How a drawing on a bar napkin led to a software platform that processes trillions of calculations
April 15, 2024
In 2007, while sitting at the pub Moran’s with a beer, I drew a sketch on a napkin that would change our business. I drew a software model that would allow an indie store to instantly show (and sell) thousands of products online—without any labor. (The secret sauce: The respective brand would do the product update work for the merchants.) The immediate goal was to help my two retailers more efficiently load products onto their websites (and save me the boredom of doing it).
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Amazon and third-party delivery services have setup a “warehouse” outside the Astor Place USPS office. This is not a truck parking for five minutes. This a day-long, everyday occurrence. I’ve seen this same scene on a daily basis all around the city for the last three years.
This hurts local retailers. While the local businesses pay extra taxes to operate a store in southern Manhattan, it costs Amazon much less to park a delivery truck (permanently?), put ...
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What universal standards can teach us about simplicity regarding e-commerce platforms.
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).
Today’s Gen Z gift registrants want to do everything online, often on their iPhone 14. They want to start a registry, add products, remove products, edit quantities, and view purchases. They don't want to call the store to do this.
In the adoption of digital tools, another trend is also at play: female shoppers are busier than before. Today, more women graduate from college than men. Women are increasingly doctors, CEOs, and world leaders. (Italy just welcomed its ...
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In the early 2000s, the board game Cranium became a hit. The game combined elements of Scrabble and Pictionary with the goal of helping more people enjoy playing a game. Richard Tait, who created Cranium and sold it to Hasbro in 2008 for $77.5m, passed away in July. Like Mr. Tait, I had been a paperboy, but he went beyond what I ever offered: he came up with a new service that sold breakfast sandwiches along his newspaper route. He increased profits and made customers happier. ...
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At Bridge, we make buying wedding gifts easy. Today’s Times covers buying a wedding online, which may start at $2,000. For people that grew up with an iPhone, it makes sense that more in-person purchases would be converted to online transactions.
I recently saw an advertisement for Windows 11 in Wired magazine. I thought: “Wow, finally something from Microsoft that someone can understand: a logical name for their software offering.” I recall a time when Microsoft had a confusing litany of software names including: NT, 98, 2000, Millennium (ME), Windows XP, and Vista--before finally relegating those clumsy names to the desktop recycle bin and adopting a simple, progressive number system. Apple has been naming its ...
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Scott Galloway, a business leader and NYU professor, shares that we're now spending over 4 hours a day on our mobile phones--up from just 20 minutes in 2010. (…I wrote part of this post on my iPhone.) What does this mean? Lots of opportunities for Amazon--as well as Facebook, Instagram, and other tech titans--to sell to us. Our cell phones are, in essence, 1,000 'buy buttons' in our pockets (or on our nightstands) that encourage us to buy stuff online, any time of the day.
Last February e-commerce company Shopify Inc. replaced the “Ottawa, Canada” dateline that began its press releases and earnings reports with a strange new one: “Internet, Everywhere.” The geographical shift came at the insistence of Shopify’s founder and chief executive officer, Tobi Lütke, who tends to view such matters through the prism of cold, hard logic. In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, he’d made the early, seemingly rash decision to...
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Is your car becoming a giant App Store?
Today’s WSJ shares how auto makers see your car as an iphone and want to grow via software sales. Stellantis reports that software will makeup $22b/year in sales in 2030 and its making that happen by hiring 3,000 programmers.
In a related article, we learn that GM seeks to make $80b/yr by 2030 via software sales.
The goal of these companies—and their announcements: raise their stock price (often to compete with ...
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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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In this 5 minute video, I explain how the registry business has changed over the last 20 years.
I share how Bridge has helped hundreds of indie stores in the U.S. soak up registry sales by adopting digital solutions that service their brides, registrants, and customers.
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August 29, 2019
August 29, 2019
Amazon and Chinese companies have teamed up to bypass Main Street and ship goods directly to doorsteps. This is hurting American manufacturing as well as local city governments. To accomplish this, they're misleading Americans by putting out press releases that cherry-pick statistics.
Follow these 3 steps to see the issue at hand:
1. In an Amazon press release last week, Amazon claimed:
"Independent third-party sellers – primarily small and medium-sized businesses – ...
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March 24, 2019
March 24, 2019
Happy to see Diane Seidleโs lastest strategy article in Tableware Today below. Speaking of hashtags, Bridge created its own โ$tagโ to similarly offer quick access to product info. Type a dollar symbol โ$โ before a SKU and the specific item will magically appear below your Chalk.
Tableware Today:
WHAT'S YOUR HASHTAG STRATEGY?
Just in case youโve been living off the grid for a year or more, a hashtag is simply a word or phrase behind a pound sign. When you use a hashtag that word or phrase becomes ...
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March 21, 2019
March 21, 2019
Happy to see Diane Seidleโs lastest strategy article in Tableware Today below. Speaking of hashtags, Bridge created its own โ$tagโ to similarly offer quick access to product info. Type a dollar symbol โ$โ before a SKU and the specific item will magically appear below your Chalk.
Tableware Today:
WHAT'S YOUR HASHTAG STRATEGY?
Just in case youโve been living off the grid for a year or more, a hashtag is simply a word or phrase behind a pound sign. When you use a hashtag that word or phrase becomes ...
Read More
June 22, 2018
June 22, 2018
Amazon gets you to buy more iPhones, lawn mowers, power washers, and movies by: first selling you bananas. Whole Foods, owned by Amazon, ropes you in with the promise of savings. These banana sales will translate down the road to a tighter grip on all of a consumersโ purchases and result in lost sales for all or most retailers including Best Buy, Home Depot, AutoZone, Nordstrom, and more.
This will likely result in job loss and lower tax revenue. That may put downward pressure on our ability ...
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February 11, 2018
February 11, 2018
A game-changing service often wins in two out of three areas: - Price - Quality - Time
Historically, when you adjust one of these variables, you negatively affect one of the others. For example, if you want a project to be done faster, you either reduce the quality or increase the price. When you want something cheaper, you often get it slower or reduce the quality.
A revolutionary service will change two or more of these factors with no noticeable impact on the other factors. For example, Uber ...
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January 15, 2018
January 15, 2018
Want your business to 'win' in 2018? Check out these predictions: