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Why Bulletin Is The WeWork Of Retail http://ift.tt/2BQInvi PSFK sat down with Bulletin co-founder and CEO Alana Branston to discuss how the company makes it easier for brands to rent space and track their in-store sales Despite the fact that we now have interactive dressing rooms, smart mirrors and virtual racks in stores today, when it comes to procuring the actual four walls within which these cutting edge innovations are housed, the retail real estate game today looks close to the way it did 50 years ago. No matter whether a brand is super established or venture-backed, the barrier to entry for companies to move into a retail space is incredibly high—so high in fact that many decide to remain in the pure-play online space or sell through demand-fulfillment giants like Amazon. But what if you could facilitate a drawbridge for these brands? Enter Bulletin—often called the ‘WeWork of retail’—is doing just that by enabling online brands to rent sections of its physical stores on a month-to-month basis. Currently operating in New York’s SoHo and Williamsburg neighborhoods, Bulletin lets brands decide which of their products get sold, the pricing and how they’re displayed. Its female team celebrates women with every inch of its stores, through its design, shopping experience, product selection and programming. Each item it sells was dreamed up by a female entrepreneur, and every event it hosts is meant to inspire and bring women together. Its stores feature products from female-led brands that, until now, have only sold on the Internet. The coolest part? Bulletin gives 10% of all store profits to Planned Parenthood of NYC. PSFK sat down with co-founder and CEO Alana Branston to discuss how Bulletin is able to create stores with timely, reactive content, making it easier for brands to rent space and track their in-store sales. PSFK: What are the biggest shifts and trends you see in retail today? Traditional brick-and-mortar retail as it exists right now is this very cumbersome, outdated, long process to go through. You’re signing leases, you’re building stores, you’re hiring staff. It’s very difficult for a brand, whether they’re venture-backed or super established to quickly get into a space. So the subscription model or a pop-up model or whatever it is makes it easier for brands to quickly get access to a physical space to get their products out there. It’s really important to lower that barrier to entry as much as possible.
The nature of the way we structured the store helps us do this. It’s not like a traditional brand where you’re like, “OK, we only do apparel and we just put out new stuff every season.” We curate our stores around editorial concepts. That’s another thing that technology really helps us with. For us to onboard a new brand only takes about five days from the time they apply to the time they get their product in the store, which is much, much faster than most retail spaces. For a lot of these brands that have built up this amazing online presence, all of their customers have only been able to interact with them via their Instagram Stories or a little e-commerce site that you can only see on a laptop. We know that our customer is very interested in female empowerment. They’re very politically active. They’re very progressive. We’ve built our store experiences around that. Could you give us a hint of what’s on the horizon for Bulletin in 2018 and beyond? We’ll be opening a store in LA in 2018. We have a lot of brands that we work with and out there. It should be really exciting for us. Then, we’ll continue to expand in New York. The strategy for us is to build stores around editorial concepts, which is something that we’ll continue to do because it’s worked so well for us. We just launched the Bulletin Mini Mall in Flatiron, which has been great. We’re now starting to come up with other stories that we are looking to tell. What would be fun to show in a store? And what kind experiences does a store’s customer want? We are really building those editorial concepts around that. The other thing that has been interesting to see is the types of brands that work with us. Even in the past three months or so, a lot of the brands that are applying to sell in our stores aren’t traditional brands. A lot of them just sell their products on Instagram. Some of them have a really popular Instagram account and have decided to start creating products to basically monetize the audience that they have. For a lot of them, retail and creating product and selling product is still new. It has not been the cut-and-dry, “You’re a brand, you’re established, you’re ready to do physical retail.” Because of our platform and how easy we’ve made it to sell in a physical store, so many of these brands only exist on Instagram. Also, for the customer, they’re like, “Oh my God. My favorite Instagram profile is now creating all these fun products. I can actually go shop those products in person,” which hasn’t really happened before.
Mobile Marketing via PSFK http://www.psfk.com/ December 22, 2017 at 11:09AM
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