Morning Glory < 30 Seconds: Fun at French Laundry, Tower Records

Morning Glory < 30 Seconds

November 17, 2020

By Cliff Oxford

Daily Deal—Here for the party. First thing Monday morning, New Mexico and California pulled the rip cord on reopenings with heavy-handed lockdowns even though Calif. Gov Gavin attended a big birthday bash Saturday night at The French Laundry, famed Napa Valley see-and-be-seen destination. His business, but we misread his appearance as no lockdown on Monday. Wrong. He put LA county in purple zone, severest lockdown. 

I actually agree with NY Gov Cuomo on bar lockdowns at 10 p.m. If you can’t close the deal by that time, it’s not going to happen anyway. Go home.

Side Deal—Under the radar a sliver of good news in bad news of COVID hospitalizations: Number admitted are going up but days of stay per patient are decreasing, which means beds are turning faster—hospitals functioning means no national lockdown. Total COVID cases and deaths are tragic, but nearly irrelevant to a total lockdown.

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IPO Glow—Brown & Brown (NYSE:BRO), located in Daytona Beach, Fla, acquired CoverHound, the original insurance technology company, a San Francisco-based insurance policy marketplace for individuals and small businesses that is also behind CyberPolicy. Founder Keith Moore will remain CEO. 

Bumble, a dating app on which women make the first move, chose Goldman Sachs as its lead investment banker on its planned IPO. The company is backed by private equity firm Blackstone Group Inc., and that's how you get into the IPO pipeline. 

Entries/Exits—Maybe the mack daddy of all retailers, Tower Records—which started in 1960 as a section in a  Sacramento drugstore and grew to international fame where the likes Elton John and Prince dropped in to soak up the culture—is back in business online 14 years after it closed its stores and declared bankruptcy. 

Guess the game is to repackage the imagination of founder Russ Solomon who was memorialized in the 2015 film, “All Things Must Pass,” which studied the chain's rise and demise. Watch it. 

I gave it a fair shot and few days but the new online store illustrates you cannot recreate right place, right time, and a phenomenal marketing mind.

Introducing a collection of shoes inspired by the 911 Turbo.   This year, the world’s most iconic sports car welcomed its eighth generation. To mark the occasion, Porsche and PUMA have collaborated on a limited-edition collection of sneakers inspired by each model. Popular period-specific paint colors. The iconic rear wing. Lightbars, interiors, and body lines. All used to create a collection of shoes as loud, fast, and captivating as the 911 Turbo itself. The long-awaited release of these sneakers is here, available at select Porsche Design and PUMA stores and online. But like any Porsche, they’ll be gone fast …