Fly on Corporate Wall

The reasoning seems to go something like this:
Every woman wants a Hermes bag (and a Berkin and a Gucci and a few others), but you can’t just walk into a store and buy one, even if you have the cash.
You have to order one and then sit back and wait, sometimes for months, maybe a year.
So Lips, trembling, asked Nuanpan, honorary chairwoman of Saint-Honore (Bangkok), which is Hermes’ exclusive distributor in Thailand, what’s up with that. She could only apologise.
Hermes aficionados already know anyway that life is such a brute. Even common people know you have to wait for a Hermes bag – it said so in “Sex and the City”.
And even Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra would have to wait if she wanted one. (Of course she wants one!)
With all those girls waiting, there is never going to be a slump on the Hermes handbag stock market.
Nuanpan opened her store in 1997 in the midst of the economic crisis and still broke even within the year.
A lot of the trade comes from Japanese buyers visiting Bangkok, and now, she says, “the Chinese have taken over the place”.
She has even hired Mandarin-speaking staff.
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Ikea is one of those retail chains whose catalogues have become annual rites of the season. It’s packed with interesting stuff.
Today the Swedish maker of do-it-yourself furniture is announcing that more than a million catalogues are being shipped out across the whole area within 10 kilometres of its new store in Bang Na.
So you’ve got a few heady weeks of thumbing the pages before the store opens on November 3. It’s a fun read, trust us. One Ikea executive says he was offered the catalogue for sale by a street vendor in Indonesia.
For now, people who live nowhere near Bang Na will miss out on the reading pleasure. They’ll just have to settle for browsing the website – Ikea.co.th.