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  1. News from Us
  2. News from Members
  3. Events
  4. Press
  5. Dollars & Sense
  6. Updates
  7. Training Calendar
  8. Training Videos
  9. Jobs
+ Bridge in the News - Bridge in the News

87 Results:

October 11, 2023 Loyalty Programs
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Loyalty Programs
October 11, 2023
Perk-y
I recently read about a new loyalty program and wondered what we could learn from it. The founder of Eater and Resy, Ben Leventhal, has started Blackbird, a loyalty program service designed for indie restaurants, reports The New York Times (Read the article). Using the Blackbird app, a diner receives a perk for eating at a restaurant. The retailer sets tiers for which the user qualifies for the perk. For example, a restaurant, Nat’s on Bank in New York City, gives tier 1 customers ...
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October 4, 2023 A Date With Calendars 📆
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A Date With Calendars 📆
October 4, 2023
One of the main problems that businesses have is efficient use of time. A retailer (or brand or sales rep) seeks on a daily basis to manage their time and optimize results. (I was reminded of this while reading a The Wall St. Journal article about time management for the family.) Businesses use a variety of tools to manage and save time, including email, texting, and Zoom. 

Shop Local helps businesses in their quest to save time. We offer businesses a variety of services to help ...
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September 25, 2023 Simplicity ⚪️
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Simplicity ⚪️
September 25, 2023
When Apple launched its new iPhones this month, one of its most noteworthy updates was replacing its Lightning charging cable with a USB-C. This was not a voluntary move or extension of Steve Jobs’s love of simplicity. Apple changed it because the European Union required them to, according to Ben Cohen in The Wall St. Journal. Now, just about every mobile phone in the world (forget just little ol’ Europe) will have one charging solution (USB-C).

While this may seem logical, it ...
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September 19, 2023 Standards Matter
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Standards Matter
September 19, 2023
Google, Amazon, and an array of home appliance companies are teaming up to make it easier for you to dim your home’s lights and lock your front doors. They are adopting a standard called Matter that allows devices to communicate and work together, shares The Wall St. Journal. This allows a giant like Amazon, creator of Alexa devices and Ring doorbells, and Tuo, a small home device tech creator, to use the same platform yet keep their internal, proprietary code base. This standard is like a...
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September 10, 2023 Zero Sum Networks ⚔️
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Zero Sum Networks ⚔️
September 10, 2023
Andrew Chen shares in 'The Cold Start Problem' that many times, networks are competing in a zero-sum game. One network gets a customer to join their network and thereby not participate in another. For example, when a driver used Lyft instead of Uber, Uber, which Chen helped, lost. And it lost in two regards: Uber lost the revenue from the lost ride, and Lyft gained the revenue. Chen’s team was tasked with getting drivers to use all their time driving for Uber and thereby unraveling Lyft&...
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September 7, 2023 Love Those Margins 💖
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Love Those Margins 💖
September 7, 2023
Dating apps are launching higher-priced premium tiers, according to last week’s The Wall St. Journal. Hinge offers a new $50/month plan, and Tinder is launching a $500/month plan. The League already offers a $1,000 plan. These pricey plans take the sting out of Bumble’s $60/month plan.

Why are companies offering such plans? Because even if Tinder only gets 10% of users, that's millions. Plus, the profit and margins are likely higher for customers using these plans. A normal ...
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September 3, 2023 Jugaad’a Do What Jugaad’a Do 🚀
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Jugaad’a Do What Jugaad’a Do 🚀
September 3, 2023
India last month joined three other countries in the exclusive club that has put a craft on the moon. What’s unique about India’s accomplishment is that it did this at a fraction of what the U.S. spends on space exploration, shares Ben Cohen in The Wall St. Journal. While the U.S.’s NASA program has a $24b budget, India’s ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) budget is just $1.3b. India, which started its space program in 1963, is able to do more with less because of ...
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August 7, 2023 Cross Promotions: Seeing Green
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Cross Promotions: Seeing Green
August 7, 2023
I’m at Sweetgreen, a salad-focused restaurant, and I spotted this sticker on the preparation window.  Sweetgreen is promoting Sullivan Street Bakery. Why would it dare do that? I believe it’s because it benefits Sweetgreen: people use a brand’s name to quickly deduce information, such as quality and value. People know that Sullivan Street Bakery is good. And, even if they don’t know it, they know that a bakery provided it and that it’s not from some stale loaf....
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August 1, 2023 Hollywood Gets “Amazoned” 🤖
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Hollywood Gets “Amazoned” 🤖
August 1, 2023
Over the last three decades, Hollywood and many that rely on the entertainment industry have embraced ordering goods over Amazon.com.  Recap: Amazon is a technology company that often cuts costs by replacing humans with code and robots and bypasses local red tape like, um, taxes and labor rules.  Hollywood writers, producers, and ticket goers embraced a technology company that made their lives easier but often at the cost of others (aka retail workers). 

