Marshalls comes to Canada. Did anyone tell them we have Winners?
While I make my living developing marketing and brand strategies, I like to moonlight as a professional shopper. No, I don’t get paid for this talent, but I constantly reassure my husband that I “made money” with the deals that I got. I love to find a great bargain on a good, quality brand. So [...]
Read MoreTarget Coming to Canada
Philter Retail is a retail and shopper marketing agency. Sure we work on product launches and new retail concepts. And we’ve had some fun launching new brands. But as far as retail advertising goes – we often look to the south to Target to see how much the envelope can really be pushed. Having seen [...]
Read MoreBeauty in Ruins
Years ago while working on a project for an ad agency in Toronto I was lucky enough to be invited to Maple Leaf Gardens. But this wasn’t any trip to this cathedral of hockey, because the Gardens had been closed for years. We walked in and were greeted by one security guard whose job it [...]
Read MoreHappy Life Day
With a 4-year-old at home, the holidays take on new meaning. Where they used to be about getting together, eating too much and hanging out with friends and family, it’s now about Star Wars. So when I was sent this Star Wars video from 1978 – their holiday special – I felt that I just [...]
Read MoreDesign Thinking
Yes, I’ve watched Dirty Dancing (probably a couple dozen times). That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I was thirteen when that movie was released – it was pretty much mandatory for me to be able to recite all of the dialogue. One of the passages that I often think about is a conversation about the [...]
Read MoreA new perspective – Bay Adelaide Centre photo exhibit.
When our client EllisDon invited me to check out their photo exhibit a couple of weeks ago, I expected the photos of their Bay Adelaide Centre to be beautifully shot and impressive in terms of the building process they chronicled…but what I didn’t expect to feel was inspired…and that there’s something going on in this [...]
Read MoreIIDEX Show and Tell – Stylesight and Trends for Fall/Winter 2011
The last seminar that the Philter team went to was lead by Stylesight and was about Megatrends for the fall of 2011. I’m a big fan of Trendcentral, Tendwatching, Springwise and Trend Hunter but I had never thought to turn to more fashion design-centric trend reports before. But they have some great resources for the [...]
Read MoreIIDEX Show and Tell – Emotional Ergonomics with Arik Levy
The keynote from Arik Levy was a highlight of the show. The charm and wit of Arik gave the things that we struggle with daily – the thirteenth change to a logo, the addition of one more element to a package design or the eighth shade of yellow – a less serious tone. His multi-disciplinary [...]
Read MoreIIDEX Show and Tell – Why Designers are to Blame for Their Lack of Street Cred
Friday morning’s Keynote from Avi Flombaum, the creator of Designer Pages, was an interesting smack over the head to the design community to basically get online and reap the rewards or suffer in obscurity. Okay, so maybe that’s a little dramatic, but his message was an interesting one: why is it that the average New [...]
Read MoreIIDEX Show and Tell – What can marketing learn from a bunch of architects & interior designers? A lot.
This past week the IIDEX NeoCon Canada event was held at the Direct Energy Centre in Toronto. Now it’s not a typical place to find us – even though we’re interested in great design – because a show for architects and interior designers isn’t normally a place to find the people from Philter Retail or [...]
Read MoreA moment of clarity. Phimprov week four.
It’s safe to say that the first three weeks of my improv training were about pushing beyond my comfort zone, trying to be open minded, and really learning to deal with the requisite anxiety that comes with performance. In week four, something changed. In my opinion, all of us turned a corner of sorts. We [...]
Read MoreObject as subject. Phimprov week three.
I didn’t wear a striped shirt. I didn’t paint my face. But I felt just as stupid as the mime cliché looks. For week three of my improv excursion, we learned about doing object work, or the ability to communicate with gesture alone. It’s not exactly the same as miming, but they’re certainly related. A [...]
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