I don’t own a car, yet I have a strange desire to read Dan Neil's car column each weekend in The Wall St. Journal. Why would someone who doesn’t own a car, won’t be buying one soon, and hasn’t owned one in 25 years read a car column? It's a mix of enjoying the design and technology of automobiles, wanting to know what Dwayne Johnson may be buying next, loving Dan’s witty writing style, and, confession, simply being 13-years old at heart. Cars are ...
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This past week, Amazon announced it was adding Grubhub delivery to its Prime subscription (Read the news about Amazon and Grubhub here). The goal of Amazon Prime (and other subscription services) is to make the subscription so pervasive that it's sticky. Don’t like Prime movies? Ok, but you love free Grubhub delivery. If you don’t need feature X and want to cancel, you realize you still need feature Y and keep paying for the subscription.
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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We’ve chatted about the importance of checklists. Checklists can be checklists literally as well as figuratively (i.e. software). Checklists help us order our thoughts and actions. Yet, the last step on each checklist should be: removing as many checklist steps as possible. This ironic strategy is necessary because steps inherently are friction, and friction is our enemy. We want to help our clients avoid the drag of clicks and thinking.
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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When I flew home yesterday from Charleston, while most people were seeking relief from their sunburns and reminiscing about their vacations, I was delving into The Wall St. Journal’s profile on Tracy Britt Cool, an ex- Berkshire Hathaway star. Mrs. Cool’s new company Kanbrick invests in businesses with $10m - $50m in revenue. What does Mrs. Cool look for when investing in a company? People and moats.
At Bridge, we’re reading Jim Collins’ Beyond ...
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In a recent NY Times article about working out, the author Christie Aschwanden gives readers tips on how to make working out more enjoyable. (Read the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/well/move/habits-motivation-exercise.html). In reading this, I saw many parallels between working out and helping our stores get their websites ‘in shape.’ The author encourages readers to not think of working out as exercise and instead think of it as "hanging out with friends...
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I think that Zola, an online provider of gift registries, may be harming local stores. Zola allows brides to pick things from any site, such as an indie store’s gift registry. Zola may then encourage the registrant to bypass that local store and use those gift funds with Zola. This is an issue because Zola has handled more than 650,000 registries, and its revenue is estimated to be $130m. Millions of dollars may have been diverted away from indie, brick-and-mortar stores to Zola&rsquo...
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Watch this video to learn five proven steps to grow web sales. Join me and Gina Thesing from Ivystone as we pull back the curtain on industry trends and delve in to solutions indie stores are using each day.
Webinar includes:
Five key steps that a store must take.
A homework check list that you can tailor to your store.
Is Amazon’s logo a 'smile' or a hidden strategy? Jason Solarek proposes that the smile is its business plan. The ‘smile’ is actually a representation of how the company skips most players in the retail chain.
Offering products that make people smile is a winning strategy. RetailDive shares that leading shoe brands Vans and Adidas are running with this strategy. Adidas recently offered Lego and Meissen shoes, and Vans offers shoes inspired by local businesses from across the country.
The sales of these shoes can be minimal, yet the effort is a marketing gold because its gets free press mentions and this helps the brand's halo.
Vans' Zabars shoes are part of a larger Vans campaign that ...
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A product starts in a factory. Then, the goal is get it through the sales funnel. What steps does it go through en route to the consumer? In the drawing shown, the dots represent steps along the way.
When a product travels through the Amazon arc, it skips many steps that are important for consumer safety, the lives of working people in the retail industry, and local communities. We realize its smile logo may actually be a visual representation of the safeguards and ...
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These days, ugly Amazon warehouses are beating up pretty retail stores. Many stores in 2020 had record online sales that made up 40% or more of revenue, but they are struggling because they had to bear the burden of retail stores. Retail stores cost more per square foot to rent, furnish, and maintain. They also cost more to staff. A warehouse person need not be a people person and a snazzy dresser; they can exhibit anger management issues and ...
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Game on for family entertaining! Enjoy a little friendly competition with Backgammon, a game of strategy, skill, and luck, that is a classic pastime. The Michael Aram Special Edition Backgammon Set will be a treasured piece of your game collection. Made of wood, black nickelplate, nickelplate, and suede, this board game will last generations. (Also available in a Luxury Marble version).
Stop in at Glassworks in Shadyside to check out this quality-made set.
When I was speaking with the team this week, I mentioned author Dan Roam’s strategy for convincing people to change their ways. He suggested leading with data (i.e. facts), which leads to a change in one’s thinking and beliefs, which will then change one’s actions—aka they will change their website to use Bridge.
Yet, we can’t "lead" with too many facts, because as the authors of the book Rethink point out, that is like ...
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New feature: you can now control expected delivery dates for products.
On your Details pages, your software outputs a date by which a customer can expect a product. Showing this date is a compelling strategy to get customers to order. As a reference, Amazon offers these expected delivery dates.
You can now change that date. For example, if today's date is May 1st, you can set the date to May 5th or May 15th.
You can edit this setting on the "General Settings" page under &...
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This week, Amazon launched its online pharmacy targeting the 3.8 billion prescriptions filled in the U.S. each year. Shares of major pharmacy chains dropped about 10% on the news. Amazon honed this weapon in its Seattle lab and is eagerly unleashing it on retail chains and mom-and-pop pharmacies.
Something struck me while reading this news: Does Amazon remind you of Covid-19? The similarities:
Amazons kills many businesses in industries it touches. Pharmacies are now worried