Today, technology is ...
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July 22, 2023 Pass the Apps 🍡
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Pass the Apps 🍡
July 22, 2023
Threads, a new Twitter-like service from Meta, the owner of Instagram, launched this month and almost immediately attracted 40m active daily users. The service’s growth has since stalled and now has just over 10m daily users, but that is still commendable.  The Wall Street Journal shared that this impressive launch was largely possible because Meta used its built-in network of one billion Instagram users. This user base helped it overcome the “cold start” problem of ...
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July 18, 2023 To Kill a Mockingbird
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To Kill a Mockingbird
July 18, 2023
Allbirds stock is down 95% since its November 2021 initial public offering. People may say the company launched the wrong products (did you buy one of their puffer jackets?) or tried to grow too quickly.  I believe there is a larger reason: you can’t scale a company by leading with an environmental message—which is Allbirds’s pitch. Consumers rank saving the planet as one of their least pressing concerns when making a purchase. The leading factors consumers look for when ...
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June 30, 2023 Dr. Fill 👨🏻‍⚕️
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Dr. Fill 👨🏻‍⚕️
June 30, 2023
Each April, I scramble to send my tax information to my accountant so I can file my taxes before April 15. Since my friends confide that they do the same, there are likely millions of people like us racing to prepare our taxes. What if there was a way to avoid this painful rush—and even the cost of it? The WSJ shares that Japan, New Zealand, and much of Europe get such relief. The countries prepare tax returns for their citizens using existing data, and the citizen just needs to review it,...
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June 30, 2023 Mission: Statements 🧨
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Mission: Statements 🧨
June 30, 2023
This past week, I read a mission statement from The Knot's corporate website (https://www.theknotww.com/). The statement included a paragraph and five principles. The paragraph describes what the parent company does. The statement says:

"We help couples around the world navigate and enjoy life’s biggest moments together. As a global company, our industry-leading websites, top-ranked mobile apps, and trusted resources provide the most sought-after information, connections, and ...
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June 8, 2023 Give Me a Goodbye Kiss 💋
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Give Me a Goodbye Kiss 💋
June 8, 2023
Six Flags is updating its theme parks to encourage families to spend more time there and visit more often, according to this past weekend’s The Wall St. Journal. The theme park's president, Jeffrey Siebert, says that the nightly fireworks show is what the industry calls a “kiss good night.” After park-goers have spent the day spending, they perceive the show as a free, post-purchase gift with no strings attached.  The fireworks thereby help the customer leave fulfilled and...
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June 2, 2023 Acquisition
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Acquisition
June 2, 2023
In Andrew Chen’s book The Cold Start Problem, he breaks the network effect into three parts: engagement, acquisition, and economize. At Shop Local, we rely on the network effect and its three parts. I feel that we’re succeeding in terms of engagement but need improvement in acquisition. 

