Some people like to sit on the sofa and eat Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. I roll my eyes at this because I’m very different: I like to read the Wall St. Journal’s Christopher Mims …while eating an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s on the sofa. This past weekend, Mr. Mims suggested companies may be reassessing where they source products, some even considering more domestic production. The motivation for this started a few years ago with the U.S.-China trade war, ...
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Six of the many unique religious gift ideas from Beatriz Ball. Make great heirloom presents for baby showers, baptisms, first communion, confirmation, graduation, birthdays, and holidays.All boxed for effortless gifting!
•Save precious mementos of your little one's first years in the exquisite BABY Peek-A-Boo Cross Oval Keepsake Box shown above. The lidded metal box features an embossed cross on the top and contains a "peek-a-boo" surprise--another cross--sculpted on the base ...
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Our job at Bridge is fighting for indie stores. A key indicator of our success is when we give your store more online orders. An important step in giving you more orders is: giving you more products online.
Good news: you have the Product Pass. This grants your business the power to sync with unlimited Product Syncing brands for free. This is the best way to fill your website with products.
Benefits:
The Pass allows you to sync with unlimited brands.
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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How are brands helping their stores--and themselves? They are telling retailers that Bridge is a sales solution for them. For example, Pampa Bay doubled its sales vs. last year on the Bridge platform. One way Pampa Bay increased its sales is by consistently promoting its Bridge service across various mediums. When one visits the Pampa Bay site, one can see the platforms the brand uses in the upper right-hand corner. We can see the brand uses Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Bridge. Pampa...
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Jim Collins, in his book BE 2.0, explains how purpose and mission are important to companies. To help explain this, he uses the metaphor of crossing a mountain range and seeing a star on the horizon. Your purpose is to reach the spot on the horizon below the star. The current mission is climbing up the mountain you’re on. The next mission is climbing up the next mountain and so forth in order to get closer to the spot on the horizon. You will have many missions, and may never ...
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We are pleased that we have once again been named one of 25 Gifted Retailers from across the country by Gifts and Decorative Accessories magazine. We were also named a Gifted Retailer in 2012 and nominated for an REA award for best specialty shop in 2018. Check out the January issue of the magazine and you will see that we are Retailer of the Month.
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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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Vietri, a premium designer of Italian home goods and a member of Bridge, was featured in ‘Garden & Gun’ magazine. Using our service, Vietri syncs 1,000+ products with its retailers’ online stores in real-time.
In an advertisement the designer ran in the issue, we were happy to see that forty-seven percent of the indie stores it highlighted use Bridge. Of the 30 stores listed, 14 use Bridge Store to more easily sell Vietri.
Join us from 11 - 5 at our Squirrel Hill location, 5873 Forbes Avenue. The Joseph Ribkoff representative will have the latest in denim fashions, along with matching tops and jackets.
* For every style of jeans tried on during the event, JR will donate $1 to the charity Dress for Success: https://dressforsuccess.org/
* For every purchase that includes JR denim, customers will receive a gift: a beautiful denim cross body bag (while quantities last).
* All pictures taken during the event ...
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I’d like to see publications across the country running stories like this.
Ps-The Times has a weekly shopping section in which it lists five products. Often the majority of items shown have a link suggesting the reader purchase the item at amazon.com. I’d like to see the Times update its reporting in this weekly article to suggest buying from indie stores.
I came across this 2012 HFN article about Bridge. In 2012, we had 40 stores using our e-commerce software. Today, we have more than 740. Thank you for helping us grow 18x in the last nine years :)
We’re pleased to see William-Wayne & Co. featured in the article. This NYC retail heirloom has been a client since 2001–before we even started Bridge or the Smart Products marketing service. They’re still a client today. Thank you William-Wayne & Co. for trusting with...
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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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Operating a website is expensive--not only because programmers are expensive, but because margins are smaller.
For 10 years, Bridge has encouraged stores to beef up spending in preparation for the e-commerce boom. It's easier to spend a little each year over many years than spend money in a panic. Money spent in haste often results in waste. As a reference, when traditional retailers tried to catch Amazon, they often failed in their scramble. Please recall Macy's buying the ...
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Six of the many unique religious gift ideas from Beatriz Ball. Make great heirloom presents for baby showers, baptisms, first communion, confirmation, graduation, birthdays, and holidays. All boxed for effortless gifting!
Save precious mementos of your little one's first years in the exquisite BABY Peek-A-Boo Cross Oval Keepsake Box shown above. The lidded metal box features an embossed cross on the top and contains a "peek-a-boo" surprise--another cross--sculpted on the base
For decades, brands have paid retailers to set up a display in the retailers' stores. Ralph Lauren's Polo, Nautica, Jimmy Choo, and other leading brands have paid department stores to set up displays and manage their brand appearance. This helps the brand and the stores increase sales.
As we all know, retail has gone digital. Thirty percent of retail sales are now online. What if there was a way for brands to sponsor displays like these physical ones but do so online? ...
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There are many e-commerce platforms from which to choose. A store owner can choose from more than 30 platforms including Bridge, Shopify, Big Commerce, and Big Cartel. Unfortunately, very few software providers are easy to set up and use. Most importantly, they may not improve retail sales. A store owner is surely mindful of increasing costs and wasting time on software.
Bridge, our e-commerce platform, helps more than 700 indie stores offer a website and bridal registry that...
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Online advertising is great for brands. It's bad for: indie stores.
Why? Before the Internet, there were few ways for brands to cut out stores. They may have an annual warehouse sale, but that was about it. Today, a customer visits a retailer website and looks at brand X. Or it visits brand X's site to do some research. The issue for indie stores: thanks to online advertising, now I'm being marketed to across the web. I'm reading news on the New York Post website and being encouraged to...
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The Times' John Herrman covers what it takes to go without Amazon.
Amazon has appeared to upset people across the spectrum, as "anticapitalist liberal college student[s] and...uber-capitalist conservative grandparents are both boycotting Amazon.”
Yet, Amazon is now so large that it's hard to escape its reach. Even the The New York Times' website is hosted by Amazon AWS services.
Your business has likely seen an e-commerce boom during the pandemic. The WSJ shares GroupM's forecast that e-commerce is here to stay and will be 25% of your business when the pandemic has faded in 4 years.
MyTotalRetail shares this:
"Where only a year ago we saw roughly 16 percent total penetration for e-commerce across sectors, we’ve now eclipsed 30 percent penetration, with certain categories meaningfully higher. This level of penetration represents a three-year to five-...
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