Metta means love. Lusso means luxury.
Tamar Alexia Fleischman
August 2019
Madam C.J. and I are just two girls trying to make it in a dog eat dog world. It’s fun and important to look your cutest doing it. Mettalusso is a tightly edited brand and blossoming media company that features important skin cosmetics and nutritious dog treats! I was happy to be hosted to experience it.
First things first, when doing your makeup: perfecting your skin. Mettalusso prides itself on luxurious formulas for everyday use. Their foundation comes in 20 shades and their pressed powder in 9. There was a trend to abandon pressed powder for a while and when they were coarsely milled and clumpy — no wonder. But Mettalusso Vegan Foundation and Finish Powder is a generously sized, super sheer powder in believable shades. It’s silky and light, lending to a consistent application. This is as finely milled as any of those “HD” type products, yet is in a convenient compact. While it has an enclosed puff, they encourage use of a brush for application.
MIST is a game changer, in that it has several uses. This spray containing aloe and chamomile, is a makeup remover for face, eyes and makeup brushes! It’s calming, fragrance free, vegan and cruelty free. For cleaning your face, just spray on any applicator (like a cotton pad or cloth) and wipe off. It doesn’t sting, feel soapy or greasy. You won’t have to tug and rub, either. For makeup brushes, they suggest a spray and wipe/dry for a quick clean, repeat applications and a hit under running water for a more thorough clean. So, use it on a quick daily basis, especially for those brushes you know you’ll be using a different color on tomorrow. So, going from pink to coral blush, beige to blue shadow, do the quick clean and dry. Do the deep cleaning on the weekend.
Mettalusso makes a blueberry crispy biscuit for dogs called MORE. It’s made from real food, wholesome ingredients, like spelt and oat flours, apple juice, blueberries, eggs, flaxseed oil and antioxidants like Vitamin E. You and I would look good eating that! Madam C.J. seems to really love them and they’ve been helping to encourage her to give up her hobby of carrying poops around. The treats do not have grain, sugar, soy, corn, GMO’s glycerin, waxes, artificial colors. They have a 10 month shelf life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR- Tamar Alexia Fleishman has been a professional writer for over a decade. She’s interviewed A-list celebrities in music, sports, film, attended top concerts and plays, traveled to premium luxury destinations, and eaten at some of the finest restaurants out there. Additionally, she’s developed food and cocktail recipes using exquisite, gourmet ingredients. She roams to share the best the world has to offer. http://en.gravatar.com/tamarmarcopolostyle
Mettalusso is a multi-media entertainment platform and everyday luxury product. Metta means Love and Lusso means Luxury. Mettalusso products are everyday luxury and all day style at fabulous price points.
Mettalusso®
Love + Luxury™
Media Inquiries: christine@mettalusso.com
Jimi Hendrix was on the right track in many ways when he asked “Are You Experienced?”
So what exactly is H2H? No, it is not the latest Asian flu. Neither is it water—that is H2O. And its definitely not the latest networking app!
H2H is “Human to Human”
H2H is About Brands & Delivering on Their Digital Promise
Your digital promise is the full delivery of your brand’s experience to your consumer. Sure, its easy to produce slick graphics and fabulous copy on a webpage and in social media. But brands have to really ask themselves if they are also providing the human experience vis-a-vie their digital presentation.
At first this seems a bit crazy and if nothing else completely contradictory. Isn’t the whole point of digital is that it’s exactly just that-digital? Not exactly. What customers are demanding is the full range of a robust experience that a brand has to offer. What seems to be new here really isn’t. But with digital in the mix, the rules of execution have been forever altered. Marketers know that consumers do not want to simply buy something, they want to fully experience it. This means that brands now have to understand how to seamlessly deliver online and offline–with great humanness.
The rules of brand delivery and execution are forever changed.
Missing the H2H portion of the brand delivery equates to treating your customer like a piece of digital meat!
This is nothing new because as far back as 1998, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore published “Welcome to the Experience Economy” and the phrase was then forever coined. They plotted The Progression of Economic Value graph.
Even then in 1998, customers were demanding experiential immersion with a brand. With digital marketing, they are demanding it even more. Its sort of a paradox. The more brands deliver remotely, the more customers expect to be treated like a human.
Farfetch, the digital platform featuring hundreds of impossible to find boutiques and merchandise, recently announced their “Store of the Future”. Check out this short video from Bloomberg.
Farfetch is setting the standard for digital delivery and human experience.
Farfetch founder, Jose Neves says:
“The next stage in the evolution of the fashion industry is the connected store, which uses technology to enhance the luxury retail experience to become even more customer centric,” he said. “Farfetch is at the crossroads of luxury and technology and is well placed to understand its needs and deliver a tailored solution.”
In their new retail store concept, Farfetch customers will experience the full immersion of humanity wrapped in a digital brand delivery. Farfetch has executed an admirable business benchmark for H2H.
Is your brand ready for H2H? Are you experienced?
Did you ever make one of these “investment” purchases? You love it, you want it, you have thought about it for long enough, but there was just a little somethin’-somethin’ that you disagreed with in either the design or color or functionality? Your purchase could be anything: cars, appliances, shoes, jewelry or even tech. Even though you were kind of deep down disappointed, because you really wanted it, you went ahead and bought it anyways.
