I have a friend who recently took a job with a respected women’s clothing retailer after 13 years of retirement. My friend, Leslie, a former school teacher, wanted to be of use and knew that retail was a great opportunity for seniors. She was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed her first week. She loved that the manager asked her to try on clothes she liked and then suggested outfits that would look good on her. Leslie even purchased a few of those suggestions, couture she never would have ...
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What the retail industry can learn from Google and Amazon teaming up on technology standards.
September 19, 2023
Google, Amazon, and an array of home appliance companies are teaming up to make it easier for you to dim your home’s lights and lock your front doors. They are adopting a standard called Matter that allows devices to communicate and work together, shares The Wall St. Journal. This allows a giant like Amazon, creator of Alexa devices and Ring doorbells, and Tuo, a small home device tech creator, to use the same platform yet keep their internal, proprietary code base. This standard is like a...
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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.
Bath & Body Works reduced the time it takes to make a bottle of soap from 90 days to 21, shares The Wall Street Journal. It also reduced the number of miles the parts travel from 13,000 miles to a just a handful of miles. Part of the solution: the company trimmed out China and Canada.
BBW was able to move production to the US largely due to robots and computers. In China, 50 people may work on a bottle. In the US, labor is too expensive. The company replaced the 40 people with...
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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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I am pleased to announce the Nicolette Mayer Collection is ready to sync products with authorized retailers. If this interests you, please continue reading and I'll share how to sync. Syncing products is free for your business. There is no charge. (The brand pays for this service.)
Nicolette Mayer Collection joins our stable of 112 premium brands that sync products with 1,200+ fine indie stores.
About Nicolette Mayer Collection
Produced by dedicated artisans in ...
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About Nicolette Mayer Collection
Produced by dedicated artisans in America, the Nicolette Mayer Collection offers over 1500 Art de la Table items. Nicolette Mayer is a lifestyle brand whose product categories include:
How we can bring clients together to build a larger network.
February 4, 2023
Economist Bent Flyvbjerg encourages us to find our “Lego” in his new book “How Big Things Get Done.” Mr. Flyvbjerg, whose new book is reviewed by Ben Cohen in this week’s The Wall Street Journal, says that most large projects that are completed successfully use a modular approach. Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:
“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big ...
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We are pleased to announce the Nicolette Mayer Collection is ready to sync products via Bridge's Product Syncing service.
Produced by dedicated artisans in America, the Nicolette Mayer Collection offers over 1500 Art de la Table items. Nicolette Mayer is a lifestyle brand whose product categories include:
Placemats,
Coasters,
Acrylic trays,
Dinner and Cocktail Napkins,
Murals,
Candles,
Candy Dishes,
Pillows.
Placemats are available in both round and rectangular ...
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Internet pioneer, Vint Cerf, made a big break through by drawing it on the back of an envelope in 1983. This story, shared in today’s The Wall Street Journal, hit home because I first drew the concept for Bridge’s Product Syncing solution on a napkin at a Chelsea bar in 2007. That concept now helps 1,100 indie shops sell 60k+ products from 100+ premium brands, including Le Creuset, Baccarat, and Versace. Since that drawing, I’ve become a big fan of drawing processes to ...
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Bridge has something that every store needs, but doesn’t really want: product data. We get stores to trust us that they need our product data for 64,000 products from 109 brands. They really don’t want the data—they want the sales from it. The data itself is worthless, but the sales from it are invaluable. Do you know who also has this issue? Funeral directors. Last week's Wall Street Journal shares that mortuaries are leveraging bonsai trees, setting up bouncy castles, ...
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Adam Sigel, who heads up sales at Savanna Bee’s indie stores, recently showed me his ‘business card:’ a piece of metal with a QR code on it. I scanned Adam’s QR code and my phone offered to place his contact information in my phone’s address book. This not only saved me time. Behind the scenes, the software allows Adam to see who clicks on his scanned data—one can’t do that with a traditional business card.
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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Hurray for Grandma’s China! They are hot and selling briskly once again.
“There was a long time when no one wanted to inherit Grandma’s prized wedding china, so valued she only busted them out for special occasions. Potential heirs dreaded the bequest thinking them fussy.” said Rebecca Malinsky of the Wall Street Journal. We agree with her.
But some new thinking has arrived recently, as people, especially young ones, are taking another look.
And they are thinking ...
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Marchesa for Lenox gets a shout-out in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal. The article shares show homebound people are treating themselves by using fine china more frequently.
Lenox will soon join the Smart Brand program.
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Today’s Wall Street Journal surveys niche social networks like Strava for fitness, BakeSpace for cooking, and Rate Your Music for music.
To this list I’d add: Bridge. Bridge is a niche social-media network serving the retail community. We connect thousands of businesses including brands, retailers, sales reps, publications, and trade groups.
The article shares people last year spent 57 billion hours on social networking and messaging apps via Android devices.
Wonder how prices are so low on Amazon? Yes, many items are stolen (at the time of purchase) or counterfeit, but thereโs another reason: theyโre bought after you buy them using stolen credit cards. In other words, theyโre stolen after the โlegitโ purchase. Recently, a retailer reported that it was being asked to ship Versace items to far off locations, only to have the credit card holder say it didnโt order them. They say their credit card was stolen. The reason the scammer ordered the goods ...
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January 6, 2019
January 6, 2019
Todayโs Times investigates commercial property valuations for the purpose of tax collection. The article suggests that brick-and-mortar retailers are gaming the system to unfairly reduce their property value and therefore pay local governments less in taxes. In Michigan, from 2013 to 2017, this may have cost local government $100 million.
While this a fair investigation to undertake, I ask the Times to investigate the harmful tax effects of millions of shoppers buying at Amazon. Should we be ...
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