Share this page
Quick links
Add feed
|
|
The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Archive for the ‘Sweden’ category
17.05.2022

[Originally posted in Lucire] Toward the end of next week, Panos Papadopoulosâs autobiography, Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, comes out in London, with an event in Stockholm following. This is an intimate memoir about Panosâs rise, from childhood poverty in Greece to the âking of swimwearâ in Scandinavia. Not only do I have an advance copy, I collaborated with Panos on it.
Iâm fascinated by autobiographies. When I was a teenager, I read Lee Iacoccaâs one, written with William Novak. I presume Novak interviewed Iacocca, or he worked with some additional notes, and ghosted for him. Whatever the case, it remains an engaging read, and I replaced my well worn paperback with a hardcover one a few years ago, when I spotted it at a charity fair. More recently I bought Don Blackâs autobiography, The Sanest Guy in the Room, and enjoyed that thoroughly.
Panos and I probably had a similar arrangement to Iacocca and Novak, whereby I interviewed and prompted him for some stories, and I wrote from copious notes that he gave me. Thereâs an entire chapter in there thatâs based on his reflections about the time he bought into a football team in Sweden, that he wrote in great detail himself soon after the events took place. Somehow over 10 months of 2021âthough the idea has been floating around for many years beforeâPanos and I created this eminently readable tale, the sort of autobiography I would like to read.
Of course we start in Greece in 1958, and how a young lad, who begins working at age five alongside his mother as she cleaned an office, finds poverty a torment, and vows to get himself out of it. He also cannot tolerate injustice, and attempts to expose pollution, workplace accidents, and corruptionâonly to find himself and his parents harassed. By his late teens, after taking an interrail journey to northern Europe, he finds an opportunity to study in Sweden.
Itâs not âthe rest is historyâ, as Panos works in kitchens, washing dishes and peeling potatoes. He also finds gigs as a prison guard, a parole officer, a rest home carer, and a substitute teacher.
His first taste of fame is for a postgraduate sociology paper, where he examines the importance of clothing in nighttime disco settings, which captures the imagination of major newspapers and TV networks.
Finding dissatisfaction and frustration working in health care for the city of Göteborg, he seized upon an idea one day when spying just how drab the beaches were in Sweden: beautiful bodies covered in monochrome swimwear.
Injecting colour on to the beaches through his Panos Emporio swimwear label wasnât an overnight success, and Panos elaborates on his story with the sort of passion you would expect from a Greek native, capturing your attention and leaving you wanting more.
He reveals his secrets about how he lifted himself out of poverty, creating a company given a platinum rating in Sweden, an honour reserved only for the top 450, out of half a million limited-liability companies there.
Read about how he managed his first sales despite doubts from the entire industry, how he secured Jannike Björlingâthen Swedenâs most sought-after woman, photographed constantly by the paparazziâas Panos Emporioâs model, and how he followed up with securing Victoria Silvstedt, just as she was about to become world-famous posing for Playboy.
By 1996, 10 years into his labelâs journey, and with the release of the Paillot (still offered in the Panos Emporio range today), the press dubbed him âthe king of swimwearâ, but he wasnât done yet.
More high-profile models followed, and thereâs even an encounter with Whitney Houston, revealed for the first time in the book. There are royal encounters, with former King Constantine II, and Swedenâs HM King Carl XVI Gustaf and HM Queen Sofia. HSH Princess StĂ©phanie almost makes it into the book.
