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Sarah Gilbert
Portland, Oregon - http://www.cafemama.com

Sarah Gilbert is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union's Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. So she tried her hand at *setting* strategy, working for a number of exciting and under-discovered startups in various product management roles, all of which seemed to center around writing business plans and, yes, making spreadsheets. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now works for AOL and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.

Sarah Gilbert
Portland, Oregon - http://www.cafemama.com

Sarah Gilbert is a blogger by trade and a finance geek at heart. She cut her teeth on her first Excel spreadsheet full of financials at the tender age of 21, when she began her investment banking career in First Union's Loan Syndications group. She went on to get her MBA from Wharton, work at Merrill Lynch and fall in love with analyzing company strategy and endless rows of numbers. So she tried her hand at *setting* strategy, working for a number of exciting and under-discovered startups in various product management roles, all of which seemed to center around writing business plans and, yes, making spreadsheets. She got into blogging as a marketing strategy and loved it so, it took. She now works for AOL and blogs all day (and some of the night) long, with her little boys yanking at her elbow, in her beloved 1912 Portland home.

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

When Ben Curtis first hit the TV advertisement airwaves, I couldn't decide whether I was enchanted or annoyed. Personal computers were all the rage and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) was the sweetest apple on the PC tree. When the "Dell Dude" enthusiastically told his little friend, "Dude, you're getting a Dell!" -- weren't we all a little excited?

And, let's be honest, wasn't he -- and Dell -- trading on the unspoken currency of the pot-smoking twang in his voice? It was hilarious, this college kid computer cheerleader. Unfortunately, hilarity equaled truth. In 2003 (right around the time he was phased out by the four cute Dell interns -- which is a whole different story) Curtis was busted for buying a very small amount of pot. "For personal use."

It was hardly the criminal arrest of the century (probably not even of that night in New York), it marked the end of Curtis' career with Dell. It didn't signal the end of his notoriety, however; he was given some coverage late last year for his bartending gig at Tortilla Flats, a popular financial district eatery in New York. The story goes that he makes great tips from fans of his former alter ego, and he's often asked to say his money line. He even dressed up as the Dell Dude for Halloween.

Who wants to bet we'll see him in an indie flick before too long?

Read the entire series

This post is part of a series on celebrity spokespeople who ended up doing serious harm to the brands they were hired to promote, or vice versa. See how we rank the 20 top spokesperson fiascos.

When the Milk Processor Education Campaign hired the Olsen twins for its "Got Milk?" campaign, they though they were buying into the stars' wholesome image. But even from the start, the muttering began. Why was Ashley wearing a t-shirt with an image from the Velvet Underground album famous for celebrating drug use and sadomasochism? Aren't the Olsen Twins' short statures counter to the claims that milk builds strong bones? (The MPEC insisted that teens looked up to the Olsen twins, no matter how short they are.)

And then there was the controversy they really should have seen coming when they dressed up the ultra-mini Mary-Kate for the photo shoot. Two months after the magazine campaign hit the newsstands, Mary-Kate was checked into an eating disorder treatment facility. She not only didn't 'get milk?"; she didn't 'get' any kind of food.

Adding irony to the PR debacle was the statement made by the twins at the time of the campaign launch, that "we want to help make sure our fans are healthy like us." If "healthy" describes Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, and millions of their fans are planning to follow their dietary guidelines, well, the milk industry is in for some trouble.

Read the entire series

This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.

Johnnie Bryan Hunt, eponymous founder of J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT), was, like so many Depression-era children, a jack-of-many-trades. He picked cotton, harvested grain, sold lumber, auctioned livestock, sold lawn sod, and drove a truck. He was a handy soul, inventing a rice hull press and designing a unique poultry truck.

It was the rice hulls that would be the start of J.B. Hunt. J.B. came up with the concept of using rice hulls for chicken bedding. He and a partner used the rice hull business as seed money to buy five trucks and seven trailers and in 1969 started J.B. Hunt Transport. Today the company operates 11,000 trucks and about 47,000 trailers and containers, though its founder died in 2006 -- in time to see his little transport business become the largest publicly-traded trucking company in the world.

