These nascent brands do more than automate customer interactions – they humanize them.

Consumers today want more. They love Amazon’s laser-like focus on price, access, and convenience. But consumers yearn for the intimacy and craftsmanship they once knew from the Main Street merchant.

post-Amazon brands offer products that customers truly love and a level of service that has been missing online and off.

For them, the opportunity lies in goods that consumers identify with personally and feel passionate about.

Social media is marketing, product innovation, and customer service rolled into one.

A business that successfully taps into its customers’ passion for its products can grow quickly without the massive capital outlays required of traditional brands.

Growth alone isn’t the endgame; scaling to meet customer demand is. Above all, these upstarts prize the human touch – albeit with no physical presence – in every customer interaction and in all aspects of their business.

Paying lip service to ethical labor practices or cleaner manufacturing processes won’t work anymore. When brands talk about the values they stand for, they have to mean it. And they have to deliver on it.

In the end, brand building will bifurcate into two camps: the automators and the humanizers. We call this the post-Amazon world.