Posts filed under 'Off Topic'
Hi everyone,
Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, and (in a few short days) Happy New Year.
Thanks to wonderful readers like you, 2008 was a great year. Over and over, we heard stories about how you grew more confident with your fashion choices. How you tried on new styles (and new colors) that you didn’t think would work—but did! How your evolving sense of style is changing your life for the better.
Every time we hear one of these stories, it affirms what we’re doing here at Omiru. So–thank you for sharing, and keep the stories coming!
2008 also welcomed a lot of new faces to the Omiru community, in part thanks to nods from Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. (On a related note, thanks for your continued support through some of these growing pains. We’ve had more outages lately, and we just completed a software upgrade this morning to address this–and speed up the load time of our pages. We’re also looking to make some more back end tweaks to make Omiru even better for 2009 and beyond.)
What’s next? We’re taking a short vacation, returning bright and early (and full of fresh style inspiration) on Monday, January 5.
In the meantime, we want to know what’s on your mind for 2009. As for us, we’re looking to (1) discover new designers and stores to share with you, (2) try on even more new trends, styles, and colors (so we can share what works and what doesn’t), and (3) make it easier for you to find the style information you’re looking for on Omiru.
Have any New Year’s Resolutions to share?
Cheers,
Trisha and the Omiru Team
December 25th, 2008
Greetings, Wall Street Journal readers! I’m honored to report that Omiru was featured in the WSJ’s Blog Watch. Here’s what Nikki Waller, an editor at the Wall Street Journal Online, says about us:
"Fashion-school graduate Trisha Okubo started Omiru in 2005 to deliver what she calls "real style for real people." Omiru’s writers answer readers’ questions — including one recently on what to wear to a creative-industry job interview — with tips and examples of garments and accessories from major retailers, such as Banana Republic, Gap and Forever 21. Keeping with Ms. Okubo’s mission of democratizing style, most pieces spotlighted on the site cost less than $100…Readers weary of unrealistic fashion advice in magazines will welcome tips more focused on their lives — looking work-appropriate is a frequent topic — and budgets."
Welcome to Omiru, where you’ll find inspiration and advice that’s as stylish as it is practical. Here’s a sampling of our favorite posts to get you started:
Womenswear:
Fall/Winter 2008’s Best Boots Under $100
Shopping Guide: Six Handbags Under $100
Q&A: How to Transform Your Wardrobe from Formal to Creative
Three Simple Ways to Wear a Scarf
Three Simple Ways to Wear a Little Black Dress
Ready Made Outfit: Modern Katharine Hepburn
Shopping Guide: The Best Plus Size Styles
How to Add Some Spice to a Closet full of Classics
Fashion over Fifty: Five Style Tips
How to Dress up Jeans for Work
Menswear:
Key Menswear Looks for Fall 2008
Men’s Q&A: What to Wear to Interview for a Creative Job
Shopping Guide: Four Essential Bags for Men
Men’s Trend Alert: The Shawl Collar Sweater
Men’s Q&A: How to Transition Your Style from Work to a Night Out
Where to Find Affordable Skinny Suits
What’s the Ideal Shirt Length for a Man?
How to Determine the Quality of a Suit
How to Build a Casual Preppy Wardrobe
Want more? See everything we have to offer in our archives.
Cheers,
Trisha and the Omiru Team
December 8th, 2008
Hi everyone,
Happy Thanksgiving! Wishing you safe travels, quality time with family and friends, and copious quantities of yummy food. And for those of you who dare to shop Black Friday, best of luck in snagging those deals.
As for us, we’ll be taking a mini-break for the Thanksgiving holiday, but we’ll be back with more fashion inspiration bright and early next Monday morning.
Until then, we’re giving thanks for you! Thank you for your insightful comments. Thank you for your helpful advice. And thank you for your continued support of Omiru–it’s been nothing short of extraordinary. Three cheers for you!
Trisha and the Omiru Team
November 27th, 2008
Dear Patient Omiru Readers,
My sincere apologies for today’s downtime! There was a catastrophic disk failure on the computer that’s hosting Omiru. Completely unexpected, and time consuming to fix. Luckily, the guys over at Hostmonster were able to get the site back up and running this evening (minus 10 days worth of data, which I just fixed back up).
Now that the site’s back up and running, we’re back to work on some great new stories for you this week, including a Designer Profile on a chic new(ish) men’s brand and a post about graduation fashion. Stay tuned!
Cheers,
Trisha and the Omiru Team
May 13th, 2008
While we take our weekend break, we want to introduce you to a few other high quality fashion blogs. Here’s what’s going on for this Week in Chic:
A Few Goody Gumdrops says to get ahead in red in the Louis Vuitton French Riviera patent leather pumps.
Coquette loves dressing up in cute blouses for Spring.
Fashiontribes piles on the charming, non-cheesy craftsy jewelry.
I’m Not Obsessed shows you how to get Famke Janssen’s sunglasses for less.
Stylenotes features some eco-chic deals in honor of Earth Day.
The Coveted gets results with skincare superstars.
The Fashionable Housewife dishes on how to find hidden deals for just about anything. It’s Haggling 101!
Headed for a Botox party? Let this little tidbit from The Organic Beauty Expert go to your head!
Lux Lotus has a new philosophy and a new red carpet to roll out.
Supermodel Agyness Deyn knows that long dresses are not just for formal occasions observes V-Style.
Cute flats for under $100! The Fashion Bomb scrimps stylishly.
Cheap Jap advises white not to wear..and which white is right.
Fashion, evolved has a cute scissor graphic tee for your fave crafter or sewing nut.
