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Creative Retailer: Price Follows DOW

This will be an unusual post in more than one way.

First, it’s about a decidedly low-tech retail business, that does not really fit this blog’s profile.

Second, it’s about a business I don’t personally care for: designer t-shirts. Tees are in the conference schwag category for me, I barely ever spend on them, and $110 (even $55 after discount) is an outrageous price, if you ask me.

Third, I really don’t like tattoo’s – and this line is all about reprinting tattoos. Yuck.  (But that’s just me.)

Fourth, I am reprinting an email sent to me in it’s entirety.  Rest assured, I’m doing it with the sender’s permission. I’m lazy, don’t wan to write a post and this makes a perfect story.  Ok, joke apart, keep on reading, there is something about creative business models here.  Here’s the letter (emphasis mine):

Hello! My name is Jeremy Parker and I am a 23 year old entrepreneur.  I am the CEO of Tees and Tats, a high-end, limited edition t-shirt line designed by world renown tattoo artist Marco Serio. We launched the line last July, with much success, selling to many high-end boutiques all over the US and Canada. 

But starting last November, are sales starting to slow dramatically as with the rest of the economy.  A large percentage of the stores we were selling to closed, and the stores that have survived are not placing re-orders. I did not want to concede to failure- because if the entrepreneurial spirit dies, America will be in a much worse place.  I knew the store issue would still be a problem, because high-end retailers are not buying goods anymore, but I came up with an idea that I thought might help our online sales.

I first lowered our prices from $110 to $55.  This helped a little bit, but people where still not buying like we saw earlier.  So I came up with a concept that at the time seemed bizarre, but now has proven to be a savior for us.

Now when a customer buys a shirt on our website (www.teesandtats.com), they are told the price of the DOW.  For every 100 points that the DOW drops within two months after the time of purchase they receive $5 dollars off of their purchase.  For example if a customer buys a shirt for $55 dollars and the DOW is 8200 and two months later the DOW is 8000 – the customer gets a check in the mail for $10 dollars.  The reason why people aren’t  buying high-end fashion- is that they are nervous about affording food, rent and other necessary living expenses.  Obviously very understandable.  So by assuring them that if the economy deteriorates even more they would get some money back – it made it very enticing for many customers.  Our sales have been up significantly since we started this.

One important additional element to the Tees and Tats philosophy is our desire to give back. For every T-shirt sold in the initial collection, we are going donate a percentage of proceeds to the non-profit ArtWorks Foundation. Based in Englewood, N.J., ArtWorks provides children and young adults suffering from chronic and life-threatening illnesses, and their siblings, access to creative and performing arts programming which encourages the use of the creative process as a vehicle for healing, communication, self-expression, and personal development. (I actually chose this charity to give to because of your piece on them a few years back.)

I just want to thank you for listening to my story, and I want to say that as things are looking bad and seems to be getting even worse – It is going to be the American people who are going to fix this problem.

Best Wishes,
Jeremy Parker

Wow.  Talk about creative business models.smile_wink  The discount is quite deep, 100 points on the DOW is nothing percentage-wise, yet it earns a 10% discount on your tee-price.  The company maximized the “DOW-insurance” program at 700 points, which would equate $35.  Is this a funny way of declaring the true bottom price of $20? 

There are a lot of open questions I have not verified around whether customers actually received refund checks, how market rallies may interfere with the calculation ( is there a specific “date of record” or duration  the DOW has to stay low), etc.

Still, I wanted to share this story as an example of thinking outside the box: a virtue a lot of startups (and established businesses) need nowadays to survive in the face of recession.  I don’t know if Jeremy will be running Tees and Tats a few years for now – but I am quite sure he’ll be running something.  He’s an Entrepreneur.

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When Your Technology Fails, Hire More Sales…

That seems to be the Technorati recipe: TechCrunch reports they have a new Sales VP with a 7-person sales team, and a new marketing lead. This build-up was likely in preparation for the new business, Technorati Media, a newly launched blog advertising network.

Technorati indeed needs a business model, so if this is it, fine. It’s just frustrating that they’ve spent the past two years in search of business models, while their service gradually fell apart. Anyway, in the spirit of the new-new business, I suggest they sell advertising on the Technorati page we see most frequently:

This was the rant – for details see: CNET News.com, Maple Leaf 2.0, Web Strategy, Trends in the Living Networks, A Media Circus, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

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SVASE Event: How To Build A Lean, Mean, Global Operation From The Get Go

(reposted from SVASE)

The traditional model for startups of gaining traction in your home market and then expanding internationally is under extreme pressure. Some VCs say they only look at deals that come to them with well defined global strategies, and it’s no longer unusual for a startup to develop its technology in Israel, Finland or the UK, secure its funding in the U.S. and have its founders to be first generation immigrants from China, Europe or India.

