Even the World’s Best Restaurant is Concentrating on E-commerce
Noma, the world-famous Copenhagen restaurant, is closing to concentrate on e-commerce. Excerpt from the Times:
“Noma will become a full-time food laboratory, developing new dishes and products for its e-commerce operation, Noma Projects, and the dining rooms will be open only for periodic pop-ups.”
This change supports the breath and power of e-commerce, and portends coming changes for our retail industry. It’s not that one can’t eke out a living owning a restaurant or retail shop, it’s that it’s just that: ekeing out a living. E-commerce has largely trimmed the ‘fat’ (read: normal profits) and thereby comforts of running a retail shop. For most, this means smaller margins and quite simply fewer days off and family vacations. For Noma, and the big well financed players, it’s a winner-take-all space.
Those with deep pockets or big brands (like Noma) can soak up the market which is increasingly digital. Smaller players with little or no digital arm or resources will fall by the wayside. This is where Bridge Shop Local comes in: we have the digital skills and software to help indies operate a powerful website. One trick to accomplishing this isn’t digital at all: it’s simply getting brands and their retailers to team up and share product data via our Product Syncing service. We don’t have Amazon’s technology or deep pockets, nor Noma’s big name, but we have each other. We have built a platform that leverages the ‘we’ and wins via collaboration.
All this collaboration sometimes makes me hungry—our members should all meet up at Noma before it closes next year.