Third Week Already?

Hello All,

I figure I should probably give a run down of what my actual duties are as an intern. Well my big summer project is to redo the press pages for Alchimie. Sound simple? It's not, there are 11 years of press coverage, over 350 individual pages. Each of these are saved as pdfs and to be uploaded through the website editor, they have to be converted to jpeg files, and then uploaded individually, on both the English site and the French site. Essentially, if I can do maybe 20 a day (40 uploads in actuality) without my mind going numb, its been a good day. It's not all terrible though, I am practically teaching myself about web design and it's actually pretty interesting, I think I might take a computer class sometime in the future.

Along the same lines as that part of the press project, I have to find and link images of every article in which Alchimie is mentioned in the blogosphere. Something I definitely learned from this internship, a blog world exists beyond tumblr and blogspot! I had heard of people who were professional bloggers but I never thought that blogs were really a very strong marketing tool. Lo and behold , blogs are just as influential as magazines and newspapers in relaying news, offering critiques,compliments, lifestyle advice, etc. Blogs are a huge deal and particularly in our beauty industry, it is crucial to receive great product reviews from famous bloggers. So I have to create the blog page of the Alchimie Forever website, less tedious than creating the main press pages , but still time consuming.

These projects will probably take me the whole summer, but they're pretty much on the back burner. My more recurring tasks include Daily Clippings, essentially a digest of current beauty news. Bi-weekly, I compile particularly relevant news from various beauty industry sources. I mostly use Women Wear Daily, my new favorite website/magazine. Want to know anything about the beauty, fashion, and fragrance industries(all wildly interesting), look there. It's a costly subscription, but it is more than worth it. You can't really call yourself an expert in any of these industries without knowing the stories that the website/magazine publishes. So in looking for good stories, I come across a lot of interesting information that is constantly beefing up my knowledge of the beauty and fashion industries which I'm super interested in.

I of course also do daily administrative tasks as they come up, usually from an email from either Kate or Ada, for example, putting together training manuals, filing billing statements, assessing inventory, things like that. Later in the summer we will also be doing some more event production which I hope to also be a part of. So I'm super excited.

Also, celebrity sightings: Mary Amos, a real housewife of DC came in the store for a facial the other day !

That's all for now, ttyl.

Nanette