Stores and brands sometimes ask us: How does Bridge compare to Faire?
I thought we'd compare the two service providers.
Similarities: Bridge & Faire
Audience. Both service the retail industry. In particular, both service brands and retailers. Bridge also services sales reps, and Faire tries to steer clear of them--which is one reason reps don't like Faire much.
Delivery method. Both are online platforms.
Service offered. Faire is a wholesale marketplace. It
This past weekend on the way to Florida to visit my brothers, I read about Squarespace’s advertising history. (Read the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/business/how-did-squarespace-know-podcasts-would-get-this-big.html). In 2009, Anthony Casalena, the founder of Squarespace, paid $20,000 to advertise on a tech podcast. While that was a lot for a small, young company (Casalena had started his business just six years earlier in a dorm room in 2003), Casalena said the ...
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George Lois, the famous advertising maven, writes in Damn Good Advice that he doesn’t create an advertising campaign as much as he discovers one. He pulls it out of the air and captures it. He shares that Michelangelo said that a sculpture is imprisoned in a block of marble, and only a great sculpture can free it.
I view Bridge in a similar way. We’re not creating the software—we’re discovering it. Our methods for operating an online store were bound to...
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Happy to see Ivystone present Beatriz Ball in a larger footprint this Dallas show. The display feels spacious and regal. Congrats our advertising partner Beatriz Ball :)
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Scott Galloway, an NYU marketing professor and soon-to-be CNN host, suggests that when we assess a market, we start by asking how much one's experience using the service has changed in the past few decades. For example, when you go to your doctor’s office, if you were to spin around and pretend it’s 1990, how different is your experience today vs. 30 years ago? Scott often critiques doctors' offices, hospitals, and colleges because he believes they have not evolved enough in services...
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When I was 24-years old, a market research company sent me to Philadelphia to survey potential users about a new offering from General Electric Finance. Your first question may be: "Wait, Jason was once 24?" Your second may be: "GE had a consumer finance arm?" Yes, and yes. GE was once a conglomerate with its hands in many industries, from television to nuclear reactors to jet engines. GE, like Toshiba and Johnson & Johnson, has since shrunk. But the era of the ...
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During this holiday season, does one want to tell their family and friends that they sell knock offs--or that they help Main Street? I'd vote for the latter. Yet, a new service is trying to sell knock offs and eat in to retailers' lunches.
For the last few years, retailers have been having a hard time of it: they are increasingly circumvented by the brands. With the advent of the e-commerce websites and social media, brands are pitching their wares directly to consumers and ...
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Retailers have had a difficult time in recent years, as brands have increasingly circumvented them. With the advent of e-commerce websites and social media, brands are pitching their wares directly to consumers and cutting out retailers.
I’ve sometimes wondered: What if the factory decides to do the same and cut out the brands? If the retailers don’t like it, how will the brands? Some businesses are now trying this. Services like Italic allow a consumer to bypass...
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MEMBERSHIP SURGES 50% IN E-COMMERCE COMMUNITY Online Shopping Boom Drives Retail Industry to Team Up On Bridge
NEW YORK, NY, July 30, 2021 – Bridge, an e-commerce community, reported a record increase in membership as the pandemic continued to rattle the retail landscape. In the last 12 months, 275 retail stores joined Bridge, bringing the total membership to more than 826 stores—a 50% increase. ...
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I’m seeing a disturbing trend online. Stores are not sharing news and events on their websites. Instead, they are relying on Facebook (and Instagram, which it also owns) to perform this task. That’s like a customer coming into the physical store and the store manager saying: "Want our news and events? We don’t have it here. Go to the coffee shop next door—which will be filled with our competitors pitching to you."
For decades, brands have paid retailers to set up a display in the retailers' stores. Ralph Lauren's Polo, Nautica, Jimmy Choo, and other leading brands have paid department stores to set up displays and manage their brand appearance. This helps the brand and the stores increase sales.
As we all know, retail has gone digital. Thirty percent of retail sales are now online. What if there was a way for brands to sponsor displays like these physical ones but do so online? ...
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I noticed this ad for Big Ass Fans and was struck by the word “destroyer.” That’s a strong, powerful, memorable word. I wondered what wording we’d use if we were to run a full-page ad.
Large, well-funded entities are constantly seeking to swipe indie business—that’s aggression. We’re giving indies figurative swords, shields, and helmets to fight back.
Our full-page ad may state: “We Arm the Indies With Digital Weapons.&...
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Online advertising is great for brands. It's bad for: indie stores.
Why? Before the Internet, there were few ways for brands to cut out stores. They may have an annual warehouse sale, but that was about it. Today, a customer visits a retailer website and looks at brand X. Or it visits brand X's site to do some research. The issue for indie stores: thanks to online advertising, now I'm being marketed to across the web. I'm reading news on the New York Post website and being encouraged to...
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When reading about Bed Bath & Beyond's 20% off coupon, I learned that BBB was started in New Jersey, right around the corner, in 1971. The coupon, which first appeared for a 4th of July promotion in that late '90s, was an easy way to cut out other expensive advertising avenues.
Yiren Lu shares her experience of setting up a Shopify store in the New York Times magazine. Ms. Lu reports the setup process was easy, but her online Shopify store failed because it lacked marketing, aka eyeballs and orders. In her next article, I hope Ms. Lu tries Bridge. Bridge Store helps members fill the marketing component that Shopify is missing. When a store joins Bridge, Bridge instantly points hundreds of links to the store from other Bridge members, which Google sees and ...
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In the the December/January issue of Tableware Today, keep an eye out for the 'B' in the lower edge of the page. Three brands include the Bridge logo in their ads:
Your Bridge Store ranks highly in Google. As a test, try this: Google "Juliska Dinner Plate." In the results, you'll see two indie stores outperform Zola (a million-dollar funded online retailer) and Houzz (another well-funded, venture capital-backed player). The two indies stores do not have any venture capitalists or bankers funding them. They simply use: Bridge.
Thalia and Dahlia, an Ohio-based store, use Bridge. It ranks just below Saks Fifth Avenue--and it's just 3 ...
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Walmart is building an advertising platform and seeks to acquire entities like TikTok that have lots of eyeballs. It can advertise its own products as well as those from its third-party sellers.
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Part of my job is to review registry software. I ensure that it works well for retailers, registrants, and gift-givers (family and friends). I also assess whether it offers good value (price vs results).
A retailer recently shared with me that it uses the service MyRegistry.com. I reviewed the retailer's site and how a customer would make a registry purchase via MyRegistry.com. For privacy purposes, I changed the name of the store in the screenshots shown.
Material Possessions, a gift shop in Illinois, needed a quick solution to boost its online presence. With Amazon and Covid-19 nipping at indie stores' heels, stores need to quickly boost their online offering.
In just 24 hours, Material Possessions opened a Bridge account and is currently offering 15,000+ products for sale. The retailer can sell these products directly from its Bridge Store--or it can export the products and import them into its parent website (https://...
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