It's fitting that J.B. Hunt, which made its start on the profit earned from chicken farmers, should be based in rural Arkansas -- the land of poultry. Lowell, Arkansas is a tiny town, made up of only about 5,000 residents, so J.B. Hunt is a big force. With 16,000 employees, the company could triple the town's size based on its payroll alone.

Be sure to check out more Big Company, Small Town posts.

This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.

Like most big companies located in small towns, Tyson Foods (NYSE: TSN) has a delightfully quirky origin. John Tyson, owner of a battered truck and 500 chickens, opportunist, and debtor in the Depression-era 1930s struck an idea that probably seemed like folly to his neighbors: he'd deliver chickens to Chicago and Kansas City, where they'd get more money.

I'm sure for every story like Tyson's, there were 100 that didn't turn out so auspiciously. But in this tale, the hero comes back to his little Arkansas hometown with a profit and pays off his debts. He keeps on raising and selling birds in points north, eventually devising a plan to keep more of the profits by "vertically integrating" (I'll bet dollars-to-doughnuts he didn't call it that) and incubating his own chicks instead of buying them from a hatchery, as well as milling his own feed instead of buying it from a feed store.

This wasn't the end of Tyson's forethought. He bought a broiler farm in Springdale, Arkansas (beginning the company's history in that town) and started to cross-breed birds designed for meat production, instead of using heritage (or "pedigree") breeds.

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

How is this for a post-op? "The fashions were too forward," said apparel industry analyst Kurt Barnard. Merry-Go-Round was a huge clothing chain targeted at teens and young adults, one in which (I couldn't make this up folks) my best friend in high school worked, gaining her great respect amongst the shopping-obsessed teens we were.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Merry-Go-Round was the darling of Wall Street and the suburbs where Jessica sold $70 rayon shirts for minimum wage plus commission. Its 536 stores comprised Merry-Go-Round, Dejaiz, Cignal, and Chess King, the latter an acquisition made a few years before its demise. One blogger called the apparel "faux upscale" and wrote of the chain's merchandise, "the cheesiest, sleaziest, ugliest and most eye-searing '80s clothes you could possibly find. Velcro closures? Check. Mesh designs? Check. Excessive use of leather? Check. Odd-colored thick v-neck sweater vests? Check."

Sadly, the mid-nineties teen did not want to wear v-neck sweater vests, mesh, or paisley rayon blouses. According to the New York Times, the 1990s teen wanted ripped jeans from Wal-Mart. The company had expanded too fast, too furious, changing merchandising strategies so frequently that its edgy consumers couldn't keep up. The business was so overtly trendy it tipped over the edge. Merry-Go-Round filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1994, but couldn't stay afloat and liquidated all its assets in 1996 when its chief backer, Fidelity Management, pulled its support.

The music stopped for Merry-Go-Round, and all the mesh-covered horsies fell off. None of the children, it seems, cried.

This post is part of a series on some of the most memorable companies that have disappeared.

Paine Webber was never the biggest brokerage on Wall Street; the title of top dog was held throughout the years by its rivals, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, E.F. Hutton, Kidder Peabody, Bear Stearns, Salomon Brothers. But it was part of the solid middle, the proud family firms that began to boom in the early decades of the 20th century, many before the Great Depression, and survived for nearly 100 years.

Paine Webber was founded in 1880 by William Alfred Paine and Wallace G. Webber. The firm expanded slowly in the latter part of the 19th century and by 1930 had expanded to 30 branch offices in 25 cities through the Northeast and Midwest United States. When Paine died in September 1929, his son Stephen had become a partner in the firm, maintaining the family connection. Unfortunately, Stephen got the firm mixed up in a securities fraud case involving Canadian investment trusts in the late 1930s, ending up with his securities license revoked and his firm's proud family name in the dirt.

