Kanye's Hoodie & GameStop's Dream Team
+ Amazon Fulfillment Centers (lack of) bathroom breaks, how a suitcase brand started with a book, & Ben and Jerry's early marketing tactics
Happy Sunday everyone!
Kanye’s Yeezy x Gap Hoodie, dubbed the “perfect hoodie” sold out in 24 hours…
And then Gap’s stock surged 6%.
But the real “Gap” in this story? The crazy gap between the $32 regular Gap hoodie and the $90 Kanye hoodie (which both look remarkably similar)…
Enjoy today’s business story bites and an awesome opportunity from our sponsor: Faves.
🎮 GameStop’s Team
📲 TikTok Video Views: 40,700 (watch here)
Gamestop is stealing from Jeff Bezos.
After retail investors saved them from certain doom, it should be known, that Gamestop isn’t playing games anymore.
Its new chairman Ryan Cohen is pulling a Phil Jackson because he's built a dream team.
Gamestop's new CEO, CTO, CGO, CFO, and COO all have something in common: they're all former Amazon executives.
The conversion of the struggling brick-and-mortar retailer into an e-commerce behemoth would necessitate laser-like focus and determination. So what did Chairman Ryan Cohen do? He hired the best of the best to lead this push.
GameStop is still losing money and it's obvious that if it can succeed going forward it has to win in e-commerce. With this new team, GameStop is looking more and more like a championship contender.
🚰 Jeff Bezos’ Labor
📲 TikTok Video Views: 136,600 (Watch Here)
Jeff Bezos wants you to pee in a bottle.
To understand how the richest man in the world got to where he is you need to understand his management and how he runs Amazon Fulfillment Centers.
In these facilities, various sensors and cameras track the individual output of each worker. That data is then averaged across all the workers to calculate the making rate. If a worker isn't hitting this rate, computers will beep at them with warnings. Too many of them can result in termination.
It's this Orwellian environment that has led to reports of workers peeing in bottles and an injury rate for Amazon employees that far exceeds factory averages.
Since the initial report in 2018, this issue has drawn massive amounts of attention from the media and investors and has prompted lawmakers and activists to investigate the matter.
Shortly after investigations, Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 per hour as well as full health care benefits.
💼 Jen Rubio’s Coffee Table Book
📲 TikTok Video Views: 50,200 (Watch Here)
This woman sold $450,000 of products without a product.
Jen Rubio is the founder of AWAY, a luggage startup worth over $1B, and the story of how she got it off the ground is as bizarre as it is genius.
By 2015, Jen had designed the perfect suitcase but her factory didn't have it ready by the holidays as she planned. As a marketing expert, Jen knew she couldn't miss the holiday shopping blitz.
So she interviewed 50 travel influencers and made a coffee table book showcasing their favorite destinations.
Inside the $225 coffee table book titled The Places We Return To was a pre-order voucher for the suitcase. In a few weeks, Jen sold 2,000 books, which also meant she sold out her first batch of suitcases that didn't exist yet.
In the first year, AWAY made $12 million and today, AWAY is worth almost $1.5 billion.
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🍦 Ben and Jerry’s Protest
📲 TikTok Video Views: 18,100 (Watch Here)
These two hippies sued the Pillsbury Doughboy and became millionaires.
Childhood friends Ben and Jerry launched an ice cream startup in the 70's and by 1984 their sales were skyrocketing in the Boston area.
That was until the Pillsbury Doughboy tried to crush them.
Pillsbury had just acquired Haagen-Dasz and threatened to stop supplying to stores if they also sold Ben and Jerry's ice cream. So to try and save their company, they launched a marketing campaign around the slogan “What’s the Doughboy Afraid Of?”
They put the slogan and a phone number on their pints so their customers could call and leave their contact information in order to be sent a “Doughboy Kit.” The kit contained pre-written letters to the chairman of Pillsbury and the Federal Trade Commission.
After a few weeks, so many letters were sent that Pilsbury was forced to back off.
Today, Ben and Jerry's is a $6B brand and this story confirms that the biggest asset to any startup is its most passionate customers.
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