision. "When I started Burton Snowboards, I had no idea snowboarding was going to be done at resorts," says Jake. "I thought people would do it in their backyards. I wish I could take credit for having the vision that it would become this big." But it did, and so did his company, which today commands "40 percent of the world's snowboard market. Sales ... are believed to reach almost $700 million." The business has now diversified into surfing as well as skateboarding gear, and has also opened "several brand stores."

The reality is that Burton "now makes more money selling apparel, often to folks who have never been on a board," but it's possible that Burton could become a billion dollar company within five years. Jake says he doesn't think about that, but his success "surprises no one more" than himself. "I was a punk," says Jake. "I got kicked out of boarding school at 15." Now 55, Jake still doesn't comb his graying hair, and says his brand keeps it cool because decisions "are made by a guy and his family who snowboard 100 days a year," and not by Wall Street.

As he seeks Olympic Gold, skater Johnny Weir is testing "the conflict inherent" in reconciling "performance and competition," reports Jere Longman in the New York Times (1/19/10). On the performance side, Johnny pretty much has a lock on things, with a style said to be "more burlesque than Bolshoi." At a recent performance, he skated "with a head-bopping playfulness" in a costume featuring a "pink shoulder tassel and Lycra corset." His skating, however, apparently was a bit less impressive.

"Not long ago, there was a balance in the contrast between the compelling, understated elegance of Weir's skating and the too-too costumes he prefers," wrote Philip Hersh in the Chicago Tribune. "That balance has tipped toward shtick," he added. But Johnny sees it differently: "My obligation has always been to bring the artistic side of my sport out. Jumps are jumps, and everybody can do those jumps. But not everybody can show something wonderful and special and unique and different."

Former Olympic skating champ Scott Hamilton agrees: "What he might be suffering from is one of my favorite things about figure skating -- shameless self-promotion ... I did it for 30 years. It depends on how you do it. It can rub some people the wrong way." However, as another former champ, Brian Boitano notes, "You have to be a champion to be a star." And Johnny's performances reportedly can be "curiously remote and lacking in energy and speed." While this might concern the judges, Johnny doesn't seem worried. "My costume looked pretty," he said.

Cynthia Magnus says she often finds clothes -- destroyed and discarded -- behind the H & M store on 34th Street in Manhattan, reports Jim Dwyer in the New York Times (1/6/10). She recently came across "about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up." Just to be sure the clothes couldn't be worn, "someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors." Cynthia went through it and was amazed by what she found.

"Gloves with the fingers cut off ... Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth-graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men's jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy white fiber fill was coming out in white cotton." She also found bags filled with "sturdy plastic hangers." She took some of the bags, hoping to find someone who could repair the clothes, and kept the hangers for herself.

"A girl can never have enough hangers," says Cynthia. She's also written a letter to H & M's head of corporate responsibility, Ingrid Schullstorm, volunteering "to help H & M connect with a charity that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash." As it happens, there's a "big collection point for New York Cares, which conducts an annual coat drive" just around the corner from the H & M store. Within a couple of days, H & M agreed to donate discarded clothes to charity.

Eric Malka, co-founder of Art of Shaving, thinks it's a mistake "to underestimate the importance of a smooth shave," reports Sean Gregory in Time (1/06/10). He -- and his wife, co-founder Myriam Zaoui -- should know. Fourteen years ago, they sold their BMW for twelve grand and started making shaving cream. "She blended some oils for me to put under my shaving cream so that the razor glided over the skin and didn't grab hair," says Eric. "It worked magic for my skin and was the catalyst for starting the shaving business."

Today, the Art of Shaving has 36 stores across America that look perhaps more like jewelry stores than anything else -- trimmed in wood and displaying fancy razors in glass cases. Prices are pointed accordingly: A "sterling-silver razor, stand and brush" sells for $3,400." If you cheap out go for the nickel-plated brass handle, it's still $175. Five ounces of shaving cream will set you back $22. If you think that sounds wildly out of step with the times, you'd be right -- except that the store's "revenues rose 19 percent during the last quarter of the year."

