Cheap Doesn't Mean Good

Last week photographer Jonathan Beck Leder contacted A. Esteban and me to style a photo shoot he was preparing for Mexican-based magazine Baby Baby Baby. As you all know I am a big fan of the magazine so when A. sent me the news I got pretty excited.
Unfortunately, as it often happens in this business, time was very tight and we had less than 4 days to prepare everything: we are shooting tomorrow Wednesday and we were aware of the shoot on Friday. So we started to work and send emails as crazy to every single showroom in town hoping that because Baby Baby Baby is sister of Celeste magazine we wouldn't have any problem borrowing samples... sometimes we both are very optimistic!
In any case we got very good reviews with the showrooms after showing the magazine and people was very helpful... except for H&M!!!!

This is a story that is still making me and A. laugh...

When we sent the emails on Saturday there were people that, even though was Saturday and they should be enjoining a good weekend, answered our petitions and asked us for a pdf or a copy of the publication as they were not familiar with it. We scheduled some appointments to go by the showrooms as we had only one copy to show. Good PR's were interested in knowing new publications, I guess that's their job and they do it well. Like Marc Jacobs, where they were super nice with us and three people attended us but at the end it was impossible for them to lend us anything as now it's trunk shows time and there are not a lot of pieces available for shootings.

For some reason Jonathan wanted some cute pieces from H&M so we contacted their showroom. We sent them two emails and left them a couple of voice mails. Finally the person in charge answered me the phone and wasn't very helpful or nice, and asked me all kind of things that i tried to answer and send. As we didn't get an answer back, yes or not, we assumed they would be very busy and we didn't want to bother with more calls or emails. We decided to go there directly with our copy to show them as their only concern was that they didn't know the publication and couldn't lend pieces without have a very clear idea of who are they talking about. We understood that and thought it was very correct.

We arrived there and asked to see the person I spoke on the phone with. And to our soprprise this person didn't even show up or tell the receptionist to leave the copy or anything. They were super rude, and unhelpful and arrogant. A. and me left practically laughing as we couldn't believe we were being rejected by H&M... c'mon guys, H&M is a copy-cat and is being picky about where it publishes.. and they don't even dare to take a look to the magazine!... Prada answered our emails and calls, Marc Jacobs did as well, Diesel, Ohnetitel... and H&M did not. Good for them!