Tiffany: Buying the brand, buying the history

It all started at September 18^th, 1837, when just two men and 1.000 US$ invested all on store on the 259 of the Broadway, New York. These two men were Charles Lewis Tiffany and John B. Young. At the beginning it sold stationary items and on its first day Tiffany and Young closed the doors with sales of 4.98$. Since that day Tiffany became one of the best well-known corporations of jewelry and silverware.

It quickly gained reputation and in 1845 came out the first “Blue Book”. The Blue Book is the catalogue of Tiffany’s products and it still exists in our days. However, it was in 1861 that became popular for the general public when the president Lincoln offered a Tiffany’s bracelet to his wife, Mary Todd.

After that, it was the dream of every woman to receive a small blue box with a white loop: The “Tiffany Blue Box”. This box is so important that the tiffany employees have to take a formation to learn how to do the loop perfectly. Tiffany also has registered the blue of the box as “Tiffany Blue”.

After 1861, a lot of others references to Tiffany & Co. were made in pop culture by stars as Marilyn Monroe, in films as James Bond: Diamonds Are Forever, in books as Breakfast at Tiffany’s  or more recently in series as the Ugly Betty and Glee.

Since the use of Tiffany’s products by famous people, it became a “must have” by all important people. Still today, a lot of people exhibit their Tiffany’s to gain respect and to show wealth.

In 1940, the Tiffany’s store in NY moved to the current address in the 5^th Avenue. Tiffany’s has 64 stores in USA and 103 international stores.

According to Forbes Magazine, Tiffany is the 1597^th biggest public company of the world, the 1264^th in profit and the 1058^th in Market value. It is estimated that Tiffany as a annual profit of 265.7 million dollars (2009).

References:

© 2012 Time Inc, November 4^th, 1940, Carriage Trade: Tiffany Moves, The Times Magazine, last viewed on 21^st April of 2012, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,764971,00.html

2012 Forbes.com LLC™, Scott DeCarlo, April 2012,The World’s Biggest Companies, The Forbes Magazine, last viewed on 21^st April of 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottdecarlo/2012/04/18/the-worlds-biggest-companies/

Mundo das Marcas, May 2006, Tiffany & Co., last viewed on 21^st April of 2012, http://mundodasmarcas.blogspot.pt/2006/05/tiffany-co-luxo-e-glamour.html

Wikipedia®, April 2012,Tiffany & Co., last viewed on 21^st April of 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_%26_Co.

The Blue Note

The fifties were the time where the image was everything. The time where the search for perfection was an obsession. A time of a society afraid of the new and conformed with the conventional.  

Throughout the 50s, a group of people tired of the old manners expressed themselves in most varied forms. It was the fifties counterculture. It was “The Beat Generation”!

The “Beats” choose mainly the arts to speak out for what they considered to be an awful society. In the arts they were writers, painters, sculptors… And they had a thing in common: the love for the jazz and the blues. We can actually say that it was the sound of The Beat Generation.

It was in the 50s that great jazz musicians appeared. The trumpeter Miles Davis, the pianists John Coltrane and Bill Evans, the saxophone player Stan Getz, the drummer Art Blakey and so on. The “beats” found in jazz and in its players the ultimate point of reference to creation. A lot about jazz was said in the “beats’ ” writing. The jazz music was seen just like the things that came out from the beat generation’s people: “Something new and crazy” and in this case “done by black people.”

Besides this, the main common characteristics common to these types of art was the word beat. "The word 'beat' was primarily in use after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted". Kerouac went on to twist the meaning of the term "beat" to serve his own purposes, explaining that it meant "beatitude, not beat up. You feel this. You feel it in a beat, in jazz real cool jazz".

A lot of the beat generation authors wrote about jazz and its musiciams. To know more about the jazz and the beats go to http://www.litkicks.com/Topics/Jazz.html.

Thanks for read.