Shopify and the Hard Thing About Easy Things

“Amazon is designed to commoditize products to the lowest common denominator of what they stand for,” Joey Zwillinger, Allbirds’s co-founder

We explore some inconvenient questions. Retail as a Service is great for brands to test ideas. But are they going to make venture-scale money? Most of these companies run on VC dollars.

Brandless was primarily felled by a thesis that never panned out — that there were young consumers who craved a digital middle ground between dollar stores and malls. People who were price-sensitive, cared somewhat about quality, but not about brands. Walmart for hipsters. Trader Joe's for millennials.