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By Posted on Posted in 2018, E-tailing, Entrepreneurship, Hard Discount, Retail No Comments

Boxed.com is an American online and mobile membership-free wholesale retailer that offers direct delivery of bulk-sized packages via the Boxed app or the website. Boxed product offering has been compared to that of Costco. It is based in New York City and was founded in August 2013 by Chieh Huang, Jared Yaman, Christopher Cheung, and William Fong.

Boxed is headquartered in New York City, and has four fulfillment centers around the country: in New Jersey, Georgia, Nevada and Texas, which allow orders to be delivered within two days. The company also has a support office in San Mateo, California.

In 2016, Boxed was backed by $132 million in funding by investors including GGV Capital and DST Global.

In 2018, Boxed received $111 million in series D funding from Aeon Group, one of the largest retail chains in Japan, valuing the start-up at $600 million.

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration 1 Comment

Part 1 – Part 2

Over the weekend, we have decided to work on some more logo options for the brand name of my daughter: “La P’tite Parfumerie” including the very 1st design (No. 1).

We will go together slowly thru them maybe tonight and meanwhile feel free to vote for your favorite logo, it might help us decide.

If we don’t reach any final decision with this set, we might run a 3rd round of new logos.

To be continued …

all-logos_600

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration No Comments

For those who missed the Part 1 of this series, you can start reading here.

So after a small brainstorming session, my daughter wrote down few names she had in mind for her future business, the perfumes store.

We went together thru the list and ended up picking: La P’tite Parfumerie, sorry for her being Frenchy, she is French educated in a Francophone country :-)

Dad, can you make a logo for the name?

Sure sweetheart, just give me 1-2 days.

After showing her the below logo, she goes, hmmm, it’s nice “but” can you make some other options so I can choose from.

Great, she is on the right track!

To be continued …

la ptite parfumerie

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration 1 Comment

lemonade stand Yesterday evening I arrived home and my daughter, who is 9, looked quite busy then suddenly approached me saying: I have decided what I will do when I grow up, I want to open a perfume store with my 2 best friends, I will ask them to check if they accept being in this with me but I only have one condition, I want to be the manager and run the business, they will be helping me.

I was quite astonished hearing this, me, who spent and is still spending a large amount of time chasing VCs and investors to launch my own retail startup.

I looked inside her innocent eyes which had no clue about the complex process of funding and launching a new business but at the same time saw the sparkle and enthusiasm.

And what is your plan for this business, how are you going to start? I ask.

First I am going to name the store/business, what names do you propose something nice and short like Zara, Mango or similar to these brands?

And why don’t you try naming it yourself, this is your business, you should come up with name? And let us say we manage finding a name for your business, what is next?

Next, I will start writing down the name of the perfumes brands that I will sell in the store, Lancome, Lacoste, Mont Blanc, Estee Lauder, Burberry, … please help with more names daddy!

And I propose: what about in between naming the store and the list of products, we include the design on the store and maybe later after naming it, I help you creating a logo for it and draw some design with some colors, so you can have an idea how it is gonna look like?

And she agrees.

So now we are in the process of brainstorming for a business name and in the meantime she will ask her 2 best friends if they want to be her business partners.

To be continued … in case the project is not dropped.

By Posted on Posted in CEO, Entrepreneurship, France No Comments

Nicolas Riché is the CEO of Columbus Café, a French chain of coffee shops, who went on Patron Ingocnito (Undercover Boss) on the French TV channel M6 as an undercover employee in his own stores to check how employees react, their needs, the stores problems and at the end, he revealed his real identity to the 4 employees with whom he spent 1 full day separately, training and going thru their daily tasks, after asking them to come to the main office in Paris and offered them many different ways to improve themselves and the store services to serve the brand differently and more positively.

You can watch the full video at this link (in French).

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Ideas No Comments

So you want to be an entrepreneur like everybody else. For the last 2-3 years, i have heard or read this word almost everyday, from the kid who is 10 and came up with an app, to the average employee who hates his boss and wants to quit and start his own business.

Being an entrepreneur is a wonderful thing, but don’t forget, you need to work harder than before to get where you want to go. But with time I started hating the word, every time i hear it, it puts me in a bad mood and don’t really know why.

So you have a business plan for an idea or project and you want to be an entrepreneur. You dig here and there and end up having 30 minutes with a VC. You go to the meeting, enter a big room with nice chairs and video projector and during the conversation, someone asks you, “what problem is your product gonna solve?”.

Excuse me?

Why do you think I am here to solve a problem or who told you my idea is about solving problems. I just got an idea and I want to execute it differently.

No matter what article, blog post or book I read about VCs, entrepreneurship or ideas, they always bring up the problem of solving a problem.

What about 20, 30 or 40 years ago, when people used to open businesses around the corner, was it to solve a problem? or to make a living? or they had an idea that sometimes turned into pure gold?

What about I take a product that already exist and do it in a different way? What about I copy someone else better? What about I just come up with an idea that does not solve any problem but is a nice idea?

When Jeff Bezos created Amazon.com, he simply wanted to build the world largest bookstore, was this a solution for a problem? Then he started selling other products, what solutions did he bring to DVDs or CDs or electronics? There are electronics shops in New York City and Brooklyn who have bigger stock and larger selection than Amazon.com, and Jeff is still making good earnings.

So whenever you have an idea, it does not necessarily need to be a solution for a problem, just go and make your idea and dream come true.