Founded in 1969, Graphic Image's core principles are: great value, great leather, great price. With leather sourced from the world’s finest tanneries (primarily in France and Italy), Graphic Image products are hand-made with full-grain leathers.
For classic books that touch the soul, a leather bound edition will be a keepsake for life, never to be put away and always out for friends to see. The children's books cover some of the most popular books of a generation and are instant ...
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The Wall Street Journal gives us an update on Amazon’s plans, ranging from stores, hardware, health care, and logistics. The article shares that Amazon has closed all of its bookstores and 4-star stores.
Veselka, a famous Ukrainian restaurant on my block, shared this on their Instagram.
P.S. ~ I’m reading The Cold Start Problem, a book about network-based companies. It’s helping me understand how to help indie stores and brands connect online.
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How competitive techniques can help lure clients and grow a network.
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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I was inspired to read that what we do today as a software company can be traced back 42,000 years to a bone in a South African cave. I realized this after reading The Wall St. Journal’s review of ‘Empire of the Sum,’ a book about pocket calculators.
Here’s the lineage: We’re in the software business, which is a relative of the computer business, which is a relative of the pocket calculator business (just ask Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, who ...
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Happy National Book Lovers Day! We love books and show it with this keepsake tray. Find one that expresses you, there are over 65 to pick from.
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Cucina Fresca, meaning Tuscan Kitchen in Italian, is inspired by the Tuscan landscape: the warm color of wheat, the rich red earth, the fresh greens of nature, the soft creams and whites of clouds, and the cool blues of skies and streams. The classic shapes are reminiscent of 14th-century pottery, and the lush glazes and raw terra cotta edges honor the essence of Tuscany. Stop by Glassworks to get a rustic, handcrafted authenticity to your table!
Thanks to Susan Gravely for a wonderful event ...
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How technology hurts the entertainment industry just like Amazon hurts the retail industry.
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).
Brighten up your home with a touch of Sicilian tradition by VIETRI. Sicily has a tradition dating back generations of displaying female and white sculptural heads, and they are often used as planters on doorsteps, porches, and balconies. No matter the placement, these handcrafted Sicilian Heads are sure to be a conversation starter. There are 7 different styles to choose from. Stop in to see our selection.
Join us for an irresistibly Italian experience with VIETRI's Susan Gravely! She will be...
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Many of our graphics start as sketches. In this example, I drew a sketch of what we need to show brands and sales reps. We need to communicate visually that their showroom products need to be displayed on their retailer’s website.
I started with a sketch on a Times newspaper page, and then reproduced that in Apple’s Pages program. Pages is a bare-bones program that can help one make visual diagrams. (Photoshop is my preferred program for visual projects.)
What Threads can teach us about leveraging our existing network when launching a new service.
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 acquiring ...
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In celebration of vietri’s 40th anniversary, Susan Gravely, vietri Founder and CEO, has written a memoir and a cookbook.The 240-page book features 52 recipes straight from the kitchens of Susan’s dearest Italian friends. In addition to these treasured family recipes, each chapter tells the story of how Susan met each friend and the meals and memories they have shared together over the years. The book also includes glimpses into these friends’ beautiful Italian homes and gardens...
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We’ve been tracking brands that try to bypass stores, from Nike to some tabletop brands that will go unnamed. While Nike has backtracked from cutting out stores, Levi’s continues on the path shares this weekend’s The Wall St. Journal.
The last fifteen years have been marked by brands investing in their websites, sucking up customers via Facebook and Google ads, and bypassing their stores.
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How pre-populating information saves clients time and speeds them along a process.
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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Here at Shop Local, we’ve seen brands try to cut out indie stores. We’ve seen big-name companies close accounts in good standing and raise minimum annual purchase amounts in the toughest of times in order to cut out indie stores. Well, now some of these brands are back with hat in hand.
How we can acquire new prospects by leveraging our existing network of customers.
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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