Offshore? Onshore? Nearshore? Noshore?

VCs who once bragged about never driving more than half an hour to visit a portfolio company are jetting to Australia for optical engineers, Israel for security whizzes, India and Kazakhstan for brute software coding, South Korea for online gaming and Japan for graphics chips. And many say a global view is required just to keep pace with foreign firms quick to copy an idea.
• When does having a global strategy become a strategic imperative?
• How can cash strapped startups realistically address global markets without blowing up their limited resources?
• Is offshore product development really effective for a startup? Or is it just an endless wait for S/W that never quite works as you’d like?
• Do you really need to create different products for each international market?
• If you’re planning on operating on 4 continents, where does your management team reside?
• How important are international patents? Are they worth the time & cost?
• How do you gain traction in an unknown geography?
• What added value can the right investor bring to the party?

The Panel:
• Andrew Filev, CEO, Wrike
• Girish Gaitonde, Founder & CEO, Xoriant Corporation
• Faraz Hoodbhoy, Founder, EVP & CTO, PixSense, Inc.
• Peter Rip, General Partner, Crosslink Capital
• Sridhar Vembu, Founder and CEO, Zoho
Moderator: Peter Laanen, International Trade Director, Netherlands Business Support Office

WHEN:
Thursday, November 1
6:00 – 7:00 pm: Networking and hors d’oeuvres
7:00 – 8:15 pm: Panel discussion and Q/A
8:15 – 8:30 pm: Additional networking

LOCATION:
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR Campus), 950 Page Mill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304

Register here.

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Office 2.0: Zoho Announces Business Edition

When Zoho introduced their first Web application a year and a half ago, they were little known, and nobody cared about their business model. But then something unusual happened: they kept on pumping out new applications every few weeks or so, and soon became the #2 (or by some count #1) force in the Web application space. While some of their competitors went out of business, others got acquired, others charge for their offering, Zoho continues to offer their services for free. Needless to say the business model comes up a lot more often nowadays.

Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu made it clear he is in for a Marathon, not a sprint, and he knows what he’s talking about: in the past decade he has already built a solid, profitable company, Adventnet, whose financial stability allows him to play in the SaaS market. He pledged to always offer most of his products free to individuals, yet he hinted there would be a revenue-generating business version of Zoho Services some day. But his priority was to build a solid set of services first, without having to rush to revenue. Until recently the emphasis was on perfecting the individual products (15 of them), and in the past few months Zoho started to focus on integrating them. Zoho Notebook, although in “individual” product, was a major milestone as it tightly integrated several other offerings: document editing, presentations, spreadsheets, communication, collaboration. The recently announced Zoho Start page was the first step in pulling several existing products together in a home base.

As a next logical step, this morning at the Office 2.0 Conference Zoho Business Edition will be introduced. The next two slides will help understand the segmentation between Zoho Personal and Business editions.

Personal is essentially the already existing set of services, with a few (those with gray background) additional ones still in private beta: Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts. It’s interesting to note that these “new” services have already been on the Zoho palette for quite a while, but they were offered as part of Zoho Virtual Office, a downloadable Outlook-like product – they are now being rearchitected as a Web service. All of these services are, and continue to be offered free. The services in the right box, Meeting, Projects, Creator and CRM also have a free level, but they will have a premium, for-free version as well.

The next slide shows Zoho Business, essentially the same as Personal, with an added infrastructure layer added to manage ones domains, locations, users, groups, and also offering multiple levels of security, backup and enhanced support. Zoho Business is currently in private beta.

Despite recent speculation, this is not Zoho’s entrance to the Enterprise market.

Zoho Business is primarily meant for the SMB / SME segment (small businesses). That is not to say that the core Zoho applications would not be “enterprise ready” (they have large corporate accounts in Japan), but it’s not what they focus on for now. Anyone who follows Zoho will know that they are obsessed with cutting out fat: it’s a lean, efficient operation. The last thing Sridhar wants is to hire an expensive sales force, which is still the way to enter the Enterprise. Case in point: mighty Google themselves- I’ve shared my impressions of a Google Enterprise presentation, where I felt I was teleported to an Oracle or IBM Sales Show from the 90’s. Let them be the evangelists, and wait for the currently SMB services emerge in the Enterprise.

(Disclosure: I am an Advisor to Zoho)

Related posts: Between the Lines, /Message, Web Strategy, Centernetworks, Mashable, Read/WriteWeb, Zoho Blogs, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Webware.com,