You think to yourself, wow, if I could just reach out to somebody at this company and tell them what I think, then, maybe they would use my idea……
Well, now you can. And in ways never before possible and with some of the world’s largest, most luxurious brands.
Brands and marketers call this USER GENERATED BRANDING.
Who would have ever thought that brands like DeBeers, Mercedes and Christian Louboutin would do such a thing?
For DeBeers, their “Moments in Light” app celebrates women nominated by their peers for their brilliance. Just as a diamond is brilliant, DeBeers wants all women as celebrated their precious gems.
Mercedes Benz utilized their user generated branding in the most literal way. Customers were able to design their GLA model via an Instagram app. You can watch the brief GLA customization YouTube instructional video here.
Christian Louboutin cleverly took a fun multi-media approach celebrating the Spring/Summer 2015 “Tribalou”, collection launch. When email subscribers received their newsletter, it featured a large animated graphic of a Southwest Indian mask. The mask linked to the Louboutin website and landed on a build-your-own-paper-puppet feature. Most adorably, the puppets are called a “Tribaloubi”. When the user completed their design, they printed out their puppet and assembled it. Now that’s what I call brand interaction!
Your friends won’t do it. Most likely your family and co-workers won’t either. But now your favorite luxury brand will! Go on, don’t hold back, send ’em your advice.
Have fun, and see if your ideas come to life in their next campaign.
Christine C. Oddo is the author of The Christine Report blog and founder of Madison Luxe Group; a beauty and luxury product retail sales and digital strategy agency.
Inquiries to christine@madisonluxegroup.com
In 2013, Lululemon recalled its most popular yoga pant after users realized that they were see-through when stretched. Since yoga practitioners do a lot of stretching, this was a major problem. Then, the situation became an even greater PR tragedy when their very own founder and CEO, Chip Wilson, appeared on Bloomberg Television and blamed it on the women wearing the pants. “Quite frankly, some women’s bodies just actually don’t work for it,” he said, adding, “It’s about the rubbing through the thighs.” It’s amazing how in the context of what seems a perfectly benign business channel interview, can go to a total disaster.
Oh no did he really just say that?
Of course women everywhere interpreted this as being called too fat to wear Lululemon pants.
And could fashion devotees ever forget the total public meltdown of John Galliano? While head of design for Dior, drunk in a bar, he spewed racial slurs and would not calm down for hours.
Oh no did he really just do that?
Galliano’s personality came unglued in what appeared to be an unwinding from the many years of stress that came along with his intensely demanding role. Galliano was always known for his great flamboyance, but up till then, was really only known for his amazing work.
More recently, it was Dov Charney, the founder and CEO of American Apparel. His list of bad behavior really is too gross to restate. You can see the lawsuit filing here.
Oh no, did he really just say, email, text, write, perform, photograph and video that?
Apparently and ironically, as the founder of a clothing company, Charney also enjoyed working naked.
Nobody could ever imagine these bad PR surprises. Especially from the head cheese. Publicly verbal, uncharacteristic and highly damaging outbursts from the top have got to be last on any social media manager’s worry list.
Since bad PR can happen, companies need a serious plan of combat and execution. Social media is definitely the first place your customer now goes letting the world know exactly what they think or experienced with your brand.
So, then make social media the first place you go to do proper damage control.
Make a crisis game plan that specifies the duties and roles for each member on the crisis team. This game plan should be able to hold up against any incident, anytime, anywhere in the world and under any conditions.
Your go-to PR crisis social media plan should look like this:
Any company can be caught in a PR crisis at any time. Any company should be ready with their social media strategy to answer to it. No brand should assume immunity from these way-out-of-left-field-bad press incidents.
That is why it is called a surprise. Be ready.
Christine C. Oddo is the author of The Christine Report blog and founder of Madison Luxe Group; a beauty and luxury product retail sales and digital strategy agency.
Inquiries to christine@madisonluxegroup.com
Doing nothing for 30 minutes.
This is what I attempted to do. Its really, really hard. But my timing was right. The electric company is “upgrading” the electric system in the neighborhood and the power was shut off for several hours. Cellular still worked, but I managed to set aside my beloved pink Samsung.
Mindfulness . 
Its a big topic these days. The Dalai Lama is talking about it.This topic was recently featured on the TV show, 60 Minutes. It was entertaining to watch Anderson Cooper learn about it and also give it a try. He struggled, I related. It was especially cringing though to watch him eat dinner with others that were practicing it. Nobody was allowed to speak or interact. It made them chew very slowly. The camera lingered on the participants’ slow chewing motion. Supposedly, if we talk less and chew more slowly, we taste and appreciate our food more. I always thought food was supposed to be social and the best part about it was in the sharing of the moment others. Usually this entails a lot of talking.
Anyways, needless to say, I was supposed to be thinking about nothing and I was actually thinking about watching people on TV also trying to think about and say nothing.
Experts say we can boost our productivity if we take the time and allow ourselves this Mindful silence. Now, this is something to think about. As a person with multiple jobs, self-employed and in Harvard University Extension 
Graduate School, I think about my productivity all the time!
What I have actually learned is that in order to boost my productivity, I really need to stop thinking about it so much.
Another poignant thought poked out. I write about, work in and live for luxury. My version of luxury is defined as to how we can achieve it in everyday and real life. We all know that time is a luxury.
Mindfulness is my new life luxury.
