brass Blog

We’ve got an update on our awesome May 2007 cover story, Alison Kelly. The fashion designer has not only revamped her online shopping experience, branding it with an approachable yet high-fashion feel, and a cool name: Atelierdahl, but her efforts were featured twice in the trendsetting blog Daily Candy — one mention for her new custom clothing boutique and one for her bridal line. That led to the Condé Nast Group taking note and including her in one of their latest projects. Along with MoviesRock and Chevrolet, Condé Nast has created a fashion-forward campaign that’s touring the U.S. It’s exhibiting a line of Chevy’s hybrid vehicles by combining fashion-forward products and music/film stars like Mary J. Blige and Emmy Rossum as part of the package (I recently saw an ad for this campaign in Glamour). They’ve created an online shopping experience called Chevy Malibu Shops — and Alison’s got one of her pieces featured in the line-up. The young designer is now a part of an innovative campaign where industries have joined forces to help promote a worthy environmental endeavor.

Alison’s also bouncing off the viewer appeal she found on Bravo’s Project Runway by returning to the network to write her own blog covering the current season.

How’s that for entrepreneurial spirit? Congrats to Alison…can’t wait to see what comes next.

- Sarah

Here’s an interesting stat of the week for you…

75% of college students surf social networking sites. That means that about three out of every four of you are probably checking your Facebook or MySpace as you read. I did as soon as I finished writing this. I wonder what the stats are for how many of us check our profile during class…

Source: bizreport.com, 2007

So while I was tooling around online the other day, I found this pretty interesting site which had been “dugg” on digg.com.

As I did some investigating, I was happy to find scads of government websites that can be really helpful for school or research (US National Archives, CIA World Factbook, FedStats.gov). There is also earthquake info, and my personal favorite, the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

The Occupational Outlook Handbook has average pay scales for an amazing array of careers (hundreds of them listed alphabetically), job search tips, job market info, and a bunch of other resources that I couldn’t even remember because my brain would have exploded. Basically, there’s just a huge pile of awesome resources for anyone who wants to find more information about whatever occupational field they are interested in.

Anyway, I want to keep this short, so check out those links for some helpful government pages. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving with friends and family. We’re thankful for websites like those above (and for readers like you).

- Jeremy

Last week I had the opportunity to meet two very interesting people on a trip up to Seattle.

The first person I want to let all of our readers know about is a young entrepreneur named James Sun, who started the company zoodango.com. James has an awesome personal story, which you can watch on video below,

about how he and his family immigrated to the United States, how he began investing while in college, and then went on to start his own company. Oh yeah, he also managed to have a TV stint on the The Apprentice and met Donald Trump and Arnold Schwarzenegger! James is a great example about why it’s so important, and possible, for anyone to begin investing at a young age. Zoodango also has a cool competition going on to search for a co-host for Zoodango on their homepage. Check it out.

The second person I had a chance to meet was Peter van Stolk, the CEO and founder of Jones Soda Company. While we only met briefly, Peter was gracious enough to let me and Chris Lahiji (one of our brass Take 2 columnists) have seats in his box at Seahawks Stadium for Monday Night Football. It was my first NFL experience, and it was a blast! That’s all for now. Hope these two can serve as an inspiration to all of you interested in investing or starting your own business.

-Bryan

There’s some good news for those of us concerned about identity theft. As of November 1, 2007, TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian (the three big credit reporting agencies) allow consumers in all 50 states to place freezes on their credit files.

Basically, what that means is we, as consumers, have more control over who can access our credit history. A freeze effectually prevents any agency or individual from looking at our credit score, thereby reducing the chance that a fraudster can use your credit information to open a credit card, credit line, apply for a loan, or whatever the case may be. (Bankrate.com has a succinct definition which summarizes what exactly a credit freeze is.) Consumers who have suffered identity theft can freeze their reports and lift the freeze for free, while those who have not been victimized face a $10 fee each time.

Additionally, many states also have laws allowing credit freezes, but there may be a fee which runs higher than the fee at the credit agencies (fees vary from state to state). Additionally, these credit freeze offers cannot be used in lieu of state freeze laws or prices, so consult your state’s freeze laws and information and the three credit agencies before making a decision.

And while you’re online, check out what you can do on your own to protect yourself, because knowing is half the battle.

- Jeremy

In the spirit of our blog’s new look, we’ve decided to start posting interesting stats as we come across them. The one below is especially relevant considering holiday shopping is about to begin.

Over 90% of shoppers who attempted to negotiate a lower price on goods or services (ranging from furniture to electronics to hospital bills) actually got one.

Source: survey conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center.

Check this out. Last week, I saw a story on reddit about a young teen in Australia who saved a man from an oncoming train. Julian Shaw, 14, pulled 54-year-old Mark O’Dwyer to safety after seeing him faint and fall from a train platform onto the tracks six and a half feet below.

Shaw, who stands around 5′9″ and weighs in at about 155 pounds, hefted the older man, about 6′1″ and 243 pounds, onto his shoulder and moved him out of harm’s way as the train screamed past. You can read an account of the full story here.

According to the story, Mark noted that young adults don’t always get positive publicity. Here’s the good news: Not only did Julian receive a medal from Mark’s grateful girlfriend, he also received a letter of commendation from The Department of Education and has since written his own song for his punk band about the event. And now, brass is blogging about the inspiring feat!

Nice job Julian–that’s an awesome thing you have done. It’s incredible what you can do when the pressure is on.

- Jeremy

New blog

We’re back! Welcome to the new home for the brass Blog. You’ll still find recent posts on brassmagazine.com, but they’ll be abbreviated. You can read them in full here at this new domain: blog.brassmagazine.com. We’re sorry for our brief hiatus from the blogosphere, but we were hard at work and we’ve revamped things to make it even easier for you to read and share. Also, be sure to take a look at the photos at the bottom of our blog for a behind-the-scenes look at what we’ve been up to in the last few months. You’ll see photos like this one from our latest cover shoot with entrepreneur Sumaya Kazi:

Big news

The blog isn’t all that’s been keeping us busy. Not only did our latest issue of brass come out, but we received some exciting news that BusinessWeek would be featuring brass and Bryan (CEO and founder) on their Best Entrepreneurs Under 25 list! (And yes, that’s Bryan’s pic on the very first page.) Definitely check out the brass mention. It’s a big honor to be featured along with so many awesome young people–fashion designers, web advertising gurus, and even an inspiring high school student with a winning biz idea.

But that’s not all…this morning brass was spotlighted on public radio on a money and business program, Marketplace Morning Report . It was pretty cool listening to Bryan’s interview here in the office and knowing it was going out to millions of listeners. It’s definitely worth hearing that three-minute clip.

New subscribers

In light of all this recent attention, we’ve got a lot of interest from people who want to subscribe to brass|MAGAZINE. So to all you folks wanting to get your hands on brass, sign up here.

Thanks for hanging in there while we’ve been momentarily MIA on our blog. It’s good to be back. Let us know with a comment below what you think of the recent news and our new digs. We’ll be here next week…

- Sarah