Many years ago, as a new assistant at Lord & Taylor, the buyer cautioned me to not get too attached to people or merchandise. His wisdom was not cold-hearted, but a cautionary tale to keep emotional attachments in check. I was there to deliver strong financial results and if something wasn’t selling, I shouldn’t harp on it, but mark it down and move on. And, as far as work relationships were concerned, I should be a good coworker but not get attached to colleagues.
Designer Don Estabrooks just may have the most compelling flatware portfolio ever. The longtime Towle Silversmiths designer joined the company in the mid-’60s and has created hundreds of flatware patterns in an almost six-decade (and counting) tenure.
Perhaps his greatest achievement is Wave, which debuted in 2004 to rousing fanfare and has been at the top of the charts ever since. Chris Wile, another longstanding staffer (33 years), is president of Lifetime Brands/Metals (which owns ...
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Your Shop Local account offers a built-in solution to shop thousands of products. The Wholesale service combines the best features from wholesale marketplaces and buying on a brand’s site into a new service. Shop Local retailers can save time and money by using the Wholesale service.
The Ivy House, an indie retailer in Texas that has used our e-commerce software since 2015, uses the Wholesale service to save time and money. Laura May, the owner of The Ivy House, easily places...
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The Atlantic shares how Chinese factories have found a new way around U.S. retailers and into our homes: Chinese apps. SHEIN and other Chinese apps are bypassing Amazon to be a new leader in Chinese goods. In addition to Amazon, Target, Walmart, and indie shops now have a new group of digital competitors embedded in customers’ pockets.
Except from The Atlantic article:
MATERIAL WORLD
IS THIS HOW AMAZON ENDS?
An open embrace of cheap foreign products has helped ...
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Kate Spade New York tableware and accessories has for two decades held a singular spot on retail shelves and on customers’ tables thanks to a timeless charm and chic stylings. Even after 20 years, the fun, fresh, playfully sophisticated, and refreshingly original collections from Lenox occupy a unique niche in the tableware pantheon.
Kate Spade’s contribution to fashion cannot be understated. She became synonymous with fashionistas everywhere when she started her fashion ...
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TikTok and Amazon are battling in the retail space. TikTok wants to be a retailer, and Amazon wants to be more of an influencer platform. These two share the same goal: get users to share a product link, recommend the product, and get a cut of the sale, shares The Wall St. Journal.
This article and these companies speak to the power of affiliate marketing. One of Amazon’s long-standing secret growth weapons has been affiliate commissions, and influencers are a well-known ...
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Babcock Gifts celebrates its 50th birthday in 2024. The bridal registry and gift shop opened in 1972 as a partnership that included interior design. In 1974, with the exit of one partner, the store focused on antiques, gifts, and bridal registry. Over the next 42 years, there would be growth into two stores before downsizing to one. In 2016, ownership changed and the store moved one block down, where it continues to be a destination for bridal registry and gift-giving. With the constant doom and...
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How limited resources can motivate teams to accomplish goals and breed solutions.
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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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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How big data, filters, and search engines can help us create a better experience for our members.
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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It’s a formidable task, overseeing product development for all of Lenox’s flatware brands, which includes Lenox, Kate Spade, Oneida, Cambridge, Hampton Forge, Reed & Barton, and Gorham. Your tenures at Oneida and Bed Bath & Beyond, as the tabletop buyer, provide a solid foundation for this position.
Prior to Oneida, where I was senior product marketing manager when Lenox acquired us, I was at Bed Bath & Beyond for 12 years, most recently as the tabletop buyer. My whole ...
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New York magazine reports that shopping on Amazon is a mess. It’s got an antiquated interface and lots of spam results and reviews. It’s not a nice experience and you’re not sure what you’re buying.
Excerpt:
“There was the ’90s-retro e-commerce interface, which conceals a marketplace of literally millions of sellers, each scrapping for relevance, using Amazon as a sales channel for their own semi-independent businesses. It subjected ...
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How integrating a messaging service into our e-commerce platform can help us acquire new customers.
January 31, 2023
It takes a lot of people to build a bridge, but just two to tango. This applies to the analog world as well as the digital one. In the digital space, I'm using tango to refer to messaging between two people. I believe messaging is a service we can add to our offering to diversify how our company Shop Local grows.
Different Networks Require a Different Number of Users in a Group
Andrew Chen in The Cold Start Problem states that a key difference among network models is the required minimum ...
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While drinking Athletic, a non-alcoholic (fake!) beer, I noticed that its box proclaims that it gives back 2% to local trails. I love walking trails, and I thought: the next time I venture to have a sober night, I’ll pick up another box of Athletic. (Thanks, Athletic, for giving out $2.5m in trail grants.) Warby Parker gives a pair of eyeglasses for each pair bought (they've given 10m pairs!), while Bombas does this for socks. Bookshop.org gives a percent back to small ...
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In her new book ‘Quit,' Annie Duke shares that the best poker players only play 25% of the hands they are dealt, whereas others play 50%. Ms. Duke talks with Stewart Butterfield, the founder of a few startups, most recently Slack (which is an acronym, which I didn’t know). Slack wouldn’t have been born if Mr. Butterfield didn’t drop a video game company to start Slack. Likewise for Twitter which was born out of the failed blogging company Odeo. Ms. Duke's lesson: winners ...
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Scott Galloway, the NYU business professor and firebrand, pens a weekly, attention-grabbing article about business trends. In last week’s post, he noted the rise of the attention economy. (...Yes, my post is an attention-seeker writing about an attention-seeker writing about attention.) Comparing our current economy to those of the past, Mr. Galloway notes that today’s oil is time. He tracks the growth of digital companies like Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook, and TikTok that...
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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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When I was a kid, my mom instilled in me a lesson to always get paid for my work. When I went to mow a lawn or do my newspaper route, she’d remind me, “Be sure you get paid.” As an adult, these flashbacks are vivid like a scene from Citizen Kane—just swap out the Rosebud sled with my newspaper delivery bike. Today, this lesson still resonates when running Bridge. When calling a store that hasn’t paid its Bridge bill, I’m confident in asking ...
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When is the last time you received a Starbucks gift card? I’ve received them as holiday gifts, and I’ve given them to sales reps as thank you gifts. Starbucks gift cards, like their shops, are ubiquitous. They are almost as popular as gift cards from our nemesis: Amazon.com. Just about every month, a company offers me an Amazon gift card if I sign up for a service. WBGO, the local, Newark-based, non-profit radio station known for jazz, recently offered me an Amazon gift ...
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Last week, Amazon bought iRobot, the company that makes Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner, for $1.7b. Why? Yes, their 'Rosie from the Jetsons' has AI and is in your home (which is where Amazon wants to be), but the reason Amazon wants it is because customers want it. Which leads us to ask: Why do customers want Roomba? Because it does something that humans find annoying and hate doing: cleaning. Roomba has spotted the value that robots bring to the world and it's not simply being ...
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