Up close and personal in travel retail – Sponsored by Victorinox
In just three months, Pray has been viewed 25,514 times on YouTube, played on 20 radio stations in Canada, and featured on Dubai radio, courtesy of Dubai Duty Free. And, of course, it has been heard many times as the intro to our Podcast series In Crisis: Travel Retail Voices.
I saw the danger, yet I passed along the enchanted way; And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day: We pay tribute in words & music to Barry Geoghegan’s late mother.
You can’t keep a good man down. So there’s no way one of travel retail’s most irrepressible characters, Wild Tiger Rum founder Gautom Menon is going to let a global pandemic stop his non-stop innovation programme.
So if you’re walking down the street sometime/And spot some hollow ancient eyes/Please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare/As if you didn’t care, say, “Hello in there, hello”.
I’m one of the lucky ones. There are countless dispossessed, poor, war-torn men, women and children who are suffering far greater hardship than the novelty of having to work from home.
“Steph has done it again! She has come so far. She has kicked herself back into life several times, has grown spiritually and still has a killer vibe!”
It seems just the other day that I wrote a news story headlined ‘Advent names Julián Díaz new Dufry CEO as acquisition is completed’. In fact it was 16 years ago, on my birthday (1 March).
The business empire that he built was worth an estimated US$100 billion. Yet 78 years earlier when he stowed away on a ship to Japan, all the young Shin had to his name was 83 Japanese Yen and a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther.
It’ s a winning formula based on doing the simple – and not so simple – things well.
The volumes involved were well in excess of any allowance other than that perhaps of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang Sunan International Airport arrivals duty free.
Tallink is generating enormous sales of Krug and Dom Perignon Champagne, for example, and luxury skincare brands such as Dior and La Mer. Just ensuring supply keeps up with demand is a constant challenge.
My final trip of the year, and indeed of the decade, is over. And what a great way to close out the 2010s it turned out to be.
Shannon Airport may also have lit the career touch paper of two young, dynamic and inspirational entrepreneurs who are wholly in tune with the consumer needs, trends and concerns of our time.