Category Business

The direction of retail

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 [...]

Quelling (and storing) the surge of stuff.

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 [...]

No winner in the race to the bottom.

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 [...]

Backing down from the efficiency cliff.

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 [...]

Donation management for non-profits

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 [...]

We’re all outta rock stars and ninjas

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 [...]

Success

1) Goal
2) Metric
3) Measure & track
4) Action
5) Refine & repeat
Should get you to where you’re going.

User-friendly email etiquette

I’ve read a few good guides to email etiquette and getting responses. Recently, I had a couple of experiences where I was on the wrong end of miscommunication.
I read an entire email from a friend, mashed reply and asked them a question that I could have answered myself IF I HAD CLICKED THE LINK HE [...]