Word: ashtons
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...Kevin Ashton's obsession with RFID began with a single shade of lipstick. When he launched Oil of Olay's ColorMoist Hazelnut No. 650 at Procter & Gamble in 1997, it was popular--too popular. "Four in 10 stores couldn't keep the item on the shelf," says Ashton, "and we were losing money because of it." He needed to track this item and others through the supply chain so clerks would know when to reorder and replenish the shelves. It took Ashton a year to identify RFID as a technology that would solve his problem and to hook up with...
...with the help of P&G and Gillette, the three men co-founded the Auto-ID Center at M.I.T. to pursue RFID uses. Today 103 companies are members, including consumer giants like Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods and Unilever. Ashton estimates that U.S. retail giants alone lose up to $70 billion a year in potential revenue because of their labyrinthine backroom networks. Half of that loss results from failure to restock popular items. The rest comes from lost or stolen items (shrinkage, in the parlance), particularly stuff like Gillette's Mach 3 razor blades and Duracell batteries--possibly...
...space provided, draw a picture of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher arguing over Nabokov's translations of Pushkin compared with Edmund Wilson's during a break in deliberations at the International Conference...
...loosely. Chasing the next big thing is as vital to the economy as the Fed's monetary policy. Tech companies need you to realize how empty your life was in the primitive days before you could e-mail your dishwasher. Celebrity magazines need you to care who the next Ashton Kutcher will be and not to think too much about why we needed the current one in the first place. And the self-help business needs you to despair occasionally of all this trend hopping so you can go out and buy the newest guide to simplifying your life...
...yawn at the sight of another picture of Reed Krakoff, the executive creative director of Coach. True, the guy gets more press than Demi and Ashton, but he has turned the stodgy American brand favored by New Canaan, Conn., housewives and briefcase-toting free-lance writers into a global fashion status symbol. In fiscal year 2003 alone, Coach profits were up 67%. And while the rest of the retail industry was struggling with the effects of SARS, war in Iraq and unemployment, Krakoff was catapulting Coach from a half-a-billion-dollar company to a projected $1.1 billion company...