Pictured: Stewart + Brown Gathered Hoodie | $176 at Tobi.
April 27th, 2008
Hi everybody,
We just upgraded our blog software to the latest and greatest version. Everything should be working the same, but let us know if you find something wonky.
On a separate note, how do you like the changes we’ve made to Omiru in the last month? There are still more improvements to come, but we’ve been working on diversifying our posts, adding more pictures (the #1 request we saw on our reader survey), and making sure we have men’s content every Wednesday.
-Trisha and the Omiru team
March 29th, 2008
Hi everybody,
We’re going to be doing some cleanup around here on Saturday afternoon, upgrading to the latest version of our blogging software and doing some general tidying up of the code. Omiru will be down for maintenance for a few hours starting late tomorrow afternoon, and (if all goes well) we’ll be back up and running in the evening.
Have a great weekend–
Trisha and the Omiru Team
February 29th, 2008
Hi everybody,
You guys are awesome–100 of you responded to the reader survey in a record two days! Here’s a quick summary of what you like best about Omiru–and what you think we can improve on:
You love Omiru for our…
- Style Q&As
- Trend Articles
- Ready Made Outfits
- Shopping Finds
And here’s where we have room for improvement…
- Organization: Useful articles are buried, and they’re really hard to find.
- Pictures: In particular, more pictures are needed to illustrate answers to the Q&As.
- Shopping Finds: Our shopping picks aren’t cheap enough overall, and the ones that are come from the same few places.
- Men’s Articles: Omiru has plenty of women’s articles, but there’s not enough here for the guys. Plus, the guys don’t know when the men’s articles will be posted.
- Polls (and Runway Reviews): They aren’t as useful as the Style Q&As, Trend Articles, and Ready Made Outfits. Polls, in particular, could be better if they focused on emerging trends or trends that aren’t obviously In.
While our long-term improvement plan for Omiru is still in the works, we’ve identified a few changes we can make immediately. Here’s five ways we can make Omiru better for you right away:
- More Pictures: They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ll be adding more illustrations to our Q&As, trend articles, and of course, the ready made outfits.
- More Men’s Articles: We’ll dedicate one day a week (Wednesday) to men’s articles. We know this isn’t a lot, but on our priority list is expanding our men’s coverage further in the future.
- Refocused Poll: Instead of asking if something’s In or Out, we’ll ask whether you’d wear it or not. Identifying which trends you actually want to wear (whether they’re in or not) is more relevant to "real style for real people" than figuring out which trends are In or Out.
- More Reasonable Shopping Options: We’ll work on diversifying our shopping picks so they come from more stores–and where possible, we’ll lower the price point on the items that we do feature.
- More How to Wear a Trend and Ready Made Outfit Articles: We’ll diversify our regular article selection beyond Style Q&As and the Polls.
The one caveat: in order to support our
new-and-improved article lineup, we’re going to have to throttle back
on our answers to your reader questions. The team here will still be
answering as many questions as humanly possible, but unfortunately, we won’t be able to answer all of them. If you already asked your question, though, we promise you an answer.
As for longer term changes, the two most requested features are (1) a lookbook, and (2) a forum where you can ask and answer reader questions (especially since our question queue is super long right now, and a lot of you are waiting on answers from us!). Consider both to be on our will-be-added-to-Omiru list.
Even though we’ve got the short term plan ironed out, we’re still working out the rest of the longer term changes to Omiru–so stay tuned. Thanks again for your feedback and ideas!
Cheers,
Trisha and the Omiru Team
February 24th, 2008
It’s been an exciting start of 2008 for us here at Omiru. First, we were nominated for Best Fashion Blog in the 2008 Fabbies Awards (if you’re so inclined–and don’t mind registering to vote, please cast a ballot for Omiru!). Then Real Simple magazine, which we read religiously, named us one of the three best fashion blogs on the Internet. But even more meaningful to us is the fan mail we’re getting from you guys. We love you too!
In all of this excitement, we’re not forgetting about our New Year’s promise to you: to make Omiru an even better place for you. To make Omiru better, we first want to learn from you what you like–and what you don’t. So we put together a short survey (6 questions, takes no longer than 5 minutes, promise!) for you to voice your opinion on what should stay, what we should add, and what should go.
Help us create a better Omiru for you and take the 6-question survey.
Thanks in advance–
Trisha and the Omiru Team
UPDATE 2/24/08: Survey is now closed. Thanks a ton for your feedback (and the overwhelming response to the survey)! We’re reading through each and every one of your comments and in the process of figuring out what changes we can make to make Omiru better for you. Stay tuned for more on that. If there’s something else that you’d like to add (or didn’t get to take the survey), feel free to email us with comments and ideas at hello at omiru dot com.
February 21st, 2008
It’s that time of year again: New York Fashion Week. As usual, we’ll be covering Fashion Week straight from the tents at Bryant Park. But this time around, we’ll be doing something a little different. Instead of focusing on our trademark show reviews, we’ll be concentrating on trend analysis. We’ll still do some show reviews, but we’re going to be looking at Fashion Week from a meta level to bring you the trend information you need for next Fall and Winter.
While we gear up to start our Fall 2008 fashion coverage, check out our Top 5 Most Wearable Trends and our Top 5 Least Wearable Trends for Spring 2008.
Missing your fashion answer fix? We’ll be returning to our regularly scheduled programming, providing answers
to your style questions, bright and early on Monday, February 11 (just in time for Valentine’s Day). We’re diligently working though a very long list of excellent questions (which we’re answering in the order they came in), so thanks in advance for your patience!
February 1st, 2008
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