Friday Tidbits

Gliebers Dresses: If you're looking for older articles, just click this link, and you'll get every article.

Eddie Bauer Bankruptcy: Some of you have sent me e-mails about this. One of the biggest challenges of the bricks/clicks multichannel model is debt. Now granted, Eddie Bauer's debt came from the Spiegel meltdown earlier in the decade, but the concept still holds --- you take a largely variable cost model (catalog or e-commerce) and build out a fixed cost channel financed with debt. Yuk. E-commerce is going through multichannel evolution as we speak, as customers migrate from e-mail to social media, static websites to mobile websites, etc. Let the lesson of retail/debt be heard. E-commerce will have very different dynamics without as much debt/fixed-costs as newer online channels invade, but the shift between channels, in my opinion, will happen faster and with very different and potentially unstable consequences --- in social media, take MySpace as an example.

Internet Retailer Conference: Thanks to Internet Retailer for inviting me to speak, I'm always grateful for these opportunities. If you want to see what folks thought of the conference, as it was happening, give this a read.