The firm eventually recovered from the ignomy, and in 1963 moved its headquarter offices to New York City. Throughout the next few decades, it expanded through acquisitions in the Northeast and Southeast U.S. Unfortunately, Paine Webber was a follower of market trends, and in the late 1970s when it became vogue for brokerages and investment banks to combine forces, it bought Blyth Eastman Dillon. The merger turned out to be disastrous, as the company was not prepared for the immediately following bull retail market. Their systems could not support the thousands upon thousands of trades, and the company almost broke under the pressure.

• The keffiyeh is an ancient traditional headdress worn by men, and is most connected to the Bedouins. While the keffiyeh was worn by both Yasser Arafat and Che Guevara, it was also worn by bohemian American girls in the 1980s.
• Critics of the keffiyeh's symbolism point to its connection with Palestinians and Fatah. However, Palestinians themselves wear the headdresses no matter what their party affiliation or political leanings.
• Arabs are not all terrorists. In fact, most Arabs are not terrorists. Connecting an ancient traditional garment worn by millions across dozens of countries to a tiny (no matter how awful) faction of criminals seems racist.
• Rachael Ray is not wearing a keffiyeh in this picture. She is wearing a paisley scarf with a fringe, selected by her stylist. Honestly, I don't think it looks great on her, but what do I know.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

In the suburban landscape littered with big-box retailers, it is no secret which are the favorites of the Friday morning housewives, the Saturday afternoon family shoppers. These are the stores so formidable that families can often be spotted pushing two carts to haul their weekly stock of everything from boxed wine and board books to T-shirts and toilet paper. And Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) and Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) are the very exemplification of our Battle of the Brands showdown: for most of you, it's either one or the other, never both. In the world of bargain retail megastores, loyalties run deep.

And naturally, both Wal-Mart and Target are forever trying to move in on each others' turf. While Target has always been known for its partnerships with cutting-edge fashion icons (regular shoppers often call it "Tar-jay," with a French accent, though the corporation is firmly rooted in the American Midwest), Wal-Mart has been known for tripping over its own fashion foot. Wal-Mart has emphasized its ability to deliver every single last thing to its customers (from banking to bebop to "green" coffee).

This year has marked a few nuances to the two companies' strategies. Target has been wooing upper-middle-income shoppers who are now looking for better values, with a rumored experiment with high-end cosmetics, a refinement of its furniture offerings, and a focus on labeling foods so consumers will feel more secure purchasing its fresh groceries.

This post is part of our Battle of the Brands feature. Let us know which brand you prefer, and check out other Battle of the Brands posts.

For every time in your adult life, there is a lifestyle store to go along with it. IKEA is your freshman year in college, your first job, the apartment, you share with three strangers you met on Craigslist. Crate & Barrel is growing up: housewarming gifts, engagement parties, wedding registries, dinner parties. At IKEA, you can very well imagine arguing over who does dishes; with Crate & Barrel, you suspect a maid should be doing them (or at the very least, a whisper-quiet stainless steel dishwasher).

The two stores, too, are redolent of the cultures that incubated them. IKEA is Scandinavian, cool and spare and with the timeless efficiency and modernity of the Swedes. Crate and Barrel, on the other hand, was started in Chicago by a couple who had just returned from a European honeymoon; it reflects the penchant of well-to-do Americans to catch up every imported fad and embrace it as their own. So while Crate & Barrel's style hops from Japan to Tuscany to Providence and never seems to settle on a single influence, IKEA's is constant, playful, deliberate.

Like any lover of food, good company, and pretty glassware of moderate means, I have gone through both the IKEA and Crate & Barrel phases, and come through the end of them and settled back again on IKEA. I appreciate its constancy and wide selection, and especially its focus on children (as it turns out, the love-and-marriage set often ends up having little ones who quickly break the dozen old-fashioned glasses, the heavy water pitcher, the handsome oversized plates); I like that I can still find some of the same forks I purchased 10 years ago when I was in my first-job stage. The way I think about it, Crate & Barrel is the wedding, but IKEA is the marriage -- the lifestyle store that you can live with when the honeymoon is a distant memory.

Vote in our poll for IKEA or Crate & Barrel as your preferred brand, and let us know in the comments why you love it.