There are touching moments, too, such as his heartfelt recollection of his friendship with Jean-Louis Dumas, the chairman of HermĂšs, and his wife Rena.
Weâve known each other for over 20 years, and from the start he complimented me on my writing, so I have a feeling he wanted me for this task for some time. We’ve both had to start businesses from scratch, and we did them away from our countries of birth. Additionally, he knew I grew up amongst Greeks so I had more than an average insight into his culture. Weâve talked about it numerous times, maybe as far back as 2016, when Panos Emporio celebrated its 30th anniversary. Iâm very grateful for that. There were obviously stories I knew, since I interviewed him about them over the years, but plenty I did not, and they form the bulk of this 320 pp. book, published by LID Publishing of London, and released on May 26. A party in Stockholm follows on May 31.
Technically, the process was an easy collaboration as Panos and I shared notes and written manuscripts back and forth, and I had the privilege to lay it out and edit the photos as well. The whole book was typed out on WordPerfect, which gave an almost perfect re-creation of how the copyfitting would go in InDesign, unlike Wordâfor a while others doubted I could fit the contents into the agreed page length, since they couldnât see it in the same format that I did. Martin Majoorâs FF Nexus Serif is used for the body text. And, while hardly anyone probably cares about such things, I managed to deliver it so the printer could do the book without wasting paper with the right page impositions. I know what it’s like to have printing bills.
My Life, My Odyssey was the working title, but it seems LID liked it enough to retain it for the final product. I wanted to retitle it Panos: Who Designs Wins, but the experts in charge of sales preferred the working title. âWho designs winsâ appears on the back cover, so itâs still getting out there!
Caroline Li, LIDâs designer, did the cover, and I followed her lead with the headline typeface choice; and Martin Liu, who Iâve known from Stefan Engesethâs many books, published and coordinated. Iâm grateful to the watchful eye and coordination of Aiyana Curtis, who oversaw the production stage and did the first edit; she also engaged the copy editor and proofreader, who turned my stubborn Hartâs Rules-compliant text into LIDâs house style.
I see from her rĂ©sumĂ© that Aiyana had done some work here in Aotearoa, and Caroline and Martin, like me, have Hong Kong roots, so we all probably had some things in common that made the process easier. It was particularly easy to understand Carolineâs design approach, and as someone who had done mock covers while we were trying out potential photos, I will say hers is infinitely superior to mine. Similarly, I understood Martinâs business approach from day one.
The final manuscript was done in October 2021 and weâve spent the last few months doing production, shooting the cover, and preparing for the launch, where LIDâs Teya Ucherdzhieva has ably been working on a marketing plan. Panos himself, never one to do things by halves, has thrown himself into doing the launch, and it promises to be an excellent event.
For those whoâd like to get their hands on a copy, Amazon UK and Barnes & Noble are retailing Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, and a US launch is slated for October (Amazon and other retailers will have it in their catalogues).
Tags: 2021, 2022, book, business, celebrity, England, fashion, friends, Göteborg, HermĂšs, history, LID Publishing, London, Lucire, modelling, Panos Emporio, Panos Papadopoulos, retail, sport, Stefan Engeseth, Stockholm, Sweden, UK, Victoria Silvstedt Posted in business, culture, design, media, publishing, Sweden, typography, UK | No Comments »
02.05.2022
