Rivian Raises $1.4Bn, Postcard Retargeting 8x ROAS, 3D Printed Housing, Kapernick Ads Historic, Barcode History, Etsy Opportunities, eCommerce Boom for Auto Industry, Coke Subscription, eCom Stack
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Electric pickup truck company Rivian raises $1.3 billion
Rivian, the company making electric vehicles for Amazon and Ford, just got a big influx of cash.
The Michigan-based carmaker has raised $1.3 billion in a new funding round led by investment firm and Tesla ( TSLA ) shareholder T. Rowe Price, Rivian announced Monday.
"This investment demonstrates confidence in our team, products, technology and strategy -- we are extremely excited to have the support from such strong shareholders," Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said in a statement.
Postcard Retargeting Helps Blue Canoe Gain 8x ROAS
Laurie Dunlap, founder and CEO, was open to new and innovative ways to continually adapt her marketing. She teamed up with her catalog marketer, Wayne Doleski at Black Bee Marketing. They approached direct marketing leader Modern Postcard about their newest channel: Postcard Retargeting.
Laurie and Wayne worked with the team at Modern iO to develop a strategy based on abandoned carts for her most popular product, targeting visitors who showed the most interest and purchase intent.
The Modern iO program has no daily minimums or maximums, so Dunlap and Doleski have complete flexibility with the budget and volume of postcard retargeting to blend with Blue Canoe's other marketing channels.
The world’s first 3D-printed neighborhood now has its first houses
A giant 3D printer is currently squeezing out new homes in rural Mexico. Each one takes 24 hours and lets local families upgrade from a shack to a two-bedroom house. Could this be part of the global housing solution?
[Photo: Joshua Perez/courtesy New Story]The nonprofit, founded five years ago to bring housing to people living in extreme poverty, has already built more than 2,700 homes in Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Mexico, using traditional construction.
The team initially planned to build in another part of Mexico, but because of delays in the process of working with the government to get the land, decided to start farther south in Tabasco, a state that borders Guatemala; the new location faces a higher risk of earthquakes, so the design went through even more structural engineering tests.
Nike Kaepernick ads will be among the most memorable from the 2010s
Campaigns like Nike's Colin Kapernick spot and Procter & Gamble's #LikeAGirl" succeeded in changing cultural conversation, proving big risks can pay off in making memorable ads.
"This is the type of campaign you put in a time capsule to give future generations a read on gender stereotypes in the 2010s," said John Osborn, the CEO of Omnicom Group media agency OMD USA.
In 2009, The Atlantic's Derek Thompson wrote that "to the surprise of nobody, Burger King's horrible, creepy advertising campaignis not working, and the company finds itself falling further behind McDonald's... " But now it's a powerful turnaround story .
Beep Beep: The History of George Laurer and the Barcode
How a 67-cent pack of Juicy Fruit, and a guy who said no, changed the way we shopped
The creator of the 1949 patent mentioning potential for the supermarket industry worked in the same office in IBM’s Building 2 in Raleigh, a long, cavernous workshop the company leased on Yonkers Road, to the northeast of the city.
Whenever they would pop into grocery stores, supermarkets, or gas stations, Laurer’s wife would regularly smile and wink at cashiers and attendants, pointing out that her husband invented the barcode they were scanning — and the concept behind the scanner machine, too.
Why I'll Be Buying Shares of This Small E-Commerce Company in 2020 | The Motley Fool
I'm sidestepping the usual e-commerce heavyweights like Amazon and Shopify for this $5 billion company.
Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla; Shopify has been helping just about anyone set up an online shop; and even Walmart has put together impressive e-commerce numbers over the past three years.
The company generates revenue in two ways: the first by collecting fees on listings and completed transactions on its marketplace and the second by charging for additional services -- such as advertising and printing shipping labels, among others.
E-commerce boon to the auto industry
NEW YORK — The Amazon.com Inc. vans parked outside apartment buildings and along suburban cul-de-sacs aren’t just bearing gifts to online shoppers this holiday season. The e-commerce giant’s home-deli
That’s good news for manufacturers of increasingly ubiquitous gray vans with the blue swoosh, which include Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Ford Motor Co.
“We’re seeing a lot of increase in servicing activity due to Amazon and other retailers,” said Steve Germain, owner of a dealer group with Mercedes and Ford stores in Florida, Michigan and Ohio.
Coca-Cola launches $10/month subscription service
The first 1,000 "insiders" will get an exclusive first taste of some 20-plus new beverages.
"The pilot programwas inspired by the growth of the e-commerce subscription market, which has more than doubled annually over the last five years based on the popularity of meal kits and curated collections of everything from razors to pet supplies to makeup," the company wrote.
“The response exceeded expectations, opening our eyes to an opportunity to reach true Coke loyalists not only with more information and content – but with a chance to get their hands on new products before they hit shelves.”
Are Big Changes Coming to the Ecommerce Stack? | Practical Ecommerce
Headless content management systems and site generators are driving a new content-centric web. The changes could be coming to ecommerce, at scale, very soon.
When a person shops online, the browser on her device sends a request to the server, which gets the product info from the database, and runs the code to create the page.
For example, product information could be stored in a headless CMS and delivered to an ecommerce website, a mobile app, internal administrative systems, or a marketing automation service.