Mozelle

What content curator (sans quotation marks) is padding deadlines? And is Carole meant to drop the friendships she made from the show because she's no longer on the show?

Just popping in to share that I, too, work as an editor. I'm in the communications and publications department of my organization. We aren't traditional book publishers, but we publish various print and online content. One of the dirty little secrets (I'm being dramatic with that description, of course lol) is that deadlines do get missed and they do get pushed back. Editors will also create padding in schedules for that very reason. This summer I was assigned a project, which was later put on hold a couple months in because the main contact also had to consult with people in her group about the content. She just reached out on Monday saying that they were ready to start up the project again, and I had to ask her when she was looking to get the product out. I, as an editor, am not only an editor but a project manager. I have to draft a production schedule then get feedback from the author(s) and graphic designer on whether the time allotted is feasible for them. When I sent out the draft schedule yesterday that had a completion date of mid-December, I also mentioned in the email that delays in reviews from the authoring group would likely push the target print date into early 2019 (accounting for holidays and people being on leave). It's annoying and nerve wracking when deadlines get pushed, certainly, but deadlines being pushed back is as much a part of the publishing world as editing a manuscript is.

It clearly matters to Bethenny since she believes herself to be a woman with sharp business acumen who knows how to answer the needs of consumers. If all that mattered to Bethenny was being rich, she wouldn't have felt the need to be dismissive of Ramona's anti-skin care (lol) line since Ramona's pretty darn rich herself. She wouldn't have felt the need to counter Carole's resume with her own resume. If all that mattered to Bethenny was being rich, then she could have shut the whole thing down, Dave Chappelle Show style, with, "I'm rich, biatch!"

I’m not saying that there should have been an expectation of sales being 1-to-1 (for social media follower to customers). Because you’re right, not everyone who follows will want to buy whatever is being sold. However, in the case of Kim Kardashian West, they created initial products for just under 0.26 percent of her 116 IG followers, some of whom her people had to think would be interested in what she was selling (based on the fact that she also has some dumb game app that has raked in a ton of money and has something like over a million downloads). Bethenny is supposed to be a smart business woman. Am I to believe that she and her people didn’t think about trying to leverage something like 5 percent, turning them from followers into buyers? I honestly don’t know what the inventory numbers were, but for jeans to have sold out online on the Skinnygirl jeans website AND in Macy’s in several days, I’m betting they played the KKW game and only had a fraction of a percent (of follower numbers) of product available.

I believe this was a marketing ploy on their end. They likely only ordered a very (very) limited run so that they can say demand was so high they sold out. Bethenny has 1.8M IG followers and 1.6 Twitter followers (and there's probably some overlap). They hyped up this launch for months to millions of people, which means they should have anticipated a high demand, especially if they were partnering (if even for a short time) with a well known retailer that not only has brick & mortar stores, but an online presence as well. Instead, it seems to me that they cared more about the hype than the delivery. It's a similar thing that Kim Kardashian West (KKW) did last summer with her makeup launch. Kim has 118M IG followers and exactly half the number of followers on Twitter (59M), which means she has a captive audience. And what did she and her company do? Have only 300,000 kits for sale, which sold out in hours. This way you get the press about how hot the product is, even if it means frustrating those of your fans who might have wanted to get their hands on the thing. Contrast the games that both Bethenny and Kim played with Rihanna and her Fenty Beauty launch last fall (Rihanna has 64.9 million IG followers and 87.8 Twitter followers). As with Bethenny's product and KKW's product, the hype for Fenty Beauty was real. There was a lot of anticipation leading up to the September drop. Fenty Beauty partnered with Sephora, which, like Macy's, has brick & mortar stores as well as their online platform, and they made sure that they would have the supply to meet the demand. It seemed less important to them to boast "SOLD OUT PRODUCT!" and more important that people actually had the chance to buy the goods. Point: If someone really wants to have supply meet the demand, they can.