Here are May 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Tags: 1950s, 1955, 1960s, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1970s, 1971, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980s, 1983, 1986, 2022, actress, advertisement, advertising, Alfa Romeo, Audemars Piguet, Autocar, Bertone, BL, Brazil, British Leyland, Canada, car, celebrity, Envoy, fashion, film, Germany, GM, Hollywood, humour, James Bond, language, magazine, marketing, modelling, musician, Netherlands, Opel, Panos Emporio, retro, Saab, science, Simca, Sweden, Switzerland, Triumph, Twitter, UK, USA, Vauxhall, watch Posted in cars, culture, gallery, humour, interests, internet, marketing, Sweden, technology, UK | No Comments »
13.04.2022
I always thought One: a Consumer Revolution for Business was one of Stefan Engesethâs best books, if not the best.
He recently posted on Linkedin: âreaders have told me that the book can lead to a better understanding of people and society (which can end wars).â In the interests of peace, he thought heâd give away his book for free, as a PDF, subtly retitled One: a Consumer Revolution for Peace.
âI originally wrote the book to start a consumer revolution,â he says. âAnd today it is consumers, through social media, who are demanding nations to end wars. I have thought about updating the book, but now I realize that the content could be the DNA for change and to build a better future on.â
Hereâs his original Linkedin post, and you can grab your copy of this excellent book here.
Tags: 2000s, 2005, 2022, antiwar, book, business, marketing, peace, Stefan Engeseth, Stockholm, Sweden Posted in business, marketing, Sweden | 2 Comments »
02.04.2022
Here are April 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, 1973, 1977, 1980, 1980s, 1983, 2020s, 2021, actress, advertisement, advertising, Buick, car, celebrity, film, GM, Italy, James Bond, Japan, magazine, Mitsubishi, modelling, retro, Sean Connery, Sweden, technology, USA, Volvo Posted in cars, culture, gallery, interests, publishing, Sweden, technology, USA | No Comments »
02.07.2021
Here are July 2021âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
Star Trek: 1999 reposted from Alex on NewTumbl. Didn’t Star Trek and Space: 1999 share a producer?
Publicity shot for French actress Manon Azem, from Section de recherches.
Charlie Chaplin got there first with this meme. Reposted from Twitter.
I realize the history page in Lucire KSA for July 2021 suggests that you need a four-letter surname to work for Lucire.
The 1981 Morris Ital two-doorâsold only as a low-spec 1·3 for export. Reposted from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Ford Capri 1300 double-page spread, reposted from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Alexa Breit photographed by Felix Graf, reposted from Instagram.
South America relief map, reposted from Twitter.
From the Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei episode ‘Abflug’, to air July 29, 2021. RTL publicity photo.
Lucireâs Festival de Cannes coverage can be found here. Photo courtesy L’OrĂ©al Paris.
Last of the Ford Vedette wagons, as the Simca Jangada in Brazil, for the 1967 model year. The facelift later that year saw to the wagon’s demise.
Ford Consul advertisement in Germany, announcing the 17M’s successor. Interesting that the fastback, so often referred to as a coupĂ©, is captioned as a two-door saloon, even though Ford did launch a “standard” two-door. More on the Consul in Autocade here. Image from the Car Factoids on Twitter.
Tags: 1910s, 1960s, 1966, 1967, 1970s, 1972, 1980s, 1981, 2010s, 2020, 2021, actor, actress, advertisement, advertising, Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei, BL, Brazil, Cannes, car, cartography, celebrity, Charlie Chaplin, China, Chrysler, COVID-19, culture, electric cars, Facebook, film, Ford, France, Geely, Germany, history, humour, Lucire, Lucire KSA, media, Mercedes-Benz, modelling, newspaper, parody, popular culture, privacy, publishing, retro, RTL, South America, Sweden, TV, Twitter, UK, USA, Volvo Posted in cars, China, culture, design, France, gallery, humour, internet, marketing, New Zealand, publishing, Sweden, technology, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
10.11.2020

