How we helped the #1 gift and children's store in Louisiana's Acadiana area offer 11,585 products effortlessly.
August 14, 2024
We are pleased to announce that Caroline & Company has joined Shop Local to grow its online business. Serving the Acadiana area for 27 years, Caroline & Company offers gifts, children’s clothing, home decor, furnishings, and more.
By using their Shop Local Store, Caroline & Company saved $11,585 and 17 weeks in labor on website product maintenance. The store will expand its online collection of gifts and home decor through the Syncing service. ...
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How Store Owners Can Trade Wasted Labor Costs For a New Tesla Car
March 10, 2024
No one likes to pay for gas—just ask Tesla drivers. Chris Kornelis, a reporter for The Wall St. Journal, shares this week how he switched to a Tesla to save $100 a month ($1,200 a year!) on gas.
This story is important to us because if someone will pick a car to save $1,200 a year, we should be able to find what they need to save in order to pick Shop Local’s Online Store. Let’s learn from Chris and his Tesla choice.
Making Replacement Savings Easy to See
The new ...
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I recently saw a car with the license plate: WHYWRK. I had a sad feeling for the driver, who perhaps wasn’t as lucky as I to have the best job in the world – getting paid to shop for the most beautiful goods in the world – which I am now retiring from. After 40+ years as a buyer of tabletop and gifts in Buffalo, I have the opportunity to put the dishes away, polish the flatware, and store the stemware. As a small specialty store, we’ve been through our share of ups and ...
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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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How competitive techniques can help lure clients and grow a network.
September 10, 2023
Andrew Chen shares in 'The Cold Start Problem' that many times, networks are competing in a zero-sum game. One network gets a customer to join their network and thereby not participate in another. For example, when a driver used Lyft instead of Uber, Uber, which Chen helped, lost. And it lost in two regards: Uber lost the revenue from the lost ride, and Lyft gained the revenue. Chen’s team was tasked with getting drivers to use all their time driving for Uber and thereby unraveling Lyft&...
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EMON MAASHO, CEO AND PRESIDENT OF ORREFORS, NORTH AMERICA, is representative of the exciting trajectory in this 125-year operation. The über-exec joined the New Wave Group in 2013, a time when Orrefors and Kosta Boda (OKB) were underperforming assets in the portfolio. "Our crystal brands are national treasures and a part of Swedish history," Maasho affirms. And he wanted a front row seat in their revitalization. Maasho was placed in charge of the new hotel and restaurant division ...
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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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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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How having the right defaults makes decisions easier for clients and helps them be more successful.
January 27, 2023
When you look at your driver’s license, it lists if you’re an organ donor. Twenty years ago, only 20% of people were donors, but today 80% are—thereby saving millions of lives. Did people become more kind? No, the question on the application was changed from opt-in to opt-out. People signing up for or renewing a license are now by default enlisted in organ donation. Lesson: the right default answer in medical care can save millions of lives. Similarly, the right defaults ...
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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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In Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, which the Bridge team is currently reading, the author Jim Collins confesses that he missed a key ingredient 25 years ago when he wrote the first edition. He states that he now realizes the most important part of achieving a great company is: getting the right people 'on the bus.’ I agree. Fourteen and a half years ago (long before I opened this book), I was lucky enough to pick up the right ‘passenger:' Moshe replied to my job posting (...
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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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Saks formed new company a called Saks.com that will lead the company, shares today's WSJ. The physical stores will be moved from the 'drivers seat' to the 'passengers seat.' In a nod to Amazon.com and Walmart's success with third-party sellers, Saks.com will offer a marketplace and pay third-party sellers a commission.
News outlets like the Wall St. Journal have shared that Amazon is full of fake products, counterfeits, and listings with exaggerated prices. In today’s WSJ, Amazon shares it removed 1 million fake health products related to the Coronavirus. Amazon’s action supports the accusations that Amazon often fails when it comes to policing its marketplace. It’s rare ‘action’ is actually a sign of larger ‘inaction.’ While these Coronavirus products may have ...
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December 6, 2019
December 6, 2019
Designed as a tribute to Le Musee d'Orsay, a former 19th century beaux arts Parisian train station overlooking the river Seine. The simple yet elegant design harkens back to Versailles and French Royal court fashion.
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September 5, 2019
September 5, 2019
What does Domino’s pizza and Amazon have in common? I’ll share: back in the 1980s, Dominos promised to deliver your pizza in 30 minutes or less. But drivers were speeding, getting in accidents, and even killing people in tryin to make this deadline. Dominos was sued over this marketing promise, eventually lost a lawsuit for $78m, and dropped it. Today’s Times shares that Amazon and its contractors have killed 10 people in their deliveries of packages. Will Amazon’s packages face the same fate as...
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August 22, 2019
August 22, 2019
Stores that offer convenience and deals are winning, shares today’s WSJ. Sales at Walmart, Target, and T.J. Maxx are up while they’re murky at Macy’s, J.C. Penny, and Nordstrom. Just offering deals isn’t enough, nor is just offering next-day delivery. A store is going to have to accept smaller margins via deals and convenience offerings. The alternative is: join Macy’s with its 50% stock drop.
Nordstrom’s sales are down 5% and profit fell about $20m.
Kohl’s, which has a partnership with Amazon, ...
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February 16, 2019
February 16, 2019
Royal Crown Derby's Imari Accent Riverside Park Plate
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