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- The Accelerator Conundrum
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E-Commerce
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: How do you compete with these hundred different competitors? JT Marino: We built the company our way. We cannot compete the same way they do. If we want to compete like a Casper, we cannot beat them dollar per dollar in ad spend. We have to be very careful how we purchase our
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Where was that factory? JT Marino: That was in Southern California. They were willing to take a chance. Their primary business wasn’t even mattresses. We had to go to a factory that didn’t produce mattresses and convince them to produce them. As far as the marketing side goes, we were using family, friends,
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 2)
JT Marino: We shut the site down and quit our jobs. We officially launched Tuft & Needle in October of 2012. The primary differentiation for us was that we were direct to consumer. We had just one model. This was very contrarian to the entire industry. There’s no company that makes one model. There’s firm,
Bootstrapping to $100M+ from Arizona: JT Marino, CEO of Tuft & Needle (Part 1)
Online mattress is the hottest e-commerce category these days, and here is yet another one delivering venture scale growth without venture capital. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? JT Marino: I was born in Phoenix,
Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Daniel Gulati, Comcast Ventures (Part 6)
Sramana Mitra: You may have read my article on this subject especially in the context of fashion. I did the first e-commerce in fashion with exactly this premise – that it needs to be a personalized store. You have to use technology in the backend, and it’s a very expensive technology to build. Daniel Gulati:
Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Daniel Gulati, Comcast Ventures (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: The part of retail that I find interesting is the niche. Let’s take fashion. I don’t wear big designers as much anymore. I also shop a lot when we’re traveling in esoteric designers that don’t have big footprints. These kinds of things are not accessible. If there’s a small retailer that assembles and
Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Daniel Gulati, Comcast Ventures (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: I’ve thought about this quite a lot. My observation is that you have to have private-labeled brands to compete with Amazon at this point. In whatever category that you’re working in, you need a product that you can differentiate with. You can’t really differentiate on the basis of other people’s products that easily
Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Daniel Gulati, Comcast Ventures (Part 3)
Daniel Gulati: What’s changed with Amazon is, historically, you used to be able to red-line categories as Amazon-proof. Amazon is an intent-based environment and doesn’t really do well on discovery. They’re not going to get fashion, the inspiration, and emotional connection of buying a $300 dress online. On the grocery front, Amazon doesn’t have a
