Jim Shreve made Baccarat hip. Now, he and his longtime partner, Mark Brashear, along with Sally Burnside, the former Baccarat sales V.P., intend to do the same for DeVine Corp., the 32-year-old distributor of elite European brands. You're invited to the opening!
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Congrats to you all. This is very exciting. Tim, we’ve known each other since before you started DeVine Corp., 32 years ago. You’ve been looking for the right opportunity to retire. TIM ...
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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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How restaurants, hotels, and tableware brands are using loyalty programs--and what indie stores can learn from this.
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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Speaking volumes without uttering a sound, the story of a fierce apex predator is told through a powerful sculpture and dramatic painting. As the largest living cat species, a tiger needs no introduction nor embellishment and through the artists at Herend, the intensity, energy and beauty of this feline is exquisitely captured in porcelain.
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Nothing is more calming than the sound of the ocean, the smell of the salty air and a soft breeze blowing, which is why décor inspired by beach life continues to be a popular décor trend!
The marvelously versatile two-part Aruba Chip and Dip features a surface resembling rippling sands, and is ideal for serving iced shrimp and cocktail sauce or other shoreline favorites.
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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 easy to taste-test wine like a pro. People have been tasting wine for many years and making money as wine tasters for quite a few, as well. What do professional wine tasters know that you don’t? When it comes to tasting wine and knowing how to evaluate it for its qualities and noticing its faults, you’ll find it isn’t all that difficult. Professional wine tasters will have a better understanding of the history of the wine, the grape, and the chemistry behind it all ...
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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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We work hard each day, and likely don’t mind if others notice. We want others to see the ingenuity of our software. But what if that wasn’t the case? If you want an example of someone that got passed by, just ask Van Gogh. Yeah, thaaaaat world-famous, earless, impressionist artist whose work today graces the walls of countless museums. The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is currently running an exhibition showcasing how the world missed appreciating Van Gogh’s...
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Whenever I visit my 76-year-old mom in Myrtle Beach, SC, she picks me up and the oldies station is playing in her car. I’ve tried changing that dial, and one has a better chance of outmaneuvering tennis star Daniil Medvedev. I imagine the oldies music brings her back to her youth. I read a study that people’s favorite song is often when they were 17 years old. That’s right: the 'best songs’ may not be the best songs but rather simply be what you heard in ...
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Retail Dive reports on Amazon's lazy claims that it cares about stopping counterfeits. Counterfeiters on Amazon may steal a brand's product design, name, and product pictures. When a brand reports this to Amazon, Amazon often does: nothing.
This is an issue for American brands. For example:
A brands creates a product. The brand pays for research and development.
Brand may pay to have it made in America.
Brand takes professional pictures of the finished product.
In the movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon, who plays a handsome MIT janitor moonlighting as a math savant (can one say, “Hollywood career vehicle”?), woos a young lady (played by the actress Minnie Driver) by outmaneuvering a few competing, obnoxious cads. When Damon’s character gets the girl's telephone number, he proudly shows it to the other guys and boasts, with his South Boston access, “How 'bout ‘dem apples?” I imagine Tim Cook imitating this...
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The Brick report helps our company track our past and current progress. Our team can easily look back at the last 78 weeks and know what we did. (Most companies would be hard pressed to do this easily.) The Brick brings us together and keeps us on the same (web)page. Its success leads to me ask: “Could we have an approach that helps us look at our future?" I’ve sometimes thought about crafting a weekly 'Horizon Report' that would share what’s next for us.
Nothing is more calming than the sound of the ocean, the smell of the salty air and a soft breeze blowing, which is why décor inspired by beach life continues to be a popular décor trend!
The marvelously versatile two-part Aruba Chip and Dip features a surface resembling rippling sands, and is ideal for serving iced shrimp and cocktail sauce or other shoreline favorites.
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While eating a slice of coal-fired pizza at Arturo’s in Soho yesterday, and getting an occasional whiff of Houston Street garbage, I had to admit: I was at a loss for insight to share with my coworkers this week. Each week, I send out a motivational message to my team that precedes a summary of what they accomplished. We call this report the Brick report. This would be my seventy-second Brick introduction: What else could I say--and would they miss it if there was not an introduction...
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In a 2007 article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and an author, advocatedthat more hospitals use checklists. He cited many medical studies showing how checklists save lives (and money). Implementing one checklist, a hospital "…prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs." The startling part: the list was only five steps long! In other words, people don’t consistently follow...
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About two weeks ago in Charleston, SC, in spin class where I sounded like I was getting a hair transplant, I enjoyed being at once together with my friends in the class and yet competing with them. When they peddled harder and stood up, I wanted to also. Our competing didn't mean that there was one winner and everyone else lost. It wasn’t a zero-sum game. In that spin class, we all won. After that class, we all felt great. Competition is an ...
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Businesses like Walmart, Disney, and Discovery are bundling services and adding the “+” suffix to denote them (e.g. Disney+, Discovery+, W+, etc.). In a recent article in RetailDive, we learn that Walmart is giving its customers free, six-month trial Spotify accounts. I think W+ bundling services is smart. Last week, I compared running a gym to offering software. I spoke about bundling services with things that people like to increase their usage, such as work ...
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Peloton’s new CEO, Barry McCarthy, was recently interviewed in the New York Times (Read the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/business/dealbook/barry-mccarthy-interview-peloton.html). The authors asked Mr. McCarthy if he thought that everyone who needs a workout bike already had one. They questioned where else a company making stationary exercise bikes can go (…an ironic question for a bike product that literally can’t move). The Times wanted to know what ...
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A new trend in retail is vacant shops in urban neighborhoods being converted to small warehouses. In the East Village on 10th Street, we see on the left the new warehouse model; on the right we see a traditional retailer. For the ‘store’ on the left, the customer orders via their mobile phone and then does a pickup or gets a delivery.
I’m seeing more of these ‘zombie stores’ around the city. Just in the East Village, I’ve seen four: ...
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