Engagement
We use the 64,000 products in our Syncing service to engage 1,200 our retail clients. We email them new intros, price updates, archived items for these synced products. Once they ...
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May 26, 2023 Data, Filters, and Search Walk Into a Soundbar
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Data, Filters, and Search Walk Into a Soundbar
May 26, 2023
Apple announced last month that it's launching a new classical music app. What’s novel about the Apple Music Classical app is how it lets music fans more easily search thousands of variations of the same song. For example, let’s say you want to find a Johann Sebastian Bach song. Over the past 300 years, many musicians have done ‘covers’ of his works, and there are variations by conductor, music, year, etc., thereby producing thousands of variations. Existing software ...
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May 15, 2023 We Got Sole 🩴
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We Got Sole 🩴
May 15, 2023
About 15 years ago, I bought a pair of Crocs sandals in Myrtle Beach, SC. Not only were they hot pink, but the insole was traffic cone orange. My buddies hated them, but oddly others loved them. The sandals were affordable (maybe $20), comfortable, and a conversation starter.

According to last week’s The New York Times' profile on Crocs, I’m one of tens of millions of happy Crocs owners. This happiness is profitable:
  • Crocs’ sales have almost doubled since 2019.
...
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May 9, 2023 Salsa-fy 🌮: The Time is Ripe for Efficiency
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Salsa-fy 🌮: The Time is Ripe for Efficiency
May 9, 2023
You've heard of Salsa-fy? It’s national, was started in Dallas, is used by 60,000 employees, and is used at more than 1,600 corporate locations. Salsa-fy helps businesses steer clear of trouble, offer the best value, and ensures profitability. You may interrupt me here and ask, “Jason, don’t you mean the software company Salesify?” No, I’m talking about the restaurant chain Chili’s and its approach to managing salsa, french fries, and its business.  ...
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March 2, 2023 Honoring Our Peers
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Honoring Our Peers
March 2, 2023
The founder of Juan Pollo Chicken, Albert Okura, passed away last week at the age of 71. Mr. Okura envisioned Juan Pollo, a fast food chain with 25 locations in Southern California, as a household name that would someday sell the most chicken in the world. He believed in this so much that he bought the site of the original McDonald’s restaurant, located in San Bernardino, CA, in 1998—not to turn it into a Juan Pollo restaurant but rather into a museum to honor his fast food industry....
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February 23, 2023 Save the Date 🗓️
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Save the Date 🗓️
February 23, 2023
When one thinks of shopping locally, some consider it an act of charity. One may pay more and get less selection. That’s not a recipe for success. In contrast, the world’s most successful retailers, Walmart and Amazon, operate on just the opposite principles: low prices and massive selection. When I’m in Walmart's Panama City Beach location, it’s so massive I feel like I’m in the Giants' stadium. Amazon sells 12m items on its website (350m if you count the third-...
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Next page

Press: Shop Local & Bridge in the News
Shop Local Merchants Rank Higher than MyRegistry.com and Shopify Merchants
Shop Local Merchants Rank Higher than MyRegistry.com and Shopify Merchants
September 2023

Shop Local Helps Indie Stores Rank on Page 1 of Google in 64% of States
Shop Local Helps Indie Stores Rank on Page 1 of Google in 64% of States
September 2023

Tableware Today: Free Shipping Pays Off
Tableware Today: Free Shipping Pays Off
March 2023

Bridge Helps Indie Stores Rank on Page 1 of Google in 76% of States
Bridge Helps Indie Stores Rank on Page 1 of Google in 76% of States
October 2022

HFN: Bridge Experiences Record Growth
HFN: Bridge Experiences Record Growth
August 2021

Press Release: Bridge Membership Surges 50%
Press Release: Bridge Membership Surges 50%
July 2021

Four Trade Publications Report on Bridge's Growth
Four Trade Publications Report on Bridge's Growth
July 2020

HFN Editor Praises Bridge
HFN Editor Praises Bridge
March 2020

Seminars Offer Strategies for Independent Stores
Seminars Offer Strategies for Independent Stores
January 2020

Tableware Today Article: Chart Your Future Before Big Tech Does
Tableware Today Article: Chart Your Future Before Big Tech Does
November 2019

HFN Publishes Jason Solarek's 'Letter to the Editor'
HFN Publishes Jason Solarek's 'Letter to the Editor'
May 2019

HFN Shares Juliska is Joining Bridge
HFN Shares Juliska is Joining Bridge
March 2018

...