First night

Yesterday night was the “First Night”. That means the first night of the year. It is a big thing in Boston. Although Orit has a light cold we went out to Boston Common. It was amazing. Something like “Yom Ha’hatzmaut” in Israel. Lots and Lots of people, everybody is happy to the roof (alcohol?) playing toy trumpets in your ears and shouting. In short – big party.
There were some ice sculptures of doves, lighthouse and sailors that were amazing and some other sculptures.
A very nice surprise was to discover that the T runs for free that night. I guess it is in order to reduce the number of drivers and thus the number of accidents (very dangerous day). Anyhow it is a welcome initiative.

We are planning to go north in a few weeks. I do not know where (its a surprise for my birthday) but I know is can reach -10 F so we probably need new clothes for that. We are considering buying some clothes of IceBreaker. That is a New Zealand based company that creates winter clothes out of Marino ship wool. The CEO and founder of the company flew a few months ago from New Zealand to present his company in one of the classes I had in Harvard Business School (entrepreneurial marketing). The story of the company is very interesting. This guy has a background in marketing. When he established his company, he decided to build it around a brand that he created. He invested over half of the initial seed money into marketing! Apparently he was right and was able to grow up to >$50M company in less then 10 years. That is amazing considering that this is a New Zealandic company creating clothes. The case we discussed in class was whether they should go to China or not. It was very interesting to listen to this guy and learn about his motivations and strategy.
Since we were in New Zealand and we are familiar with the marino wool (I actually cut some wool of a marino ship) and especially since we got some good recommendation (thank you Shirley and Gadi) we will probably try some of it ourselves.