We’ll be at the AmericasMart Tuesday, January 13 - Friday, July 16, 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: View explanation PDF here
2. Flyer explaining the service for use in showroom:  https://bridge.myshoplocal.com/docs/BRC/Show-

I picked up this cute flyer from the Locavore store on 6th Avenue.  

Locavore has a shop and prints a local shopping guidebook.  

How important is adding a picture to a couple's wedding registry?

Shop Local's research shows that registries with a couple's picture generated $482 more in sales than those without a picture—a 17% sales boost.

We reviewed 3,150 wedding registries from U.S.-based indie retailers with brick-and-mortar locations. We found these trends:

1.  When a registry has a picture of the couple/registrant, the average purchase was $55 more—a 9.5% sales boost (55 / 573).
2. Total purchases for a registry with a

Shop Local Is about building a community--sort of like building with Legos. We wondered what it would be like to create a Shop Local-inspired Lego set.  Grok gave us some examples.

(For some reason, Grok was very keen to use Batman Legos in mock ups.)

Lego bookshop set:

https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bookshop-10270

We're in the technology sector, and that is often about automating processes. Automating processes often involves reducing computer clicks.

Clicks = Delays and Labor Costs

The Wall St. Journal recently covered six decades of technological innovation, which extolled how technology would save users time and effort via various innovations, including the telephone, fax machine, and copying machine (my dad worked at Xerox!). While we don't make fax machines or copiers per se (sorry, Dad!), like these

The Wall St. Journal shared a series of responses to how AI will affect investing. Glenn Loveland’s response inspired me to pen this take for our retail industry:

“The future of registry sales isn’t about your physical store. It’s about your website. If you don’t use the best tech, someone else will.  The success of Zola and Amazon prove this.  They will further eat your lunch, profit, and resources you’d otherwise need for retirement.”

I predict 70% of wedding registry sales will be

I read about a WNBA t-shirt and it inspired this concept for our industry:

Small Business

Measure Us by Feats 

Not Square Feet 

This t-shirt design reminds me of our Bridge ethos poster. A few year ago, we made a poster with crossed out words. 

First read:
There are millions of indie stores in the world who don’t get to succeed online. They get ripped off by web designers and coders, pay more in local taxes than big tech companies, don’t have access to cheap money from Wall St. (

A pleasure to see many find French brands presented at the Business France exhibit, including Gien, our brand partner.

The exhibit, at 45 West 25th St, NYC, showcased more than 20 fine French providers of design, skin care, furniture, and clothing.

Many French brands use Shop Local's platform to grow their U.S. sales, including Gien, Raynaud, Couzon, Le Creuset, Deshoulieres, and Baccarat.

Explore more:

https://www.marketplace.businessfrance.fr/

I have exciting news: Members can save up to 45% on their monthly, flat-rate subscription fee with us. 

We’ll give members a discount for paying upfront for one, two, three, or four years. This is our best offer.

You can use your savings to grow your store in 2026, take a vacation (Paris or Patagonia?), and celebrate your hard work :)

There's a 100% guarantee that you'll save money. It's just up to you to enjoy this.

2026 is going to be your biggest year yet. 🥳

Details below.

Thank you.

Shop

This diagram shares how products are sold at wholesale, shipped, and sold at retail. Once at the retailer, the product is often sold in-store or online. The quicker the retailer makes a sale (whether it's online or in-store), the quicker the brand and sales rep receive a reorder. 

Sales funnel for in-store order:

1. Order: Retailer orders product at wholesale.
2. Ship: Brand ships product to retailer.
3. Arrival: Product arrives at retailer's store.
4. Display: Retailer displays item on shelf.
5. Sell: Retailer

A friend shared a meme image about the seven levels of watch wealth. This made me wonder what the seven levels of wedding registry wealth would be compared to watches. 

I also asked my colleagues to create their own registry wealth spectrums.  They came up with very clever metaphors! 
 

The 7 Levels of Wedding Registry Wealth

Jason: Watches

1. No watch: No registry. Your customers register at other retailers--giving them their business.   
2. Wall clock: Customers ask about a

Happy to see our partner Le Creuset's 100th anniversary celebrated in a store window on Rue du Marché in Geneva.

P.S. ~ Cool logo: the lid makes a zero in the "100."

Nice to see Mottahedeh, William Yeoward, and Christofle in this month's Garden & Gun issue.  These brands are clients that use our Syncing service.  Their products shown in the issue instantly appear in Synced retailers' Online Stores.

The CEO of Strava, the exercise tracking app, is trying to convert more users to paid members. Strava tries many different paths to boost usage and revenue, including helping members compete against each other. 

Michael Martin, the CEO, noted in a recent The Wall St. Journal article that working out can be lonely, and Strava seeks to fix this by building a community around exercise. (Yes, people will pay to not be lonely.) We have long said that working in retail--and online retail in

This week's news shared how Luckin Coffee, the Chinese coffee chain, requires all orders to be placed via a mobile phone. No barista will take your order. To me, this shows how even coffee is now a digital product. Software has eaten (sipped!) even the coffee market. This week's news cycle also shared that Starbucks is closing its standalone, mobile-led to-go stores. (It is keeping drive-in locations.) To me, this suggests divergent strategies: Luckin is leaning into digital and mobile, and

Last week at the trade show in Atlanta, I explained Shop Local to Dustin at Inedra, an organization that uses technology to support indie stores. In order to ensure he understood it, he explained my service back to me.  He said we’re like a sales funnel that sits over the retailer’s business. I liked this analogy and sketched it today over breakfast.  

While at the show I also explained to a friend  the steps a retailer often has to take to setup an online store. I sketched out

Spotted this sign in the Meatpacking District at a salon. 

The sign was made by this beauty brand: https://us.davines.com/

Thank you Davines and K & S Salon 🥳

Happy to see Smeg, our new brand partner, get a mention in the WSJ as a potential wedding registry gift to the rich and discerning:

https://www.wsj.com/style/fashion/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-wedding-gifts-17b25604?st=bh7C4J&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

While traveling recently,  I was drawn to this column’s prominent use of stats.  We learn that this cookbook author has: 88k Instagram followers, 27k TikTok followers, and 23k Substack subscribers. People are drawn to numbers because they suggest facts and can give a quick sense of importance, and easily make comparisons. A factor’s relevance may be hard to gauge and subjective, but social media helps by giving it a numeric value. Want a book deal? Think your writing style will appeal