Word: branded
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When Batali delivered the commencement address last year at Rutgers, he urged the graduates to "get a brand," which he defined as "your own truth, expressed consistently." "For better or worse, I've got a brand," he said in the speech. "The orange clogs, the ponytail, the attitude, my seeming fluency in Italian--it's instantly recognizable. But what matters to me is, it's not fake." O.K., but the challenge he now faces is not to misjudge how far you can stretch your brand without cheapening it. In the '90s, because of his Manhattan restaurants, Batali vaulted into...
...next morning, a pixieish 37-year-old named Darcie Purcell (whose business card reads "Brand Manager--Mario Batali") led Batali into a conference room to see finished versions of new items in his cookware line for the first time. A $100 risotto pan weighing an astonishing 12 lbs. came out first. "Wow," Batali said proudly. "You're not gonna be lifting this up with one hand." But there was bad news: the kitchenware chain Sur La Table wouldn't be buying the pan--"too niche," apparently...
Batali doesn't seem like a person especially interested in moving 10,000 garlic slicers before Christmas, but he enjoys his role in shaping the brand. "When I was trying to define Mario's brand, I came up with three things," says Purcell, his brand manager. "Authenticity, education and enjoyment. Except when I told Mario that, he said, 'Scratch that last one, Darcie. It's f______ hedonism.'" Batali's greatest gift may not be his ability to figure out a winning new way with a scallop but rather his understanding of how to use his image. Batali constantly projects...
Like any good chairman of a multimillion-dollar beverage company, Don Vultaggio knows that distribution is a key to success. But unlike most high-flying executives, Vultaggio, head of privately owned Ferolito, Vultaggio & Sons, maker of the popular Arizona brand of iced tea, will spend a Friday night on a forklift. On a recent evening, Vultaggio, in jeans and an untucked T shirt, zipped around a steamy, 30,000-sq.-ft. Tampa, Fla., warehouse on a hi-low, moving pallets to fit 3 million cans, bottles and gallon jugs of Arizona into the space. Vultaggio had flown from his Lake...
Vultaggio is the blue-collar anti-CEO, a former truck driver and Brooklyn beer distributor who, with innovative packaging and consumer-friendly pricing, has built Arizona into the fastest-growing major bottled-tea brand in the country. And he has done it on his own terms, dismissing the conventional wisdom about management (chairmen schmooze; they don't reorganize warehouses in the middle of the night), finances (entrepreneurs sell out or go public as soon as they can) and marketing (consumer companies spend at least a few bucks on advertising to consumers) along the way. "Don came up from the bottom...