When Prada sent its leather sandals down the Milan Fashion Week runway last year, the designs looked strikingly familiar, especially to anyone who grew up around India’s centuries-old Kolhapuri chappals.

The backlash was immediate. Critics accused the Italian luxury house of cultural appropriation, copying a heritage Indian craft without proper credit, and selling it at a price far removed from the artisans who’ve made Kolhapuri chappals for generations. The sandals sell for about $10 in India, while Prada’s current version is available for $995 on its website.

The controversy appears to echo numerous cultural appropriation scandals involving luxury retailers over the past decade.

Keep reading here.—JS

Sometimes you need a good old-fashioned American road trip. That’s especially true when you’re creating an ad to celebrate America.

As Coca-Cola’s creative team was crafting its campaign to commemorate America’s 250th birthday this year, they knew they would hit on themes of togetherness and optimism, but they needed some inspiration to land on the story. So they hit the road.

“Let’s just go out there and find the story,” Alex Ames, senior director of content and creative excellence at The Coca-Cola Company, told us. “They went out there and shot. The music and the lyrics came later, inspired by [the team’s] great American road trip.”

Keep reading here on Marketing Brew.—KM

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Emily Hosie led merchandising at TJX before founding overstock marketplace Rebel.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? I lead Rebel, where we take never-used returns and overstock from top retailers and turn them into the kind of deals that make you stop and think, “How can these prices be real?” We work with retailers to acquire returned and excess stock, often brand new, and resell it across 87 different categories like home, kitchen, wellness, baby, and more. Every product is quality checked, so what you’re getting is real value, not a gamble. At its heart, it’s a win-win: Shoppers save big, and retailers recover value from inventory that would otherwise sit unsold, or worse, end up in a landfill.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? That behind every “Wait, how is this such a deal?” moment is a pretty complex operation. We’ve built a tech system that handles everything from large-scale returns processing to inspecting every single item, to pricing it competitively before it ever goes live. It’s part retail, part supply chain, part tech, but day to day, it just feels like solving a lot of interesting problems and trying to make the experience amazing for customers.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? Rebel, without hesitation. We started processing returns at scale in baby gear and have grown into a multi-category platform across home, kitchen, and lifestyle. Seeing this expansion and growth has been really rewarding, but what’s stuck with me most is the impact. We’re now diverting over 50 million pounds of product from going to waste every year. That’s when it stops feeling like “just retail.”

Keep reading here.—EC

Learn why the one-of-a-kind “clienteling” messages are up 50% in the last year on the platform Endear.

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