Trail-blazer

A restaurant in China has a creative way of attracting customers.
The Xiangyang Courtyard in Xiangyang, Hubei province has a wuxia motif for the restaurant as well as its staff.
Wuxia is a genre of Chinese fiction focusing on the adventures of martial artists in ancient China, according to Wikipedia. Xiangyang opened in September with a show on martial arts, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reports, citing the Jimu News.
Xiangyang’s cooks and waiters also dress up as characters in the martial arts novel, The Legend of the Condor Heroes, written by the late Hong Kong wuxia novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung.
“We invited a professional performing troupe to teach our staff to play wuxia characters,” Zhu Xiujun, general manager of the restaurant, told SCMP. “We would like to strengthen our restaurant’s wuxia culture feature and improve the customer experience.”
Meanwhile, a Frenchman thought up an unusual advertising stunt that went viral on social media.
In July, entrepreneur Dagobert Renouf of Lille, France sold advertising space on the jacket he would wear for a special event on 25 October. Twenty-six mostly startup companies bought 800-euro to 1,600-euro prominent ad positions on his jacket.
Renouf looked like a mobile billboard bearing company logos when he wore the jacket on his wedding day. He raised 10,000 euros from the ads, covering the cost of his wedding, with an extra 2,300 euros as his profit.
“Big thanks to the 26 startups that helped us pay for our wedding. It was a beautiful day,” Renouf said in his post, SCMP reports.
A post on one social media platform about his wedding received 41,000 likes in 37 minutes, according to SCMP.
SCMP quoted one captivated netizen as commenting, “This is the most successful marketing initiative of 2025.”
With a gimmick that worked, Renouf is thinking of wearing another wedding jacket with 10 times the ad price, not that he is getting married again, according to SCMP.
