Planet Business

The list: Twitter backfires

This week, it was Waitrose. Tomorrow, who knows? There is seemingly no end of companies trying and failing to promote their goods and services on Twitter.

1 Waitrose: Its invitation to finish the sentence I shop at Waitrose because… got a heap of jokey replies such as because I think food must automatically be better if it costs three times as much.

2 McDonalds:Its hashtag #McDStories was seized upon by those who wanted to unleash horror stories about vomiting customers and fingernails found in food.

3 Starbucks:Its #MyFrappuccino competition asked customers to show us what makes you proud to be British. The problem is, the tweet was sent by Starbucks Ireland.

4 Kenneth Cole:The worst hashtag marketing is the spontaneous kind that tastelessly occurs in the wake of tragedy. The fashion chain tweeted Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumour is they heard our new spring collection is available online

5 Qantas:Its downfall was #QantasLuxury, a campaign inviting customers to share their ideal flight. They did so with reference to a bitter industrial dispute happening at the airline at the time.

In numbers: Hamley's

252

Age of the famous Hamley’s toy shop on London’s Regent Street. It was originally called Noah’s Ark.

22

Number of toy shops owned by Hamley’s across Britain, Ireland, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

£60 million

Estimated price paid for Hamley’s by French company Groupe Ludendo, which operates some 300 toy shops across Europe. It started as a single Paris store in 1977.

The lexicon: Martingale

The term martingale may well be known to fans of probability theory and/or blackjack, but it was also the gambling philosophy of Kweku Adoboli, the former UBS trader accused of causing the largest unauthorised loss in the City of London’s financial trading history.

The principle behind the martingale system involves the gambler doubling his or her bet after each loss on the basis that eventually, some day, their luck will change. (Its also known as throwing good money after bad.)

So it’s a totally perfect system, then, as long as there are limitless funds to back it – and even UBS was going to notice a loss of €1.4 billion.

Image of the week

It’s been a long working day, capitalism. Why not put your head on the pillow and have a little snooze? Everything will be just the same when you wake up in the morning. This endearing graffiti advice is pictured on a fence surrounding the construction site of the new headquarters of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Yes, that’s right, the ECB is trading up. May it continue to bring us many coded statements on inflationary pressures. Photograph: Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters

Getting to know: Sophia Amoruso

The 28-year-old founder and chief executive of fashion e-tailer Nasty Gal has a net worth of $250 million, according to business magazine Forbes, which named the San Francisco native as one of their ones to watch, in other words a billionaire of the future. Nasty Gal began when Amoruso started buying and selling vintage clothes on eBay, made a packet through flipping items, and then set up her own site.

Four years later, its sales are on track to quadruple this year to $128 million and Amoruso recently raised funds of $40 million. While shes not counting the cash, she also turns her hand to designing her own range for the site.