Not only that, but Procter & Gamble bought the franchise last June for an undisclosed sum (link). This left some observers puzzled: "You kind of wonder what they are doing here," says Linda Bolton Weiser, an analyst, suggesting the company may have lost its way. But another analyst, William Chappel, thinks otherwise: "This is alternative marketing, just another way to promote the Gillette brand," he says, adding, "This isn't a core push into retail." And, as Eric Malka notes, "spending $100 on shaving products becomes very inexpensive once you realize the benefits our products have on your skin."

"Pearls embody how humans can trick Mother Nature into producing some of the world's most expensive objects," writes Stephen G. Bloom in "Tears of Mermaids," as reviewed by Joseph Sternberg in the Wall Street Journal (12/28/09). "A perfect natural pearl of extraordinary quality may be the product of one out of ten million oysters," Stephen explains. This, of course, is the reason pearls are so expensive, and until the late 1800s, only the very wealthy could afford them.

That began to change in 1888, when "Kokichi Mikimoto, the son of a poor noodle-maker in Japan, started a pearl farm that would eventually democratize the world pearl market. By the first decade of the 20th century, Mikimoto had perfected a technique for cultivating pearls, inserting a nucleus of North American mussel shell into an oyster that would then produce a pearl in as little as two years ... Cultured Japanese pearls took America by storm in the 1940s and '50s when homeward- bound GIs bought them for their wives and girlfriends."

It was kind of a no-brainer, since pearls, essentially, are just "accumulations of concentric layers of nacre, a compound of calcium carbonate that some mollusks ... produce to line the insides of their shells." But pearls also form a kind of "aesthetic rapport ... with their wearers, absorbing body heat and seeming to glow and reflect luminescence onto the skin." Today, Chinese entrepreneurs "have found ways to culture pearls in a species of mollusk that can produce more pearls per bivalve than the typical oyster," making pearls "cheaper and available in more varied colors" to more people than ever.

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta -- that's Lady Gaga, to you -- was predicted by Andy Warhol, who died a year after she was born, reports Guy Trebay in the New York Times (12/27/09). What Andy predicted, in "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol," was "new categories of people" created from "parts" of other people. This would liberate fans from idolizing a "whole person," instead just picking and choosing the parts they like. That's what Lady Gaga does as she "subjects herself to a real-time version of Photoshop."

As Guy writes: "Lady Gaga is rigged for that stardom: her persona is an amalgam of surfaces, faceted, though not truly 3-D, addictive in the way videogames are ... Like an emissary from a parallel world familiar to Second Life types, she is a real-life avatar." She "makes no bones about assimilating the lessons of celebrities who built careers by tapping into the talents of other and even larger talents ... But her singular innovation on the sincerest form of flattery has been to barge right past imitation to outright larceny."

Her "inspirations" are said to include Leigh Bowery, Grace Jones and David Bowie, among others. "She imagines the clothes she will wear to perform her songs as she is writing them." The bottom line is, Billboard listed her as the number-three top artist of the year, and "her name is among those most often searched on the web. But the voice without the package would equal a novelty act in a Singapore hotel lounge ... and lest anyone fail to see that the package is the message, she makes it a point to go out now and then with her hair styled in a gigantic blonde bow (image)."

Keds is engaged in a "wholesale business-model change" in which its consumers not only design footwear, but can also sell it, reports Christina Binkley in the Wall Street Journal (12/10/09). "Marketing has evolved into a conversation with the consumers," says Kristin Kohler Burrows, president of Keds. To keep that conversation going, Keds is launching a site, called Keds Collective, where consumers can choose from a palette or upload their own design elements.

If Keds likes a design, it makes a deal with the consumer, who receives a 10 percent cut on any sales. The shoes can either be ordered online by consumers or stocked by retailers for sales in stores. So far, this hasn't exactly made anyone rich, but that's not the point. "I'm totally thrilled," says Jeriana San Juan, who has "sold six pairs of Keds with her designs." And for Keds, its all about turning "custom sneakers into an advertising juggernaut when the designers ... proudly holler about them from the rooftops of the internet."

Jeriana, for instance, "has posted her Keds designs on Facebook and is adding a Keds link to her website." Similarly, Nike not only publishes a "gallery" of consumer designs on NikeiD, but also provides "convenient icons to click to 'share' them on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace." Champion meanwhile asked its "consumers to design hoodies and submit them for votes (link)." Darren Paul of Night Agency, the social-media consultancy that helped create the Keds Collective, comments: "People feel much more connected to the brand because they're part of the advertising, in reality."