2PM - No. 369: Please be good again.

We all want J.Crew to be good again

Brand Equity / A Continuous Lean: In those early days, I was just starting my blog and the guys J.Crew was selling to were the ones coming to ACL to geek out over Aldens or Red Wing boots. J.Crew was the first advertiser I had on the site and I considered many of the people there to be work friends. The NYFW presentations the brand did were huge hits and widely attended by the most important people in fashion. The brand was riding as high as could be and it was cool to see men’s fashion without a capital F was getting so much mainstream attention.

Editor's Note: It can be argued that J. Crew never recovered from the last financial crisis, and that this setback 12 years later served a crippling blow. American apparel retailers dove headfirst into a promotional cycle that conditioned customers to never pay full price, an ultimately unsustainable habit that made it impossible to earn a profit. In a pandemic, turning again to promotions to move inventory had little effect. People aren’t shopping like they were before, and promotions aren’t enough to convince them. This strategy is one that could also set up Gap, Inc. for bankruptcy before long – it’s also one that opened the door for DTC brands like Everlane to come in and show people what they were paying for and why it cost what it did. While this pandemic has ravaged retail, especially apparel retail, it will open doors down the line for new types of businesses.

Featured: The World's Leading Brands Go DTC

eCommerce / The Economist in 2PM: Selling directly to consumers used to be the preserve of upstart brands that would otherwise have been crowded off shop shelves by larger rivals. By cutting out retailers, young firms have won brand loyalty and backing from investors who have poured billions into “direct-to-consumer” companies. But those larger competitors are themselves coming to see the merits of the business model. A number of the world’s best-known brands, hitherto content to rely offline on traditional retailers and online on e-commerce giants, have in recent months built their own direct-selling operations. Others that have long had in-house e-commerce platforms are now relying on them far more heavily to make up for sagging in-store purchases.

Understanding and shaping consumer behavior in the next normal

Consumer Psychology / McKinsey: According to behavioral science, the set of beliefs that a consumer holds about the world is a key influencer of consumer behavior. Beliefs are psychological—so deeply rooted that they prevent consumers from logically evaluating alternatives and thus perpetuate existing habits and routines. Companies that attempt to motivate behavioral change by ignoring or challenging consumers’ beliefs are fighting an uphill battle.

Did Hearst's culture kill Hearst's biggest magazine story?

Digital Media / New York Times: The workplace environment at the company's magazine division was troubled under Troy Young. And it may not have been good for ambitious investigative journalism, either. One evening in August 2018, Maximillian Potter, then a writer for Esquire magazine, was sitting in a restaurant in California's inland empire, trying to persuade a man in his 30s to share his memories of rape and abuse at the hands of powerful men in Hollywood in the late 1990s.

How the coronavirus is changing the way we shop - and what we're buying

eCommerce / CNBC: The coronavirus pandemic is likely to change how and what consumers buy, forcing the retail industry to quickly innovate in a race that's likely to squeeze smaller brands. Retailers were already under pressure prior to the pandemic, struggling to adapt to a growing online world and facing lower margins amid a plethora of competitors.

Daily Harvest, a trendy Jolly Green Giant for the DTC era

DTC Brands / New Yorker: Though most of Daily Harvest’s two hundred employees have been working from home since March 12th, when Drori temporarily closed the company’s Flatiron headquarters, increased demand—seventy per cent more new customers than anticipated—meant that a critical part of the business could not flag: taste-testing potential new products. “Vegetables are hard,” Drori said. “You have to know what to do to make them, like, really amazing.”

Twitter’s security woes included broad access to user accounts

Data / Bloomberg: The controls were so porous that at one point in 2017 and 2018 some contractors made a kind of game out of creating bogus help-desk inquiries that allowed them to peek into celebrity accounts, including Beyonce’s, to track the stars’ personal data including their approximate locations gleaned from their devices’ IP addresses, two of the former employees said.

From Rihanna to Kanye West: why music's biggest stars aren't focused on actual music

New Media / WSJ: One of music's biggest stars has a major "drop" coming this month. There have been teases in the media, an official July 14 announcement on Instagram viewed 4 million times and Twitter messages to hungry fans. "The wait [is] soon done," the star told one. "I got you!"

Note: Congrats to Executive Member and Trapital CEO Dan Runcie for this feature!

Google just upped Its eCommerce game to attract more sellers

eCommerce / Forbes: Google said Thursday that it will drop commission fees for merchants that participate in its Buy on Google program, which allows consumers to search for and check out products directly on its platform without being directed to retailers’ pages. Google also said it’s opening its platform to third-party providers, starting with PayPal and Shopify, to give retailers more choices.

We will need great leadership to navigate through the next industrial revolution.

The United States once led in the effort to digitize its economy. Today, we trail China by a factor of three. Our neglect may have damning consequences without a correction in our course. The direct-to-consumer industry can be myopic, even often worth ignoring. But studying DTC as a philosophy for modernization can be a competitive advantage for entire economies. For a moment, jettison words like luxe, digitally native, lifestyle, or even HENRY – they are symptoms of a shift. The focus here is on the core of that shift.

This has been attributed to Henry Ford, the fabled and complicated engineer, businessman, and founder of Ford Motors. It might as well have been spoken today:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

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