Three, Two, One, The Designhounds Voting is Almost Done!
This campaign for the Designhounds Design Influencer of the Year has been so much fun - I can’t believe it’s almost over! But that does mean I will be leaving for Las Vegas for KBIS and IBS, so there are lots to look forward to.
THREE DAYS
When Pigs Fly…
If you all keep voting, I’ll keep sharing.
So my fascination with pigs come from the time in my life when I owned a homebuilding company and went on a builder trip with Capital Distributing to London and Paris. This is when I discovered Hérmes that I went on to work for, and how the French revere pigs because of their unique ability to find truffles. I even found an ad in French Vogue that was this distinguished woman riding in the back of a vintage Rolls Royce convertible with a driver, her hair tied back with an Hérmes scarf, and this pig that had as much attitude as she did sitting in her lap with sunglasses, pearls and a fur coat.
I had a friend that ran the Zoology program at the Plano High School - Jim Dunlap. his sense of humor was as wicked as mine is. After I showed him the ad, little redheaded Phoebe complete with pearls and a fur coat (faux of course!) was under my Christmas tree. Always the marketer, we let the local newspaper know about it and we had the lead story New Years Eve - limo and all!
She stayed with me and taught kids about pigs and how intelligent they are until she got a little / a lot large and she got to live out her years at a summer camp.
When I moved to Tucson to open my Arizona office, I was fortunate enough to live in the foothills, and animals came to visit day and night. Javelinas (wild boars) are nocturnal, so we wouldn’t always see them, but you could smell them! We had some tough years with drought and their food sources dried up so I would put out food for them and we became friends. They even brought their babies to meet me and they would eat Doritos and strawberries out of my hand.
So know you know even more about me, and how my Lifestylist Brand has evolved. Besides Phoebe, going on that trip and discovering Hermés was life changing. Hérmes in my eyes is the original lifestyle brand. They started out making saddles and harnesses, now they make the hand bags and scarves that everyone covets. Understanding how they turned the families passions into a brand were a great training ground for me. I could tell you about my scarf collection, but that is for another day, and I still have to post Two Days!
The Three Smith Girls
I’ll let you in on a little secret… there are warehouses that take all of the clothing and items that people donate but don’t sell where you can bid on huge bins that are full of you never know what, or you can buy what is in them by the pound.
Bin Shopping for buried treasures!
Talk about treasure hunting! It’s a dirty, dangerous job (I fought a huge guy one time for a coat and won!) If it doesn’t sell here it goes to the landfill, so not only can you find really cool things, you are recycling items that have value and keeping them out of the landfills.
The Ronald McDonald Home - Everything was donated
One of the things I love doing with the Lifestylist Brands is repurposing items, and incorporating vintage items into my model homes. I worked with the Riedman Companies in Rochester NY and the Rochester Homebuilders Association to do a show home that was furnished and decorated completely with items that had been donated to the Ronald McDonald House there. That home was one of my biggest challenges, and people are still talking about it and remember me for that home. Everything in the home was sold in a silent auction, and all proceeds went to Ronald McDonald House.
When my company won a national merchandising award with the National Association of Homebuilders, it was for a home that we did with Sherwin Williams where we used paint to repurpose furniture - we did over 32 different paint treatments and colors!
I found these cuties in a bin, dirty and thrown away, but I loved their expressions. Each one was in a different bin - you have to hunt to find collections! After cleaning them up, they are now staying with me because they remind me of The Smith Girls - my sisters and myself. When my parents got married, they had a Kewpie doll bride and groom on top of the cake that has since been used by all of us, including my kids, and my niece just this year.