Kiwi sav in the city for SJP
IN case anyone needed another excuse for a drink, Invivo winemakers are teaming up with US actress and entrepreneur Sarah Jessica Parker to showcase their latest drop in a virtual tasting session this week.
Invivo co-founders Rob Cameron and Tim Lightbourne will host the event from their Te Kauwhata winery in Waikato on wine.com, with Parker tuning in from her home in New York.
The trio will be tasting their award-winning New Zealand sauvignon blanc and give viewers a sneak preview of the upcoming Invivo x SJP Rose´ .
Lightbourne said it was an opportunity to showcase the New Zealand wine industry to the biggest online wine retailer in the US market. He said sauvignon blanc was already worth $400 million in the US and was one of the fastest-growing varieties.
After collaborating with comedian and TV host Graham Norton in 2014, Invivo has been working with the Sex and the City actress since early last year.
Lightbourne said Parker had been closely involved in marketing and distributing the wine, joining the board of the company and promoting the product to her millions of social media followers, and didn’t take much convincing to agree to the virtual taste testing.
The launch of the SJP Invivo sauvignon blanc at a store on Madison Ave in New York had seen queues down the street, he said.
Equally, he was expecting thousands to tune in to the tasting at 11am on Wednesday New Zealand time, which is 7pm on the East Coast of the US, and 4pm on the Pacific Coast.
‘‘We’ve done many presentations, but this is the first virtual tasting we’ve ever done with her. We’re really excited for it. There will be literally thousands of people tuning in.
‘‘We’re not sure how long we won’t be able to travel internationally, so while the world is the way it is this is a great way to engage with our customers.’’
Lightbourne said in spite of the lockdown, wine lovers could look forward to a vintage crop from the 2020 harvest.
‘‘It was a really good crop, flavours were really good, and we’re up in terms of volume. We’re fortunate it was deemed an essential service by Government.’’
school popular clique. Yet just as popular kids peak in high school before falling off the map, influencers also fly impossibly high before crashing into the pastel prison walls. And it’s an ugly mess to scrape off.
That’s because, while it helps if you’re naturally vapid, it’s not the most essential trait a successful influencer requires. That trait is your ability to turn yourself seamlessly and in entirety from human into brand. At its heart, influencing is the conscious decision to live as a brand, to be a business wrapped up in a lifestyle and talked about like a celebrity.
Now, I know in the rosy glow of late stage capitalism that ‘‘becoming a brand’’ sounds as easy as it does sexy but it’s the Kardashian trap; anyone could be one, right? Well, no. Only one in a million can. In fact, most people find living as a brand to be an all-consuming, corrosive, catastrophic headf .... Most influencers step into a career of influencing assuming they can live as both brand and human simultaneously. A handful can, but most have to sit back and watch as their online brand cannibalises their real life. ‘‘At the start, I felt I’d be able to keep the two identities between my life and the brand separate,’’ says O’Connor. ‘‘But the lines definitely blurred. I found myself making decisions in life so I could present them in a certain way on the blog.’’
The most dramatic example happened in the same week she went viral after The Guardian featured her op-shopped outfits at her NZ
Fashion Week appearances. She snapped her Achilles tendon, resulting in hospitalisation and a year of not walking. ‘‘My first impulse was, What a great opportunity to demonstrate how you can hustle through life’s challenges!’’ She pauses. ‘‘There’s something so twisted about that... I saw it as a piece of branded content – this is how much it infiltrated my life.’’
Not only that, but instead of living your life then putting it on the Gram, you start to make decisions in your real life so you can then Gram them. O’Connor sighs, ‘‘it’s like your real life doesn’t exist beyond the brand any more’’.
The other side of living your life as a living, breathing, marketing meeting, is that it can also often fill you with self loathing. That’s what happened for Rachel Klaver. ‘‘I didn’t like how transactional I became in my relationships,’’ she sighs. ‘‘I looked at