The one percent is alive, well and being targeted by The Wall Street Journal with a new magazine insert: WSJ Money, a spin-off of WSJ Magazine, which calls itself "the world's largest luxury magazine."

"It's for people who are voyeuristically interested in the high end, and are at the high end," Mike Miller, a Journal senior deputy managing editor overseeing the magazine, told Adweek. 

Scheduled to debut March 9 and publish quarterly, the glossy will focus on personal finance and be distributed in the Journal's weekend edition in the U.S., which has a current circulation of 2.3 million. The edit/ad plan is to publish 50 pages per issue: 30 for editorial and 20 for ads.

The announcement follows the recent launches of Bloomberg Pursuits and Dujour, which joined Departures and ForbesLife in the category.Continue reading...

It hasn’t been easy for Air Canada in recent years with plenty of quarterly reports filled with losses. So what's an airline in the red to do? Launch a new sub-brand called "Rouge," of course.

Starting in July, Canadians can start using the new low-cost airline, which will initially fly out of Toronto and Montreal to such destinations as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Costa Rica as well as Venice, Italy; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Athens. Consumers could start buying tickets Tuesday. 

Later next year, Rouge plans to add more Canadian cities to fly out of as well as international destinations – and not just the ones that Air Canada flies to. "The creation of this carrier is to assist us in serving many destinations that our existing model does not work on a competitive basis," said Ben Smith, Air Canada's chief commercial officer, to the CBC.

According to Yahoo! Finance, Air Canada plans to hire 200 people for Rouge, but those employees shouldn’t expect to be rolling in dough. “Cost savings are expected to come from paying lower wages,” the report notes, “and putting more seats in planes in a so-called new ‘multi-tier seating’ structure.” And we’re not talking just a few more seats. The CBC hears it could be as much as 20 percent more. Prepare to not only fasten your seatbelts but suck in your gut, Canada.Continue reading...

TCBY, the acronym by which The Country's Best Yogurt chain is better known, once ruled the yogurt-retail world, but in recent years, a lot of competition has grown up around it. Part of that competition targets “back to the earth” consumers who are more interested in going back to a more “natural” yogurt and part of that competition is simply those hoping to horn in on TCBY’s frozen-yogurt mix-in turf.

The explosion in yogurt shops just in New York City of late has been astounding, including Chobani's first standalone boutique. “There’s been a veritable war in the Village,” real-estate broker Faith Hope Consolo, a retail real-estate broker for Douglas Elliman, told the NY Observer. “It’s the fastest-growing franchise in the country.” Don’t think TCBY is taking the war lightly.Continue reading...

It turns out that Fresh & Easy was neither, in the end.

Tesco, the third largest retailer in the world, has announced that is ready to pull up stakes and close its 200 Fresh & Easy supermarkets in California and Nevada after a largely unsuccessful five-year run.

As Tesco CEO Phil Clarke put it about why the US grocery store brand is "under strategic review," "It just became clear to us that the journey to sustainable returns was going to take too long. ... It's likely but not certain that our presence in America will come to an end."

Tim Mason, deputy chief executive in charge of the U.S. business, has left the company, effective immediately, after 30 years of service. But as we reported back in July, the writing has been on the wall for Tesco's US expansion.Continue reading...

This holiday season, there are about a bazillion pop-ups sprouting up in New York and London, such as one at NYC's Ace Hotel for Krochet Kids International, the organization that teaches Ugandan and Kenyan women to knit, and the Santa Baby cocktail bar in London's Shoreditch area. Tech lovers and brands will no doubt be rejoicing at one particular pop-up that spans the Atlantic to both cities.

For eight years now, Wired magazine has been wowing tech-lovers with an annual pop-up shop stuffed with whatever the latest and greatest happens to be. This year, the magazine is not only back with a Big Apple pop-up stuffed with gadgets, gear, brands and cultural happenings, but also taking the fun to London. 

The London store features products from such companies as MakerBot, Arcbotics Hexapod, Hiut Denim, Makie Lab, Zboard, and plenty of others. Orders could be made on-site for the products to be delivered.Continue reading...

The folks that make Peeps, those little marshmallow-chick candies found nesting in Easter baskets each year, have tried to market their product to fit other holidays such as Christmas (snowman and Christmas tree Peeps!), Valentine’s Day (heart Peeps!), and Halloween (Guys: there are pumpkin, ghost, and cat Peeps!) Nice try, Peeps, but the enduring image of the candy is still poking out of Easter baskets, no matter what Just Born seems to do. After all, 700 million of the sugar-beeked things are sold around that time of year.  

Undeterred, Peeps is soldiering on and making another effort this year to break the wall down and market itself as a year-round sweet treat. The brand's holiday 2012 collection includes a new Peeps on Earth line of T-shirts, infant clothing, and water bottles, according to a press release.Continue reading...

Whatever you're sipping these days, Starbucks wants to be the brand you're sipping.

As richly as Starbucks brand has made its name on coffee, selling and evoking the world of coffee-growing, -processing and -drinking, it's the tea universe — with a wide variety of ingredients and flavors and functional purposes — that strikes many as much more intriguing these days. So in announcing its purchase of the Teavana tea chain, the company's biggest-ever acquisition, Starbucks is betting as much on being able to exploit the lore and learning about tea as it is in selling the beverage itself. "We will do for tea what we did for coffee," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told the Wall Street Journal about the $620-million deal.Continue reading...

The textbook case of entrepreneurial success that is Sara Blakely's Spanx shapewear brand has just written a new chapter: on Nov. 2nd, Spanx opened its first standalone retail store in the U.S., at the Tysons Corner Center in Maclean, Virginia, one of three stores opening this fall in addition to the brand's first airport boutique, at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. As the brand posted on its Facebook page, Blakely told USA Today that the opening made her feel "excited, nervous, emotional" as it made the leap into its own bricks-and-mortar retail channel.

Blakely's meteoric rise from inspired but inexperienced entrepreneur to one of the richest women in the world has been one of the most interesting stories in business over the last few years. She started out shilling her first invention — a modernized, footless hybrid of a girdle and panty hose — from a folding table in the foyer of a Neiman Marcus and would ship online orders in white Office Depot envelopes from her Atlanta apartment, as Forbes recounts.

The 41-year-old entrepreneur continued tirelessly promoting her brand to the point where, today, Spanx products are sold in more than 11,500 department stores, boutiques and online shops in 40 countries. As Forbes puts it, Spanx has become the "Kleenex" of the category Blakely invented, with revenues just shy of $250 million last year. And her success made Blakely the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.

Even so, Spanx never had operated its own stores, but it now has the cash and variety of products, including Spanx for men, swimwear and apparel, that the timing couldn't be better.Continue reading...