Danjaq LLC/United Artists
Time for another podcast, this time with a Scottish theme. I touch upon how fortunate we are here in Aotearoa to be able to go to the ballet or expos, and, of course, on the US elections (thanks to those who checked out my last podcast entry, which had a record 31 playsâsure beats the single digits!). That leads on to a discussion about A. G. Barr, Richard Madden, and Sir Sean Connery, who never said, ‘The name’s Bond, James Bond.’
Tags: 2002, 2020, A. G. Barr, Annette Rosencreutz, Aotearoa, Bora-Bora, Boris Johnson, culture, Donald Trump, election, film, humour, James Bond, Joe Biden, media, Medinge Group, New Zealand, personal branding, podcast, politics, popular culture, Rory Bremner, Scotland, Sean Connery, Tahiti, Thomas Gad, TV, UK, USA Posted in culture, interests, media, New Zealand, politics, Sweden, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
19.10.2020

My partner Amanda and I are part of Medingeâs presence at Dutch Design Week this year.
Since Medinge couldnât celebrate our 20th anniversary due to COVID-19, some of our Dutch members, helped by many others, took the opportunity to get us into the event, which is virtual this year.
We had done a lot of work on Generation Co earlier in 2020, thanks to a load of Zoom meetings and emails. This takes things even further, but builds on it.
The programme can be found here, and is titled âPutting the Planet First: a New Orientationâ.
The description: âInstead of thinking about the 3Psâyour challenge is to adopt a new perspective. Always put Planet first. Then people. Then profit.â
After signing up for free, you can head into our virtual rooms.
From the page: âOnly 21/10/2020, 10:00â13:00 lectures and livestreams from members of the Medinge Think Tank: a group of brand experts and visionaries from around the world whose purpose is to influence business to become more humane and conscious in order to help humanity progress and prosper. With international speakers who have worked on these rights and bring in the perspective from indigenous people who co-exist with the rivers.â
On Tuesday the 21st at 10 a.m. CET is Amandaâs presentation on the Whanganui River, which was given the rights of a legal person in legislation enacted in March 2017.
Amanda worked at the Office of Treaty Settlements at the time, so this is really her talk. I just set the laptop on the table, with a microphone generously lent to me by my friend Brenda Wallace. Then I edited it in video-editing software with all the skill of an amateur.
But thatâs the year of COVID-19 for you.
The way the talk came about was in discussion in 2019 with my colleagues at Medinge Group. The concept of legal rights on natural resources and indigenous rights came up, as did the case of the Whanganui River, which is known beyond our shores.
They had no idea Amanda worked on it, and proudly I mentioned her role.
From then on she was part of the programme, and it all came together last Friday.
In the talk, youâll see me on a much lower chair than her, propped up by a bag of rice that slowly sags as the recording wears on.
Thereâs only so much furniture at her Dadâs studio but it was the most comfortable place we could think of for the filming.
More important are the contents of her talk, which I thoroughly recommend. She worked really hard on the responses over a few weeks to make sure it was thoroughly rigorous.
Itâs followed by a talk from my good friend and colleague Sudhir John Horo. Pop over, itâs going to be a really eventful day in virtual Eindhoven.
Tags: 2020, Amanda Satterthwaite, anniversary, Aotearoa, Astrid Benneker, branding, Christof ZĂŒrn, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, Jack Yan, law, MÄori, Medinge Group, natural resources, nature, New Zealand, Sandra Horlings, social responsibility, Sudhir John Horo Posted in branding, business, culture, design, leadership, marketing, New Zealand, politics, social responsibility, Sweden, Wellington | No Comments »
06.09.2020
A guide to emojis for 2020.
At least Twitter works. Google, as usual, doesn’t.
I had a check to see how Lucire was performing in a Google search yesterday and noticed there was a Wikipedia box to the right, and a message saying that if it was about us, I could ‘claim’ the box. I clicked on the link, and as Google knows my email address is associated with Lucire through its search console, it verified me. ‘Congratulations, you’ve been verified’, according to the Google website, and I could ‘Add or change info’, with a ‘Review info’ box that I could click on.

Actually, it’s just a coloured rectangle. Clicking on it does nothing.
Maybe it’s my privacy settings, so I used my fresh, unblocked, Google-can-plant-what-it-likes Chromium browser. I log in as me on Google. And here’s what I get.

Another variant is the below:

âThis account doesn’t have permission to publish on Google Search.’ Um, it does. You just told me I did.
The box remains claimed but there’s not a damned thing I can do.
Long-time readers will remember my pointing out many years ago how the Google Dashboard isn’t accurate, especially when it comes to arithmetic. Nothing has changed.
Google says I have one task. Well, I can’t, since I’ve never used it. Click through: I have none, and Google returns a ‘Get started’ page. Google says I have two albums. Again, impossible. Click through: I have none. It says I belong to one group. Click through: zero. I’m honestly astonished at how bad they are. If you can’t do maths, you probably shouldn’t be working with computers.




Finally, I see Facebook has forced a lot of people to change to its new template. I actually don’t care what the UI looks like, as I’m not there sufficiently to care. And I bet that if you were Māori, you’d want to have the old template back, since you can’t type macronized vowels. The macron just winds up on the baseline on any Chromium browser.

