retail

Those stories and more here in our daily news roundup.

• The Municipality of Florence will award Suzy Menkes the Fiorino d'Oro — an award for contributions to the city — during the upcoming Pitti Uomo men's trade show. [WWD]
  

• If rumors are to be believed, Vogue has tapped Beyoncé for its March 2013 cover. [HuffPost Style]
  

• Over 100 retailers, including DVF, Helmut Lang, Marc Jacobs, and Tory Burch, are offering postholiday markdowns on select merchandise. [Racked]
  

• Many retailers hope their new promotions will make up for a lower-than-expected holiday shopping numbers. [WWD]
  

• In related news, Maison Martin Margiela has relaunched its website. [MMM]
  

• It's official: Terry Richardson is making a documentary about Lady Gaga. [Fashionista]
  

• Phillip Lim's pop-up store in Hong Kong, which opened its doors last week and will stay open for 10 months, is the brand's first temporary space in Asia. [3.1 Phillip Lim]

Photo courtesy of Maison Martin Margiela for H&M.

The social shopping trend has moved from the web to mobile, and now a new app is poised to help you shop and inspire you with suggestions and recommendations from others. Pose is meant to enhance your in-store shopping experience by allowing you to take photos of merchandise, recording pricing and location information. Then, share it with friends for feedback via email or social networking to get trusted opinions.

If you're looking for inspiration, Pose has you covered; continuously updated style feeds show popular items, the latest posted, and an editorially selected feed featuring "the finds of a handpicked group of exceedingly stylish shoppers."

Pose for iPhone is free to download; an Android app will be available soon.

With all of the extolling I've done for Google Goggles, it's surprising that I've waited so long to laud the capabilities of this app. But eBay's RedLaser is the perfect shopping companion for finding the best deal no matter where you are. Initially launched for last year's holiday season, the updated app is packed with new features and costs less than its previous $2 price tag.

To use the app, launch it and quickly scan an item's bar code. (If you were addicted to self-scanning everything in sight with an in-store price checker as a kid or in love with the self-checkout at the grocery store, this app is for you.) A list of stores that carry the product (both physical stores nearby and online retail outlets, even eBay results!) is displayed, along with quick price comparisons to help you find the best deal. Find out how else you can use RedLaser (spoiler: it has nothing to do with shopping), and how much it's gonna cost you, when you read more.

Holiday shopping is kicking into full swing this week, and with so many retailers offering Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, getting swept up in the shopping fun is easy. But before you check out or click Purchase, be sure to make sure you understand the return policy for your item.

Many stores, including tech giant Best Buy, implement special holiday return policies. Instead of Best Buy's standard 14-day return policy, for example, items purchased after Nov. 1 are returnable through January 31. BUT, this does not include computers, monitors, projectors, camcorders, digital cameras, and radar detectors, which are subject to the same 14-day return policy as always. Find out about Target's holiday return policy after the break.

After its initial launch over the Summer, rewards-based app Shopkick has just announced a new holiday program culminating in a grand prize of more than four million kickbucks to put toward a reward of your choosing. "The 12 Days of Kickmas" is a 12-day holiday sweepstakes that awards 12 different Shopkick users with prize packages.

To enter, shoppers should download the free Shopkick app for iPhone or Android and use it to check into a participating store upon entering. Shoppers will receive Kickbucks from participating stores like American Eagle, Best Buy, Target, and Macy's. Each check-in also warrants 50 entries into the sweepstakes, which starts today and ends on Christmas Eve. Winnings will total more than 31 million Kickbucks, which are redeemable for items from MP3 downloads to magazine subscriptions to big-ticket items like TVs.

I'm obsessed with the PopSugar Daily emails I find in my inbox each morning. Whether they're spotlighting a new product, a new trend, or a super sale, it's a great tool that helps me plan my extracurricular (read: shopping) activities. Similarly for locals, the new Daily Candy Stylish NYC Alerts app takes these tips on the road and uses your Android phone's GPS function to monitor your location, alerting you via a push notification when you're near a Daily Candy-approved sale or event.

Non-New Yorkers, don't worry, Daily Candy plans to build out the service to include its other cities soon.

Have you found a cool download-worthy treasure you'd like to share with the rest of us? Join the Download of the Day group, where you can submit your favorite downloads, apps, and widgets.

I'm smitten over the latest site trend: bookmarking and displaying collections of your favorite things in a beautiful, visually stimulating way. Pinterest is one such site, allowing users to create a category and post photos of clothing, products, books, or anything else to create a visually stimulating virtual inspiration board. You can browse pages by user or category. To make your own collage, upload photos directly onto the site, or use Pinterest's bookmarklet; just drag it onto your browser's toolbar and click it to "pin" any product to your board. There's also space to comment on each item. It's a simple idea but presented in such a stunning way — I'm in love!