Amazon Day Two, Tracksuit History, AvantStay Lands $20M, Thingtesting Funded, Private Labels Growth, Allbirds Copycats, Amazon and Rivian, Blue Apron Recipe for Disaster
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Day Two to One Day - Stratechery
As Amazon focuses more on its bottom line in addition to its rapid growth, it is increasingly taking aim at CRaP products [ “Can’t Realize a Profit” ], according to major brand executives and people familiar with the company’s thinking.
This is also why Facebook’s commitment to Stories was a good sign even if it entailed an earnings hit; its various attempts to wring engagement out of its core app through things like forced Instagram integrations and dating services run in the opposite direction.
The tracksuit is rap culture, and it is street culture—and, naturally, it has been co-opted and monetized by more apathetic, more ruthless forces.
Fixx evangelized running as life extension, Turney explains in her book “ Fashion Crimes .” This put the runner, in his tracksuit, in a “God-like role,” both “man and superman, ego and super-ego, performing a Foucaultian battle that will ultimately result in the mastery of the mind over the weakness of the flesh.”
The Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy is famous for a specific oblique athleisure aesthetic that’s become known as “post-Soviet.” In collaborations with Adidas and Fila, he has utilized Cyrillic lettering and staged fashion shows in Kaliningrad.
AvantStay locks in $20M in funding, looks to expand short-term rental portfolio | PhocusWire
AvantStay is looking to bring in more properties for its short-term rentals for groups concept following $20 million in funding.
Sean Breuner, CEO of AvantStay, says: “3L’s extensive track record helping consumer companies scale to deliver world-class experiences and deep knowledge of the space make them a great partner as we continue to build on our success.”
The company has also developed in-house technology including Stay, a group booking platform and Butler, a mobile concierge app.
‘The best VC on Instagram’ is now VC-backed – TechCrunch
@thingtesting wants to become the ultimate review platform for D2C products.
Gyllander, who was at the center of the London startup ecosystem as an investor with the British seed fund Backed.VC , would upload photos of interesting direct-to-consumer products with a caption that served as a bite-sized review.
Gyllander, like a slew of other Instagram influencers, however, quickly realized an opportunity to monetize content using the feature, a trend explained in detail in a recent report from The Atlantic.
Private labels outpacing national brands
Store brands are grabbing market share from established players, but some categories are easier to conquer than others.
Amazon and Target are the two retailers that seem most intent on providing customers with in-house brands in several categories, with assortments in baby care, household essentials and apparel, among others.
Even Amazon is encountering resistance from its Prime members when it comes to healthcare, and pet food and supplies, "where quality and loyalty concerns drive most purchases," according to Gartner L2 .
How Steve Madden built up its e-commerce business | Modern Retail
More than 80% of Steve Madden’s revenue still comes from wholesale. But that doesn’t mean that the footwear retailer can totally ignore its e-commerce business.
But, what drew Silverman to Shopify was that he felt the company’s mobile store was better than that of many other e-commerce platform providers’, and better than one that Steve Madden could develop on its own.
Silverman also said that buy-now, pay-later financing option Afterpay has proven to be a valuable selling point among its customers, as well as free two-day-shipping, so Steve Madden will periodically advertise both of these features in its social media ads.
In a matter of five years, Allbirds has managed to build what it says is a $1.4 billion business based on what have been called “the world’s most comfortable shoes.” Under the watch of co-founders Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger, the San Francisco-based sustainable footwear startup has larg
On the heels of filing a since-settled lawsuit against Steve Madden in late 2017, claiming that the trendy footwear giant ran afoul of trademark law by copying its wool trainer, Allbirds is suing again.
This time the buzzy brand is taking on Austrian footwear company Giesswein Walkwaren for manufacturing and selling sneakers that are “identical in all material respects” to Allbirds’s Wool Runners.
Amazon will start letting people pay with cash because not everyone has credit cards
The new Amazon PayCode service is the company’s latest attempt to court Walmart shoppers.
And by doing so, Amazon could better appeal to the more than 8 million low-income households that do not have bank accounts, and thus no debit or bank-affiliated credit cards, according to a 2017 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation survey .
The obvious question upon launch in the US: If you’re going to go to a Western Union to pay for your Amazon order, wouldn’t you just buy the item at another local brick-and-mortar store and have it that day?
The Sneaky Way Clothing Brands Hooked Men on Stretch Jeans
In opposition to stretch jeans stood the popularity of selvedge denim, an old-fashioned manufacturing method whose stiff, rough product found an ardent following among menswear enthusiasts online that hit a fever pitch a few years ago—long after women had largely embraced the ability to painlessly sit down.
Nathaniel Freeman, Banana Republic’s head of men’s denim, told me the name sprang out of fit testing for the line, during which “a team member put the garment on and started doing lunges down the hall, telling everyone how comfortable and flexible they were.” (Other stretch-jean makers wouldn’t comment on their gendered brand strategies.)
An artist-centric startup built for a creator’s world
It’s a blue ocean market to build something that’s great for indie artists, and no one else understands enough about this niche to do…
You can skip the medium post and go right to a PDF brain dump of what I see both wrong with the current music landscape for artists, or read below to see if you’re interested in learning more first.
The next great music startup will actually use these key tenets that power everything from Facebook feed algos to Google search and YouTube content recs.
Amazon will order 100,000 electric delivery vans from EV startup Rivian, Jeff Bezos says
The Michigan-based startup is riding high from a series of major funding rounds.
The announcement came during an event on Thursday in Washington, DC where Bezos unveiled Amazon’s sweeping plan to tackle climate change.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Rivian’s main push this year has been a massive fundraising effort, with the company securing enormous investments from a host of major players, Amazon included.
The Unexpected Key To Casper's Success As A DTC Brand: Turning Something Terrible Into Something Fun
Casper launched itself into the deeply traditional, entrenched sleep market with a radically bold proposition: they were going to get customers to make a large, long-term purchase totally online, sight unseen.
Casper launched itself into the deeply traditional, entrenched sleep market with a radically bold proposition: they were going to get customers to make a large, long-term purchase totally online, sight unseen.
Whether that’s through experiential campaigns , content marketing, or a comprehensive social strategy, by offering connected consumers something that’s both entertaining, and authentic to your brand, you’ll be well on your way to cultivating long-term, loyal customers.
Jeff Bezos unveils sweeping plan to tackle climate change
As part of the plan, Amazon has agreed to purchase 100,000 electric delivery vans from vehicle manufacturer Rivian.
"We want to use our scale and our scope to lead the way," Bezos said at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. "One of the things we know about Amazon as a role model for this is that it's a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large physical infrastructure.
The company also announced a $100 million donation to The Nature Conservancy to form the Right Now Climate Fund, which will work to restore and protect forests, wetlands and peatlands around the world, with the goal of removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Recipe for disaster: The meteoric rise and ongoing demise of Blue Apron | PitchBook
Four years ago, when its VC backers valued Blue Apron at $2 billion, the meal-kit delivery company seemed like the next big thing. Oh, how times have changed.
Around the same time, Plated opted for a different kind of exit: It sold itself to Albertsons for a reported $200 million, uniting with an established grocer with a more finely tuned supply chain that might be better equipped than a startup to package and ship huge amounts of food at scale.
But in the weeks to come, the price just kept on sliding, other than a brief bump up to above $10 when Blue Apron revealed plans to begin selling Beyond Meat products in its meal kits—a move that linked the current next big thing in foodtech to the company that held that title a half-decade ago.