Adventures On the Road

It has been almost one month since we first landed in New York City. 

Who knew that we would live the life of regular New York locals – living in Jersey and taking the Lincoln Tunnel commute every morning. 

Who knew that we would become familiar faces on the streets of Brookyln, get preferential treatment at a local bagel shop, and recognize people around the city. 

It’s been a fairly uneventful stay so far, but it has had its moments. 

1)  Nathan and I are becoming Street Fighter Champions (during those slow periods at the pop shop, what else is there to do but to play Street Fighter on the X Box, although the customers are now taking turns beating me at the game)

2) One rainy weekday morning we had a surprise celebrity visiter.  Ed Lover came to visit and get some free clothes.  Now, personally I really had no idea who he was, but Nathan recognized him as the infamous Ed Lover from MTV Raps, previously of the Ed Lover and Dr. Dre combination.  He’s now a big radio personality

3) We were invited out to dinner at Wolfgang’s, a very good steak restaurant inTribeca, during the Tribeca film festival

4)  We’ve booked an all-inclusive vacation for 9 days in….you guessed it – MEXICO.  We’ll see what we end up doing with that or if we change our destination.  You can’t go anywhere now without someone talking about Swine Flu.

5)  We’ve become experts in the retail industry.  I now know how to ‘paperfold’ shirts and have learned all the merchandising tricks of the trade.  Nathan has been doing his part by specializing in the exclusive ladies line and talking about the ‘extra bling on the shirts’ and the ‘colours that pop’. 

All in all, it’s been an interesting time in Brooklyn.  Sorry for the lack of photos, but there really isn’t much to see in the middle of the Brooklyn hood, at what used to be an empty construction lot.

One last hightlight – we ended up in a place called Teaneck, NJ in search of a Dairy Queen for their Midnight Truffle blizzard.  The place was an old-fashioned barn style building with line ups down the streets – who knew Dairy Queens were such a big deal?

I start off with this photo because this, my friend, is the money shot.  Let me set the scene for you:

New York City….

5:00am….

Pouring Rain….

The Meat Packing District…

Amid all of these narrow one-way streets and decorative marshmallow shaped boulders, rolls a big black 18 wheel tractor trailer.  Little would anyone think that no more than 12 hours later, the streets would be packed with paparazzi (well, let’s say 10 paparazzi), the RW pop shop would be filled with the new summer men’s and women’s line and Jay would be hanging out playing x box with me (and when I say with me, I actually mean I helped set the system up, chatted with him for a couple of minutes and then got the hell out of the way, because who are we kidding – I don’t know how to play x-box!). 

So everything went extremely well with the event.  The Meat Packing District would exactly be the target market, BUT we definitely made an impact on all of the european tourists that were around. 

Two days later the streets really were flooded with paparazzi.  (note the limited edition bag that was made specifically for the pop shop)

Now… if only we had been there to see the craziness that their lunchtime visit caused…

Very quick note:

Yesterday we opened up the pop up store at the Nets game, and we got the word that Jay Z was going to come down to see the store.  At first the email just said “Jay” was confirmed to be there at 7pm, and since we have a merchandiser named Jay from Atlanta who was supposed to be there, well, I thought nothing of it.

Well, the black car rolled up and “Jay” and his bodyguard came strolling through and just took a look around, sat down and just chilled with the RW corporate people.  Big surprise for all the people that were already in the store!  He ended up coming in again during half time with friends and he was showing them around and taking photos of the outside.  It’s great that he’s excited about it.

The funniest part was watching everyone’s reactions.  There were people that just went up to shake his hand, some just screamed and got flustered and stared at him, others were shopping right next to him and didn’t seem to notice.  One of the girls asked us if that was him or if her eyes were tricking her, and another guy, while buying a shirt, asked if there was anyway that he’d ever be able to meet Jay Z, to which I replied, ‘well he’s right over there…’

Anyway, it was very cool that he showed up, we had a quick hello when he came in, but otherwise I was busy keeping an eye on the floor and selling things.  All in all a fun night.