Bolt’s Post

“You can’t ‘out-tech’ big business, but you sure can ‘out-touch’ them.” - Jon Reily, SVP Commerce Center of Excellence at Bounteous, shares his perspective on how growing brands can gain a competitive edge over big box and e-commerce giants. Read the full article from Entrepreneur Magazine here:

“You can’t ‘out-tech’ big business, but you sure can ‘out-touch’ them.” - Jon Reily, SVP Commerce Center of Excellence at Bounteous, shares his perspective on how growing brands can gain a competitive edge over big box and e-commerce giants. Read the full article from Entrepreneur Magazine here:

“You can’t ‘out-tech’ big business, but you sure can ‘out-touch’ them.” - Jon Reily, SVP Commerce Center of Excellence at Bounteous, shares his perspective on how growing brands can gain a competitive edge over big box and e-commerce giants. Read the full article from Entrepreneur Magazine here:

“You can’t ‘out-tech’ big business, but you sure can ‘out-touch’ them.” - Jon Reily, SVP Commerce Center of Excellence at Bounteous, shares his perspective on how growing brands can gain a competitive edge over big box and e-commerce giants. Read the full article from Entrepreneur Magazine here:

Meet the man who transformed $500 and a dream into a booming candle business. Mikey Kim's story is a testament to resilience and innovation. Get the details here: https://lnkd.in/gWeHNaBy #SmallBusiness #SuccessStories #Ecommerce

Exciting News Alert! Lightspeed Unveils Game-Changing Product Features 🌟 Lightspeed is thrilled to introduce a game-changing roster of new product features, custom-built with one goal in mind: making life easier for our merchants. Speed, simplification and customization sit at the core of these product enhancements, letting merchants save time and focus on what matters to scale their business. As our CEO, JP Chauvet, puts it, "Merchants don't start a business because they love spending hours ordering inventory. They start a business to bring their passion to life and share it with the world. Our job as their technology partner of choice is to shorten their to-do list and empower them with the tools to scale their business. This latest round of new product features does just that – simplify the complex and give them an edge in this ever-growing competitive market." Ready to supercharge your business? Dive into the details in our latest press release. 👉 https://lnkd.in/e3F_i8Xe

In bidding farewell to 2023, I can't help but to think of what a strange and difficult year it has been within the world of retail. Business is never easy -- if it was, everyone would be doing it. But this past year was uniquely difficult with a confluence of so many factors making the business environment that much more challenging for so many. This article from The Robin Report summarizes the "year that was" in retail... and it wasn't pretty: https://lnkd.in/eeFqvAKb My quick take: As strong as retail was for so many during the pandemic, it was just the opposite on the other side of the pandemic. Heavy inventory positions sank retailers and those that supply retailers with products. For retail suppliers like us, not only did we have our own heavy inventory issues to sort through, but replenishment orders from retailers were incredibly soft as they had their own inventory issues to work down as well. A double-whammy. What's important is that we are here. Many aren't. As Whitmor enters our 78th year of business, we continue to learn and become smarter and more efficient in everything we do. I am so proud of the resilience of our company and our people. Focusing on what you CAN control vs what you CAN'T control is where I am placing my focus in 2024 and beyond, and you should too. Happy New Year to everyone reading this, and please reach out if I can ever be helpful.

Half a year ago, we bought our first position in Groupon into our treasury at ~$3.60 a pop. I got flooded with DMs ridiculing/questioning the move. It currently trades at $13 and we believe with its ongoing transformation, it still has space to go, courtesy of Dušan Šenkypl and his amazing team. Yesterday, we bought into our 2nd "CZE" asset which we have been tracking for a while, Pilulka, at 190 CZK after Martin Kasa announced he's reinforcing his own position in the company. Trading at 245 now, it generated ~30% upside in 24 hours, nothing to scoff at whichever way we look at it. Highly volatile beast, better to approach with caution though. Fortunate entry, the fair value is way higher in our view. Best of luck to both "golden Czech hands" in our portfolio and we hope the market will soon reward you with the attention and valuation you deserve. #investments #czechrepublic #groupon #pilulka #pse

#Kaspien is closing. The news wasn't wholly surprising, but having spent over a decade at Kaspien, word of the closure hit me hard. With recent news of the struggles at #Thrasio and #Zulilly, Kaspien's closure is another data point on the larger issues with running a profitable online retail business, especially with historical debt in a high interest environment. As one of the first early large 3P #Amazon sellers to be acquired, I would like to share a few details about what made Kaspien unique. #Opportunity. Before it rebranded to etailz, Greencupboards was started by Josh and Sarah Neblett to sell subscription eco-friendly cleaning products before pivoting to sell on Amazon. Josh was great at inspiring the team and grew sales from $5mm, to $16mm, to $35mm annually finally doing more than $1BN in sales of branded products in Amazon's stores. With the acquisition of a competitor named Ecomom, Greencupboards was rebranded to etailz. Along the way there were POs placed with thousands of brands, including products listed on #SharkTank and brands owned by #fortune500companies. Kaspien sold these products throughout North America, the EU and India. It acquired #BigBetty, and created the private label brands #Jumpoffjoe and #BrilliantBee. The opportunities, provided to mostly inexperienced young entreprenuers helped jumpstart many careers. #Culture. It was not always easy and mistakes were made along the way, but somehow a group of mostly new colleage grads managed to build a thriving company. One of my fondest memories was time we ambushed Josh during an all company meeting with nerf guns. Somehow Josh knew and was ready with his own super neft gun. Nerf darts flew everywhere and then we proceeded with the meeting. There were summer BBQs, Christmas parties, easter egg hunts, Halloween decorating competitions and more. On the business side, we found new partners, built advertising plans, placed POs and generally found ways to bootstrap growth while finding ways to increase our partners marketshare. The colaboration that came from having fun paved the way for the hard work of serving partners. #People. I along with many others, were attracted to the growing tech forward retailer with a start up culture. As the company scaled we built a training curiculum to help quickly onboard people. The training included understanding listings, basics of inventory tracking, product compliance, Amazon marketing and more. after two weeks employees still realing from the number of accronyms and data were thrown into deep end to help build the business. The team created a number of software tools for advertizing, compliance, inventory management, and inventory cost recovery. Now Kaspien alumns work for other 3P sellers, agencies, seller software providers and Amazon itself. So as Kaspien winds down its business, I am grateful for the opportunities it provided, the culture that formed me, and especially my former coworkers who became friends with along the way.

Very interesting interview with Avito's CEO! I highly recommend reading it!!