NFR #45 - Baecation, Philosophy & Picking Robots

Baecation, Philosophy & Picking Robots

May 25, 2022

🐦 Inspirational Tweet

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🤖 eCommerce News:

“The company currently employs around 7,000 people. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce means that around 700 people will lose their job at the fintech company. It will potentially affect all domains and offices around the world. “I am no stranger to sharing good and bad news. However, today is the hardest one to date,” Klarna co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski wrote in a message shared with all employees. “As much as we may like it to be the case, Klarna does not exist in a bubble.””

“Glossier founder Emily Weiss is stepping down as chief executive officer, she said in a company blog post on Tuesday. She has been CEO since the brand’s founding in 2014, and will remain on the board as executive chair, she said. Kyle Leahy, who in November joined the DTC beauty brand as its first chief commercial officer, is taking her place, according to Weiss. Leahy is a veteran of Nike, Cole Haan and American Express and “has spent her career setting strategy and aligning operational execution to build enterprise value and maximize brand potential,” Weiss said.”

“Stripe, the payments upstart now valued at $95 billion, has been launching a number of new products to expand beyond the API that helped make its name, to build out its position as a platform for financial services and related business infrastructure. The latest of these is making its debut today: App Marketplace, as the new service is called, is a new offering where Stripe will both provide access to third-party apps, as well as scripts created by app publishers, users and Stripe itself, that incorporate those apps with Stripe. It potentially represents its biggest leap yet away from payments.”

“In addition to the revamped customer rating system, Instacart is rolling out new features for shoppers. The company is introducing a new “Your stats” screen that shows shoppers information about their account, including their average customer rating, customer feedback and statistics like how many orders they’ve completed. There’s also a new section within the Shopper app that will provide shoppers with information about batch accuracy, including details about items found, replacements and more. Instacart says a shopper’s accuracy information does not have an impact on their rating or access to batches, but can provide additional insights.”

“Robotics are playing a growing role in the world of e-commerce logistics and fulfillment — where they are seen not just as a way to speed up operations but to drastically reduce the costs of running them — and today a startup developing software and hardware specifically in the area of robot picking is announcing some funding. Nomagic, a Polish startup that has built a robotic arm that can identify and pick out an item from an unordered selection (say, from objects in a box) and then move or pack it into another place, has raised $22 million, funding that it will be using toward both growing and expanding its business.”

“It’s crunch time in the world of instant grocery delivery, with the latest turn representing a big blow specifically in Europe. Berlin-based Gorillas, which raised nearly $1 billion dollars at around a $3 billion post-money valuation only seven months ago — today announced that it would be laying off some 300 employees and exiting four markets — Italy, Spain, Denmark and Belgium — as it seeks to shift from “hyper growth” (read: burning tons of cash to win new customers and expand its operations) to “a clear path to profitability.””

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🎶 Tik Tok Ad Of The Week:

Airbnb “Made Possible by Hosts” campaign

“We invited photographers to take trips on Airbnb with their family and friends, shoot photos of their stays, and send them back to us. We edited the photos together with familiar songs and the result captured the unique experience of traveling on Airbnb, which our Hosts enable. These commercials are part of a series called Made possible by Hosts. Watch the playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...”

What does this have to do with Tik Tok?

This is one of my favourite ever brand campaigns.

It’s simple, elegant and so easy to understand as a consumer.

Everyone loves to travel, enjoy themselves and create memories together.

The clip below is my favourite out of the campaigns ads. (Link)

“After 57 years of marriage, Valenti and Maria Luísa’s love for each other is stronger than ever. So when their grandson Dani took them to the coastal town of Begur, he wasn’t surprised to see them turn the trip into their very own romantic getaway.”

So what?!

This advert which has been streamed across every form of media as a paid advert is now being recreated over and over again organically on social media.

You know you’ve done an advert right when people are re creating it and posting it on their own channels.

With CAC at an all time high, you have to be focussing on community.

How do you pull your customers in, give them so much value that they’re willing give up their precious space on social media to speak about you in such a nice way.

What a magical flywheel of growth Airbnb have managed to achieve.

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📈 Trends Of The Week:

🚁 Drone Delivery

“Drone delivery has been a long time coming, but its actual implementation has largely arrived in fits and starts. Some companies (Alphabet’s Wing) have made decent headway, while others (Amazon) have struggled. There are still plenty of issues to contend with ahead of any sort of mainstream adoption, from regulation to congestion to safety concerns. But a number of parties have found small successes in limited markets. Today, Walmart is expanding its own investment, announcing plans to extend its partnership with DroneUp to include 34 sites across six states. The planned rollout is set to be completed by the end of the year, at which point it will — theoretically — cover up to 4 million U.S. households.”

🚀 Premium Subscriptions

“While Netflix’s downfall has raised speculations about if the SVOD (subscription video on demand) industry has peaked and is beginning a downward trend, new Antenna data supports the contrary. Antenna discovered that U.S. Subscriptions in the Premium SVOD category grew +4.0% quarter over quarter and by +24.7% year over year. The research also shows that there were 37.4 million new gross SVOD customers and a loss of 29.8 million subscribers, leaving a gross of just 7.7 million new subscribers in the first quarter of 2022.”

⬇️ Less Plastic

“Heinz is ready to move on from squeezable plastic bottles into the “Ketchup Bottle of Tomorrow” — a bottle made entirely of sustainably sourced wood pulp. The company announced its partnership with Pulpex to develop a paper bottle for Heinz ketchup. The new bottles will be paper-based, renewable, and recyclable and sourced from sustainable materials, according to a Heinz press release. The paper bottles are said to be a step toward Kraft Heinz’s goals for sustainability, which include making all of its product packaging recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.”

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✍️ Poem Of The Week

I Rise

I will riseAfter every fall.I will riseAnd stand tall.I will riseOver the wall.I will riseAbove them all.Like the sun,Which never dies.Though sets every night,Every day it does rise.Like the oceanWhose tidesMany times they are down,But invariably they rise.Like the trees,From seeds they arise,And heights greatThey rise and rise.After falling once,Twice and thrice,Again and againI will rise and rise.I will riseAfter every fall.After every fallI will rise.

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Happy Existing 👋