The Microwave Principle. Consumers are on an eternal quest for convenience. If you can build a product that demonstrably saves them time or gives them more convenience, they'll choose your product over a higher-quality competitor almost every time.
This is attention to detail. Care in design. Follow through in customer service. This is an embrace of elegance and wabisabi and the opposite of laziness. This is bringing care (which is rare and precious) to work even if most people would look for a shortcut instead.
Lululemon, the purveyor of expensive athleisure and activewear, is betting on the future of personalized remote exercise as a way to reach customers by acquiring Mirror, a home fitness start-up that sells a $1,495 wall-mounted machine for streaming workout classes.
Covid-19 has created short-term winners and losers. But the more structural impact is that trends already under way have been accelerated. Everything was already moving online. Now this is happening even faster. Online marketplaces now have a combined value of $814 billion globally. 58% of consumer marketplaces could be well-positioned to navigate ... See more
Pinduoduo recently announced a move into real estate. Users paid a ~$1k refundable deposit to take part in a team purchase on a 1,000 unit property under development. 600 units were sold. It appears unrelated to the core business at first, but real estate has a high GMV and typically precedes many other large purchases made by new families. Similar... See more