One friend tried to replicate this on Windows and couldn’t, so this might not be a universal issue.
The font being called by the stylesheet is Segoe UI Historic. I have it installed, and it’s not something I’ve ever edited. I will point that that, according to Character Map, no macronized vowels are visible in the relevant Unicode range, though I haven’t opened it in Fontlab to confirm. If the browser has to substitute, that’s fine. But what font (indeed, which of the Segoe fonts) has macrons on the baseline? It appears to be Microsoft’s Segoe, so if it’s not a Facebook linked font (the code inspector suggests it isn’t), then we can point the finger at Microsoft for a buggy font on a standard Windows 10 computer. Either way, someone in a Big Tech outfit goofed.
I had bookmarked this on my cellphone but because it’s my cellphone, it takes a long time to get it on this blog. I have to remember to grab the phone, then look up the post. But it’s your regular reminder that Facebook usually does nothing, despite saying it actively takes down hateful content. As I noted on The Panel in late August, eight copies (I believe in part) of the Christchurch massacre still exited on the platform as of March 15, 2020. The lies are laid bare once more.
As a company, they also take their sweet time in removing bots. Here’s Instagram in a message to me on August 27 (it’s not the only 2018 report they responded to that week):

Same old, same old.
Tags: 2020, Big Tech, bug, bugs, Facebook, Google, language, MÄori, Microsoft, Twitter, USA, user interface, Wikipedia Posted in culture, internet, New Zealand, publishing, Sweden, technology, Wellington | 2 Comments »
15.06.2020
I hadn’t done one of these for a long time: take the number of COVID-19 cases and divide them by tests done. For most countries, the percentage is trending down, though there has been little movement in Sweden. I hadn’t included Brazil, Russia and India before, but as they are in the top part of the table, I’ve included them for the first time for context. That does leave the C of the BRIC countries out, but as China does not disclose its testing numbers, I can’t work out a figure for them. Given the news, it is no surprise that Brazil has the worst percentage I have seen since I began crunching these numbers: more than half of the tests done result in a positive. The source is Worldometers.
Brazil 867,882 of 1,604,784 = 54·08%
Sweden 51,614 of 325,000 = 15·88%
France 157,220 of 1,384,633 = 11·35%
KSA 127,541 of 1,106,398 = 10·99%
USA 2,162,261 of 24,795,407 = 8·72%
Singapore 40,818 of 488,695 = 8·35%
Switzerland 31,131 of 461,128 = 6·75%
Spain 291,008 of 4,826,516 = 6·03%
India 333,255 of 5,774,133 = 5·77%
Italy 236,989 of 4,620,718 = 5·13%
UK 295,889 of 6,772,602 = 4·37%
Germany 187,671 of 4,694,147 = 4·00%
Russia 537,210 of 15,161,152 = 3·54%
South Korea 12,121 of 1,105,719 = 1·10%
Taiwan 445 of 74,409 = 0·60%
New Zealand 1,504 of 311,121 = 0·48%
Australia 7,335 of 1,830,665 = 0·40%
Hong Kong 1,113 of 275,293 = 0·40%
It shows that COVID-19 is far from over, something that we here in New Zealand need to be reminded of as we begin to rebuild. Still, nearby Fiji is also COVID-19-free, so perhaps we can begin having some travel with them?
Tags: 2020, Aotearoa, Brazil, China, COVID-19, health, India, New Zealand, Russia, statistics Posted in China, India, New Zealand, Sweden | No Comments »
03.05.2020
Finally, a podcast (or is it a blogcast, since it’s on my blog?) where I’m not “reacting” to something that Olivia St Redfern has put on her Leisure Lounge series. Here are some musings about where we’re at, now we are at Level 3.
Some of my friends, especially my Natcoll students from 1999â2000, will tell you that I love doing impressions. They say Rory Bremner’s are shit hot and that mine are halfway there. It’s a regret that I haven’t been able to spring any of these on you. Don’t worry, I haven’t done any here. But one of these days âŠ
Perhaps the funniest Tweet about the safe delivery of the British PM and his fiancĂ©e’s son, for those of us who are Clint Eastwood fans:
Tags: 2020, Aotearoa, Bauer, Boris Johnson, China, Chinese Communist Party, COVID-19, Facebook, family, film, globalization, health, Hong Kong, humour, innovation, neoliberalism, New Zealand, podcast, politics, racism, social media, Sweden, Twitter, UK, USA, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in China, culture, France, globalization, Hong Kong, humour, New Zealand, politics, publishing, Sweden, UK, USA, Wellington | No Comments »
|