New Florence. New Renaissance.

Herman-Miller B2C foray

Office furniture company Herman Miller Inc. is trying to expand further beyond selling large orders of expensive chairs to employers with a new bid for individual at-home workers.

Herman Miller this month will open its first stores designed for consumers in Century City in Los Angeles and New York City’s Hudson Yards, and plans to open two more next month in Austin, Texas, and Tokyo. It previously relied purely on large showrooms aimed at business-to-business customers, e-commerce and a presence in consumer outlets such Design Within Reach, a sibling under parent company Herman Miller Group.

WSJ (sub required)

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Brandless – fewer grocery options, more aligned with Millennials

It’s tough to wow Masayoshi Son with a bargain, but during a meeting this spring, Brandless left the SoftBank Group chief executive officer a bit flabbergasted. Yes, the startup’s founders assured the billionaire, every product he picked up from the table, from the extra-virgin olive oil to the carbon-steel eyelash curler, was just $3. The trick: It’s all store brand, and there’s no alternative. The site will sell only one kind of toothpaste, or coaster, or tree-free toilet paper. Hope you like it!

BusinessWeek

The Wawa transformation

After decades of pushing cheap gas and cigarettes and made-to-order sandwiches to suburban crowds, Wawa is starting to de-emphasize two of the three. The current CEO, Chris Gheysens, is swapping in Tesla charging stations, kale salads, and small-batch coffee, most of which customers can order on their phones (or Wawa's ubiquitous touchscreens). Gheysens calls this Wawa's "barbell" strategy: continue to offer the cheap staples that attracted longtime customers, while expanding into cities as the newest health-conscious, gourmet-inflected, casual-lunch option.

Inc

The Digital Grocer

It could be called the “ply” model — as in, “ply your wares with digital technology.” This model seeks to offset the scale advantages of Amazon and Walmart by leveraging the distinctive capabilities of a local grocery store: a supply chain fed by full-truckload shipments (which Amazon lacks); dynamic pricing and promotion (which Walmart disdains); and the ability to command intensive loyalty from shoppers, because of its local community knowledge, customer segmentation, and product customization. To compete in the coming decade against the twin disruptions of Amazon and Walmart (and their equivalents), today’s grocers and supermarkets need to return to the customer-centric mind-set of their 19th-century predecessors, while making the most of today’s digital tools.

Strategy+Business

The growing Amazon device business

Adam Lashinsky of Fortune interviewed David Limp, an Amazon senior vice president who oversees Alexa and all of its Amazon devices at the Brainstorm Tech conference. Some eye popping details about the size of the device business and its business model.

“We really believe and the team believes that we should align ourselves with both the business model and the product, so that if customers use it over a period of time, then we'll take a small amount of profit every time they have a transaction. It might be an Audible book; it might be a Kindle book; it might be shopping as they go through the lifecycle of that product.

Nothing makes me and the team happier to see a first generation Kindle in somebody's hands. We're still supporting it. You can still buy books from it and that's a great win-win for us and the customer.”

Asian Business Model Innovation

The first wave, as we call it, primarily exploited differences in labor and other input costs between developed and developing markets. By contrast, the second wave is driven primarily by business model innovation and typically leverages new technology. These companies are characterized by extensive and often radical reconfigurations of the profit formula, resources, processes, and relationships within a broader stakeholder ecosystem. They may have a sophisticated global orientation from the start; for example, in Viki’s case, the company was “born global,” beginning as a class project by graduate students who were studying in the United States but who later moved the company to Singapore.

Sloan Management Review

How to turn unveiling of concept car into a giant Kickstarter

When nearly 400,000 people raised their hands for the Model 3 and cemented the conviction with a $1,000 deposit, a new business model in a staid industry was born. While conventional automakers seek board approval to tap cash reserves or issue bonds to pay for new vehicles, the ever-unconventional Tesla showed crowdfunding gets the job done in two weeks.

Even Musk was floored by the response. He anticipated fewer than half the deposits he received and must now scramble to find a way to build all those cars.

Motor Trend

 

McKinsey Digital Compass

Digital is not only a means to optimize a company’s existing operations. It also gives both attackers and incumbents the power to disrupt value chains, enter new sectors, and create innovative business models. Established companies face threats from new competitors like Amazon Business, which offers millions of products, from automotive components, industrial lifts, and ramps to lab products, protective gear, and electrical equipment.

To get ahead of threats like this, industrial companies can use digital to transform and extend their own business models before change is imposed on them by attackers reshaping their industry. Some incumbents are joining digital platforms and B2B marketplaces to aggregate demand and sell direct to end users. BASF, for example, was the first chemicals company to sell products online through Alibaba. Other businesses, such as the 3-D printing start-up Sculpteo, are selling services rather than products. Still others are offering their manufacturing capacity as a service to third parties.

McKinsey

A flexibility engine

Jay Walker about his new site Upside

‘The notion of building a flexibility engine, which is essentially the software that runs this thing, is applicable in a broad range of industries. Any industry where the complexity of the purchase relates to the customer's flexibility ultimately will use these kinds of flexibility engines. I believe we're really the first of an entirely new category of software here. I'll give you an example. In health care, if you say to me, "If you'll be flexible and drive an extra five minutes to get this X-ray, your health care provider will give you $50 in incentives to do it." Of course you're willing to make tradeoffs and be flexible as long as you have confidence in the product quality you're buying. The same is true with us. As long as we put you on a major airline and you get to see the airline in advance before you buy the package, your flexibility is something you're willing to modify. Show me what my flexibility is worth. It's true in health care, it's going be true in business travel. I suspect it's gonna be true in a fair number of places where people have flexibility. Nobody has ever been able to show them what it's worth. I'm willing to trade off comfort and convenience often for other benefits I want more. Right now those things are all invisible in the data set. But what big data software allows you to do is make invisible things visible.”

 

 

Indie bookstores reinvent themselves

But the good news is that the indies are quietly resurging across the nation, registering a growth of over 30 percent since 2009 and sales that were up around 10 percent last year, according to the American Booksellers Association, the indies’ main organization with more than 2,200 stores.

“Existing stores are selling once more to a new generation of owners,” said Oren Teicher, the A.B.A.’s chief executive officer, noting that such stores could never be resold during the gloomiest years, when they were under threat from Barnes & Noble and then later, Internet sales. The indies now find that readers are looking for life beyond their computer screens. They want to embrace books in all three dimensions and to select them in a tactile, less anonymous marketplace. Booksellers are fellow readers who converse knowledgeably and jot down their current favorites on helpful bookshelf notes.

New York Times