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- NFR 30 - After Life, Juggernauts & London Shutdown
NFR 30 - After Life, Juggernauts & London Shutdown
After Life, Juggernauts & London Shutdown
☕️ Morning Inspiration:
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
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🤖 eCommerce News:
“Amazon is exploring an offer for Peloton and is speaking with advisers about whether and how to proceed, a source said. Peloton has not yet decided whether it will explore a sale, according to the source. Shares of Peloton surged 30% in extended trading on the news, which comes days after activist investor Blackwells Capital urged the company's board to put it up for sale.”
However
“The firm is cutting 2,800 jobs globally, around 20% of its corporate workforce. Cuts will come “at every level of the organization.” Such moves arrive at the tail end of a roller-coaster couple of years for the connected fitness brand, culminating with a drop in demand. In addition to Foley, Peloton’s president of five years, William Lynch, will be transitioning to a non executive director role on the company’s board. (Source)”
“For the third time, the new year means new plans for Google as it continues to alter its plan to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome. On Jan. 25, the tech giant introduced a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics that will replace Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) — exactly a year after putting it’s weight behind the proposal.”
“The feature will be enabled for the iPhone XS and later models. Tap to Pay on iPhone will be available for payment platforms and app developers to integrate into their iOS apps as a payment option for their customers. Stripe will be the first payment platform to offer Tap to Pay on iPhone to customers through a new Shopify app. Apple says additional payment platforms and apps will follow later this year.”
“Money from the first round of funding will go toward international expansion, recruiting new talent and investing in product inventory in order to meet demand. Leading the round were U.K.-based venture capital firm Venrex, which also has stakes in Lyst, Charlotte Tilbury and Samantha Cameron’s label Cefinn and which just linked with the British Fashion Council in a new fund to support start-ups, and Active Partners, a fund focused on sustainably minded brands such as Rapha or the transparent jewelry label Taylor & Hart”
“Google acquired YouTube for $1.65B in 2006, but didn’t break out earnings for the streaming service until 2020. For the latest quarter, YouTube ads brought in $8.6B. Here’s the wild part: That’s an annualized run rate of $34B, which outpaced Netflix — a $30B run rate — for the 1st time. With a mostly ad-based business, YouTube is usually left out of the streaming subscription wars conversation but it’s clearly the video leader.”
“Meta's shares slumped by more than 20% in after-hours trading in New York. The slide in Meta's share price wiped around $200bn (£147.5bn) off the company's stock market value.” “What happened? The sell-off came after Meta’s latest earnings report, per CNBC: Slowing sales: Meta revenue hit $33.7B in the last quarter but its guidance for Q1 2022 ($27-$29B) was below expectation. The Apple effect: New changes to iPhone’s privacy policy will cost Facebook’s ad business an estimated $10B this year. (source)”
“The Nintendo Switch had a relatively strong holiday quarter, with 10.67 million units shipped between October and December despite the global semiconductor shortage. That brings the system’s lifetime total to 103.54 million units shipped, meaning it took just under five years to overtake the Wii’s 101.63 million.”
“The e-commerce boom that started with the COVID-19 pandemic shows little sign of slowing down, and today a company called Shopware, which provides a set of open source tools to power online shopping experiences for some 100,000 mid-sized and larger brands, is announcing $100 million in funding to capture the opportunity.”
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📈 Trends Of The Week:
“Sales of real estate in the metaverse topped $500 million last year and could double this year, according to investors and analytics firms. Real estate sales on the four major metaverse platforms reached $501 million in 2021, according to MetaMetric Solutions. Sales in January topped $85 million, the metaverse data provider said. It projects that at this pace sales could reach nearly $1 billion in 2022.”
Getting Crafty Is a ~$647B Business
“The Signal: Tactile crafts have had a glittering year. Subscribers to r/Embroidery and r/Leathercraft have doubled over the last ~12 months. The woodworking community of Reddit is now 3.5m+ strong. US Amazon searches for “crafts for adults” are up 83% over the last 90 days, per Jungle Scout. Pinterest is awash with more craft-based interest across Europe, Canada, Australia, and the UK.”
“Ways to get in:
Entry level crafts
Get Online: The crafting market, which is traditionally brick-and-mortar heavy, is moving online — US ecommerce sales of hobby and crafting supplies hit a record $15B+ in 2021.
Advanced Crafts: Skills like leatherwork, woodwork, and sewing are in vogue.
Experiences: Events like wine and craft nights are starting to make an impressive resurgence. Searches for “paint night near me” are on the rise again; Pinot’s Palette, with paint night tickets starting at $35, has ~300k site visits/mo., according to Similarweb.”
Get Your Curl On
Source: Subreddit Stats
“Around 70% of the global population has wavy, curly, or coily hair — but they are still a highly underserved demographic with care, styles, and products.
Niches to leverage include:
Eco-friendly textured hair care: We covered the sharp rise of Viori shampoo bars last August; targeting the curly niche with high-end, sustainable options could be huge.
Styling and accessories: Celebrate natural textures through style guides (e.g., for puffy natural hair), accessories (this set of braid/dreadlock jewelry generates ~$25k/mo. on Amazon), and tutorials (help parents style their children’s natural hair).
The curl craze is not just limited to natural curls. Heatless curling methods are trending on TikTok (1B+ views), and these heatless rollers bring in $211k+/mo. on Amazon, per Jungle Scout.”
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🛍 My Marketing Highlights:
“Benches to mark the final series of a Ricky Gervais TV show about loss have been installed in parks to provide a place for people to chat and reflect. They are among 25 benches donated to local councils by streaming service Netflix and the suicide prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM).”
“London-based streetwear brand Corteiz sent social media into an absolute frenzy over the weekend after shutting down the city with its ‘BOLO Exchange’.
The event saw hundreds of followers of the rapidly rising imprint exchange jackets from brands such as North Face, Stussy, C.P. Company, Moncler and Supreme in exchange for CRTZ’s new puffer jacket—the ‘Bolo’—in Wormwood Scrubs car park near White City, West London.
Corteiz has enjoyed a rapid ascension over the past few years, with the brand now regularly selling out of pieces within minutes and generating tens of thousands of site visits on release dates from their online site. The brand was co-signed by late Louis Vuitton creative director and Off-White founder Virgil Abloh before his untimely passing, calling Corteiz’s rise “inevitable” in his cover story for skate magazine Sneeze last year.”
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❓Quotes that make you think:
“Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts.” Sam Harris.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” George Orwell.
“I don't trust people who don’t love themselves and tell me ‘I love you.’ … There is an African saying which is: ‘Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.’” Maya Angelou.
“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.” Karl Popper
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⛓ Mental Model Of The Week:
Anchoring bias
“Anchoring bias is a cognitive bias that causes us to rely too heavily on the first piece of information we are given about a topic. When we are setting plans or making estimates about something, we interpret newer information from the reference point of our anchor, instead of seeing it objectively. This can skew our judgment, and prevent us from updating our plans or predictions as much as we should.”
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📚 Book I'm Reading:
“Massive success only comes when you get massively clear about the one outcome you can control in your business: you. In The No B.S. Small Business Book, you will learn how to get ruthlessly honest about yourself, your business, and what you really want from both — and how to get it. You’ll roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, applying practical business strategies gleaned from decades of experience building and exiting successful companies. If you want to gain massive traction from achieving massive clarity as you take massive action at all levels of business and life as a no-B.S. business owner, then buckle up.”