Bethenny’s charity dealings and relief work is getting scrutinized because that is the nature of the beast. Charitable and philanthropic organizations are always under a magnifying glass, and for good reason (it can be really easy to exploit people who have dire needs, as is the case with the Oxfam scandal). St. Bethenny isn’t being singled out any more than any other organization. Taking the tack that people should be grateful and therefore scrutiny is bad is just not something I can get with. One of the many podcasts I subscribe to is Tiny Spark whose podcast description you can see below.

Carole told Elle in 2015 that she didn’t like the gym. And in mid-2017 she started training for the marathon that she would go on to run and complete six months later, and well into 2018 she maintains a personal trainer. Wow. Carole, like a bunch of people in the world, changed her views about something that she previously said she didn’t care for.

I had, years before. I've said it either in Carole's thread or one of the episode threads, that I first started following Cassandra's company on IG, Violet Grey, not long after Carole joined the show. Carole had tagged the company in an IG post years ago, and that was also I how I learned of Cassandra Grey, who I followed shortly after learning that she and Carole were friends. That was six years ago.

Haha! Bingo! I mean, I don't think any of these women are hip, but for as much snarking that Carole has received for daring to have sex with a man in his 30s, for daring to play around with fashion, I think Bethenny can and should be added to list of someone who thinks that she's cooler than she actually is. Bethenny has definitely shown, over the course of years, that she thinks she's got her finger on the pulse of what's hip and edgy. She doesn't.

None of that was ever Bethenny's lingo. At all, ever. Bethenny learned of those sayings loooonnngg after they had fallen out of favor by the demographic using them (i.e., "urban" youths). Given that Carole never used "Get off my jock" toward anyone but Bethenny, and it happened after she and Bethenny's friendship had fractured, it stands to reason that Carole was mocking Bethenny for "Get off my jock." At the very least "narrative" as a term is evergreen. So Bethenny can be annoyed by that yet go back to using lingo from 1998 and before. Bethenny will forever remain tragically unhip, co-opting language that's at least a couple decades old--"'Rollin' with my snowmies!' Get it, get it, get it?!"; "I'd like you to meet my new dogs, Biggie and Smalls." It makes sense, though, given that her jean line is also tragically (tortuously is probably more in line with Bethenny?) pulling from the bedazzled days of the late '90s.

Except for the part where she was dismissive of Ramona being a businesswoman. I know Bethenny thinks that the reunion is where she gets to reset, and that saying one thing or another somehow magically erases all the other things she said and did during the season, but for some people it doesn't work that way. "I know I was dismissive and mocking of you for six months of filming, but for these 12 hours of reunion filming, allow me to be your biggest cheerleader. I know this is the last moment of the season, and I'll just...need...you...to..."

Yeah, my time with QA was back when I was working with online training materials, so I remember the developers being stressed if we found some hiccup on the test server that they couldn't immediately replicate. Because we worked with training materials, I was only used to already launched courses staying up on the live server even while updated courses were being worked on. I guess the difference is that online training materials and e-commerce are two different worlds lol Now in my new gig I'm straight up on the editorial side, so I don't have to futz too much with all that other stuff (though I have been learning the super duper bare minimum with Dreamweaver for a new project, so...yay? Or eek?). So, I heart Madewll jeans. I mean, not at $500, of course, but I own a couple that I've dropped about $130 on because they didn't do that awful gapping in the back. I just re-upped a pair of white jeans from there that I ended up paying only $70 for because they were on promotion and I did the denim donation that knocked off an additional $20.

Thank you for your input. I'm aware of the whole QA process for website launching, but on the other hand, I was never working in e-commerce, so I admit that's where my gap in knowledge is.

I guess I find it odd because in my experience (now, I don't work as a programmer, but I've worked on projects where the thing I'm working on will be posted online) when a website already exists and there are updates or even a nice facelift being done to the website, all the work is usually done on the test server. This is so as not to disrupt what's going on with the public-facing website.

Even the FAQ page? Because that's the link that takes one to the "We'll be back soon" page. That they're also saying to come back Monday for the store opening tells me that the jeans will likely be sold online; that they probably don't have a distribution deal with any brick & mortar stores.