On Monday morning he received a desperate call from Michael, who was national sales manager at L.A. Gear.

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He could scarcely wait to call his best friend, John Brewer, 53, a sales manager at L.A. Gear, who worked out of Houston.

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In 1992, the British designer Vivienne Westwood, who used to dress the Sex Pistols and once sold bondage gear out of a shop she ran with rock manager Malcolm McLaren, received an Order of the British Empire from the Queen.

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The media-modeling tool was kicked into high gear two years ago when Chad Jacoby, senior manager of Nissan's Business Intelligence Unit, used years of Nissan's consumer research to build a computer model comparing the relationship of each phase of their "purchase funnel"--from awareness to purchase consideration to a transaction--to the phase before it.

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