  | Book Details Title: Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy |
Book DescriptionReview “Keen storytelling and painstaking reporting . . . [with] the pacing of a literary thriller. . . . [Ingrassia] ferrets out the most compelling, consequential stories and people behind the direct-to-consumer revolution.” ―The New York Times Book Review”Far more than a journalistic take on unorthodox online retailers . . . [Ingrassia] offers an insightful description of how entrepreneurs armed with little more than an idea have undermined powerful incumbents in industries that once enjoyed tantalizing profit margins.” ―The Wall Street Journal“Billion Dollar Brand Club is a fascinating, eye-opening adventure tour through the companies remaking our economy and lives. Lawrence Ingrassia’s stories of how start-ups have transformed nearly everything―from how we buy and sell to how we work and live―are critical reading. If you want to understand why you’re buying razors, or mattresses, or nearly everything else in a totally new way, then BUY THIS BOOK.” ―Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better“Lawrence Ingrassia has given us an exhilarating behind-the-scenes look at the personalities and processes shaping what we buy and how. Every page is full of insight and real-world stories about what it takes to create a product and brand that will be around for the long term in a world where things move faster than ever.” ―Eric Ries, author of The Startup Way and The Lean Startup, and founder and CEO of LTSE “Billion Dollar Brand Club chronicles the seismic changes rocking retail. Lawrence Ingrassia does a masterful job illuminating the new breed of internet-forged brands and the savvy entrepreneurs who have overthrown decades of thinking about what it means to sell.” ―Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store“In the last few years, upstart brands have come out of nowhere to take over huge businesses. Think Warby Parker, Casper, and Dollar Shave Club. How did they do it? That’s the question everyone, from consumers to the big brands who previously owned these categories, wants to know. Lawrence Ingrassia’s engaging, must-read new book, Billion Dollar Brand Club, has the answers.” ―Bethany McLean, coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here“In Silicon Valley, billion dollar companies were once called ‘unicorns’ because they were so rare. These businesses have disrupted the entire retail sector, but until now no one has really understood how they did it. Lawrence Ingrassia’s fascinating, fast-paced, and truly elucidating book details how a herd of unicorns changed the way we live, and will continue to disrupt the business world for decades to come.” ―Nick Bilton, special correspondent, Vanity Fair, and author of Hatching Twitter Read more About the Author Lawrence Ingrassia is a former business and economics editor and deputy managing editor at the New York Times, having previously spent twenty-five years at the Wall Street Journal, as Boston bureau chief, London bureau chief, money and investing editor, and assistant managing editor. He also served as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. The coverage he directed won five Pulitzer Prizes as well as Gerald Loeb Awards and George Polk Awards. He lives in Los Angeles. Read more Customers Review: I have wondered, for a number of years, if companies such as Warby Parker, and a number of other direct to consumer companies (D2C) were real or if they offered that much of a better deal than regular consumer channels. As I am near retirement, I am a little more leery of new brands than are younger generations.This book looks at a number of companies that are D2C and how they were created. It also studies what they offer and how they manage to offer it much more inexpensively than regular consumer channels. It looks at venture capital funding, how the ideas for the products come about and how they determine if they can actually succeed against established brands already in the market.In a number of instances, established brands blew these new companies off, until they saw their share of market (and profits start to be effected). Then the companies had to make a decision about what to do…in some cases, they started their own D2C offerings or, the more likely route; they chose to buy up the startup and keep running it.The book also looks at Amazon and how smaller companies are skipping starting with their own websites and are using the Amazon platform to sell their products. Using Amazon cuts a lot of problems….creating and driving customers to their own website, warehousing and shipping, etc. The biggest problem for companies using Amazon as their store was to figure out how to make products better and get good reviews.Although I am not a business man and know only enough about computers to write reviews and shop online, I found the book fascinating and easy to read. The author deciphers some of the trickier terms and explains what they refer to. Overall, an excellent read! | |
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