FOR BRANDS

Good news: Your brand has an easy solution to grow its sales network during the June trade shows. You're invited to display your ready made Shop Local poster. The poster contains:

• Text explaining the benefits of your Shop Local Product Syncing service
• Your logo
• Your slide
• The number of products you Sync with a retailer
• Two examples retailers
• Labor costs avoided by using the service
• Expected increase in sales
• A QR code leading to your Shop Local page

How to Get Your Free Poster:

• We'll handle it

This 31 page Times guide appeared this past weekend and is chockablock with great tips and brides’ personal experiences.  

While the guide doesn’t address the gift registry aspect, we’re sure it would suggest registering local 💌

I couldn’t find the full guide online, but this page has elements of it:

https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/wedding-guides

Tableware purchasing is tanking, shares the Wall St. Journal, partially due to notable price increases.  Prices are higher due to tariffs and the war. 
 

What can a store do to protect itself? 
Great news: While self-purchase tableware spending is down 25%, our same store gift registry sales for nearly 1,500 indie store are up 37%. We’re seeing that the wedding registry space is a safe harbor in this tumultuous industry. We invite all indie retailers to offer a powerful wedding

Spotted this t-shirt at a vintage shop in West Hollywood. It spoke to me because we believe that shopping local has meaning.  

Ironically, this shirt wasn’t for sale.

Elon Musk and his executive team often use a five-step process to approach a business issue. 

This formula, which is the focus of a new book by Tesla’s ex-president, Jon and McNiell, and a recent Wall St. Journal piece, is often referred to as the “Algorithm” and consists of:

1. Question every requirement.
2. Delete every possible step in a process.
3. Simplify and optimize.
4. Accelerate cycle time.
5. Automate. 

I thought about how this could improve our business, Shop Local. For example, if we

Thanks to the New York Tabletop Association for hosting the spring tabletop show at 41 Madison.  

Trivia: What is the best month for wedding registry sales for your store? Answer: Likely March, followed by April. 

We tabulated 2025 sales data from nearly 1,500 indie stores, and found that March through June and August through October are the peak months for wedding registry sales. The months with the lowest sales were November and December. 

I saw this ad on the subway for an AI service and it reminded me of our Product Syncing service.

FOR BRANDS

A Starbucks latte may be $6. When a brand Syncs with a retailer on Shop Local, it costs the brand just $5.88 per month. 

For $5.88, we do these seven things for our brand partner:

1. We sync the brand’s products to the retailer's Shop Local Store. All updates, including price changes and new introduction launches, happen in real time. The retailer never has to click “download” or “upload” for our Syncing service to work. It doesn’t

Today’s Wall St. Journal shares how AI tools like ChatGPT deliver results vs. traditional services like Google.  
 

Unlike Google, there is more focus on:

- FAQs

- Reviews

- Reddit and message boards

- Summaries

- Personal narratives

Read more:    

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-search-seo-ai-tactics

What good is emailing customers if your email won’t be read? It’s said that 75% of emails aren’t read, while in contrast, 95% of text messages are read—and read within minutes. Lesson: SMS text messages are the best way to communicate with customers.

Unlike other e-commerce providers, Shop Local has you covered: your Online Store account with us has built-in text messaging. You don’t need to pay more to activate it or pay to add a third-party app. Your Shop Local account sends SMS for a few

Read the full article: 

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/fast-free-shipping-retailers-fedex-ups-amazon-e6ba5967?st=dMM4o1

We'll be at the Dallas show Wednesday, June 24 and Thursday, June 25, 2026.  We'd love to meet and help you achieve your sales goals. 

Are you a brand or sales rep that uses Shop Local?
If so, we put together the following materials for you to share with your retailers. Please print these for use during the show:

1. Explanation Materials

1. A flyer explaining the benefits of the Shop Local service: https://bridge.myshoplocal.com/docs/BRC/Shop-Local-explanation-one-pager-2025-v3.pdf
2. Flyer

We’ll be at the AmericasMart Tuesday, June 9 - Friday, January 12, 2026. 

We'd love to meet and hear about your sales goals.

Are you a brand or sales rep?
If so, we put together the following materials for you to share with your retailers. Please print these for use during the show:

1. Explanation Materials

1. A flyer explaining the benefits of the Shop Local service:  https://bridge.myshoplocal.com/docs/BRC/Shop-Local-explanation-one-pager-2025-v3.pdf
2. Flyer explaining the service for use in

Read the full article: https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/bloomingdales-department-stores-saks-bankruptcy-bf1801f9?st=B8EkkB

Thanks to ChatGPT for this amazing assessment of our business below. I asked it:

"Give me a high-level understanding of what Shop Local’s e-commerce platform is and why retailers and brands use it.

Explain what problem Shop Local exists to solve, who typically gets value from it, and what customers gain by using it. Focus on the business impact and real-world value.

Explain this simply, as if you were summarizing Shop Local to a decision maker who wants the "why" and the "so what" overview. Start

How does someone come up with an idea? A chart sharing their idea?

These are two drawings I made explaining our service. I converted these drawings into more "professional" charts.

I like the drawings, but I also like the simplicity of the line charts.

Are you a member at Costco? If so, what was your logic when joining?  You likely estimated how long it will take to recoup your annual membership fee investment.

Your math may resemble this:

• When you join Costco for $99/year, you may save 10%.
• You’ll get your fee back after spending $900, which would cost $1,000 elsewhere.
• Anything spent above that, and you’re getting a ‘free’ 10% off.

We do similar ROI math in other parts of our lives. A movie ticket now costs nearly $20. When I pay Netflix $20

A Michael Aram cocktail shaker is lauded as an item to help one enjoy their jet and yacht journeys in today’s Wall St. Journal.   

Read the full article: 

https://www.wsj.com/style/design/what-the-wealthy-want-in-their-private-jets-46b94ea0?st=o9pGJR