A new Italian bicycle manufacturer, Legend, is dual-purposing their showroom to sell other brands related to their core market.
This looks to be a viable trend for premium brands, as also seen at The Stronghold in LA. They carry their own line, but support it with add-on sales of Filson, White’s boots, and other staple [...]
Over in the bicycle industry, we often refer to the bicycle shaped object or the BSO. You can usually find these hanging out in the big box stores, and often times, at the lower price points at Performance Bike.
After taking a stroll through retail stores this last weekend with my wife, I’ve noticed that [...]
A recent article on self-storage in the NY Times mentions that “we’ve spent more on furniture even as prices have dropped, thereby amassing more of it.” The same appears to be true in other markets, apparel, housewares, etc. As the prices drop, people spend the same, but amass more items of a poorer [...]
Right now, Made in USA and heritage/heritage-styled brands are cleaning up. From all the reports from Vegas this week, it looks like the trend is over the top, and it’s going to start the long slide down through consumer exhaustion.
The question is, how are we going to move forward without losing the focus on [...]
The question that’s been bothering me the most lately is why so many people want to buy so much cheap crap. It makes no sense to me, and the prices people want to pay are astronomically low.
Consumer price sensitivity is perfectly reasonable, but when that price sensitivity manifests as demanding specialty items such as [...]
The same inefficient food supply model proposed in this Grist article by Tom Philpott could very easily be extended towards the entire marketplace of goods and services. Just as it makes more sense for quality food to be produced this way, it makes sense for large swaths of consumer needs to be produced in the [...]
This post on Off the Cuff , and this response on Name Development got me thinking about the issues of aspirational branding when it comes to developing clothes and accessories around bicycling.
Surf and skate have been thoroughly co-opted, as has the preppy New England lifestyle. The lumberjack/outdoorsman theme has been mined deeply as of [...]
For a recent project for a non-profit, I had to make a decision about using an out of the box solution for managing donations versus building our own solution.
We are still working on the decision, but here are the key points to consider:
1) Opportunity cost – What asking opportunities are we going to [...]
I subscribe to several niche job feeds. At least once a day, I see postings for “rock star developers” and “javascript ninjas’. Occasionally there’ll be a need for a Ruby on Rails wizard.
I’m pretty sure ninjas and rock stars are too busy being ninjas and rock stars to write code.
If you’re looking for [...]
1) Goal
2) Metric
3) Measure & track
4) Action
5) Refine & repeat
Should get you to where you’re going.