{"id":1124,"date":"2008-12-23T22:23:11","date_gmt":"2008-12-24T06:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1124"},"modified":"2009-09-21T18:52:58","modified_gmt":"2009-09-22T02:52:58","slug":"better-nothing-at-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=1124","title":{"rendered":"Better Nothing at All"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><q>English Leather<\/q> used to be a major brand of men's grooming products.  The English Leather brand was introduced by the House of Dana in 1949.  I'm not sure exactly what happened to the brand, but in 1995, <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">les Parfums de Dana<\/span> was acquired by Renaissance Cosmetics, <abbr title=\"Incorporated\" style=\"font-size: inherit ;\">Inc<\/abbr>, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999 and was acquired by Fragrance Express, <abbr title=\"Incorporated\" style=\"font-size: inherit ;\">Inc<\/abbr>, which cre&auml;ted <span style=\"font-style: italic ;\">New Dana Perfumes Corporation<\/span> with the portfolio.  In 2003, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.danaclassics.com\/\">Dana Classic Fragrances<\/a>, a company closely associated with New Dana Perfumes Corporation and principally owned by the <abbr title=\"Chief Executive Officer\">CEO<\/abbr> of New Dana Perfumes Corporation, bought the fragrance brand portfolio of New Dana Perfumes Corporation.<\/p> <p>And yester-day, in my mail-box, I got a different sort of indication of the fate of the brand.<\/p> <p>The junkiest of the junk-mail that I get comes in a form rather like newspaper inserts.  On the back page on such an assemblage, was an advertisement for <q>English Leather&reg;<\/q> hats.  Here's a version that I found on-line of pretty much the same advertisement: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.directsourceinc.com\/hats.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/leatherhats_s.jpg\" width=\"450\" height=\"321\" style=\"display: block ; margin-left: auto ; margin-right: auto ;\" alt=\"[advertisement for four tasteless black leather hats]\" \/><\/a> I don't know how <q>English Leather<\/q> comes to be used to brand extraordinarily tasteless hats, whether this be a hijacking or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.danaclassics.com\/\">Dana<\/a> having left a back-door unsecured.  But this is a brand either in <em>free fall<\/em> or in grave danger of becoming so.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"English Leather used to be a major brand of men's grooming products. The English Leather brand was introduced by the House of Dana in 1949. I'm not sure exactly what happened to the brand, but in 1995, les Parfums de Dana was acquired by Renaissance Cosmetics, Inc, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999 [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,104,4],"tags":[485,364,258,486],"class_list":["post-1124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-news","category-public","tag-branding","tag-hats","tag-intellectual-property","tag-trademarks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}