Full letter to Amazon Employees can be found here

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I just finished reading a book entitled “VkusVill: how to a retail revolution by doing everything wrong” by Evgeny Shchepin, an employee of the Russian chain VkusVill (translated as Tasty Town).

I recommend this book to anyone in the consumer retail space for its simple language and mostly the transparency in which the book was written by someone from inside the company and bluntly showing all the errors they made during their scaling and growth process.

We are used mostly to American, Japanese, European, and lately Chinese corporate success stories and books but not anything coming from Russia until I discovered this book, although Russia is one of the world largest consumer retail markets with giants like Magnit, X5 Retail Group and Lenta, to name few with many different store formats and thousands of locations all over the Russian territory.

The book talks about 37 rules that made the success of VkusVill, it really shows “the simple culture” of a company that became a Russian success story and the persistence of the founder and his team to make it work given the good and bad circumstances while keeping a start-up spirit running in the air and without taking 1 single loan and rotating the money generated from actual stores to open new locations!!!

You can download the book from this link: https://vkusvill.ru/en/business/files/VkusVill_Book.pdf

Extracted from their website:

VkusVill started by Andrey Krivenko in Moscow in 2009 as a food retail chain (convenience format; 150 sqm trade area; 2,000 SKUs) offering fresh and healthy food with short shelf life at affordable prices, all under its own brand ‘VkusVill’.

In 2019, the Company reached 1,200 stores in Moscow and other cities of Russia (27 in total), reported $1.3 bn of revenue, and had over 10,000 employees. Explosive growth was always financed with operating cash flow only. VkusVill has always been profitable and cash-positive. No external equity investments and no loans ever since inception.

VkusVill leverages its strong brand equity (healthy products at affordable prices) and its unique IT algorithms which allow for efficient supply chain of products with short shelf life (up to 7 days). It also has super-high customer engagement, achieved via various feedback-collecting channels (mobile apps, social networks, website). ROI when opening a store is over 100%. It all helps the Company to report historical sales CAGR of well over 50% and open stores quickly.

Additional Reading:

VkusVill is planning to launch in the Netherlands & France, read more here

Check the VkusVill store concept by Art. Lebedev Studio at this link

Retailers + Brands and Consumers + Shoppers = it’s love, maybe a 1-sided love affair, but it is there since forever.

Retailers and Brands cannot live in a world where consumers and shoppers do not exist, thus they need to take good care of them and fall in love with them every day and grow this love just to keep them coming their way because they are their only raison-d’être to open their stores every morning.

The retailers BIG Data should consider in the overall perspective:
_ Forecast & Replenishment Demand
_ Historical Purchases
_ Seasonality of Products and Events
_ Local & National Events
_ National and International Holidays
_ Strikes (if any)
_ Promotions & Their Effect
_ Weather Effect

Then in the more personalized part of the love affair with its clientèle:
_ The Store Location
_ The Neighborhood
_ Its Customers & Shoppers Profiles
_ The Surrounding Competition
_ Some Other Specifics

Reading Recommendation

SMALL DATA by Martin Lindstrom

Hired by the world’s leading brands to find out what makes their customers tick, Martin Lindstrom spends three hundred nights a year overseas, closely observing people in their homes. His goal: to uncover their hidden desires and turn them into breakthrough products for the world’s leading brands. In a world besotted by the power of Big Data, he works like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, accumulating small clues to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. Lindstrom connects the dots in this globe-trotting narrative that will fascinate not only marketers and brand managers, but anyone interested in the infinite variations of human behavior.

Small Data combines armchair travel with forensic psychology into an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. It presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create global brands, and along the way, reveals surprising and counterintuitive truths about what connects us all as humans.

Consumer Behavior will never stop surprising us!
And when I say “us”, I mean the people involved in the Retail and FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) industries.

We are all aware of the latest worldwide epidemic of Coronavirus which led to an unexpected “Panic Buying” behavior worldwide on many and different categories and sometimes to real fights in stores and at the shelves just to grab more of a product:

1st category: is simply the face masks, 3-Ply mask, N-95 mask, etc… new names of masks that usually consumers never heard of, all markets are out of stock, factories production output not enough, prices rocketed to an unrealistic level in some markets, and the demand is still high in all markets.

2nd category: and it goes straight after the masks, are the medicines and thermometers. Any type related to flu, fever, throat, vitamins, etc… mostly OTC (over-the-counter) which are the easiest to grab without any prescription.

3rd category: the hand sanitizers, disinfectant wipes, any alcohol-based liquids to kill germs, soap bars, liquid soaps, and… toilet papers, which still no one is able to understand why this category specifically, prices of course surged and major multinational grabbing more and more sales volumes.

4th category: rice and pasta, yes indeed the what-so-called “staple food” are now bought and kept in large quantities in every house worldwide.

I do totally understand when people are panicking, buying and stocking out of fear but in my opinion -Panic Buying- is not necessary especially when you are not really sure about the start and the end of the event itself that brought you to this panic situation and built only on speculations. It also leads to over-consuption, stockpiling and over-spending in many cases but human nature does not count spending when in time of fear and uncertainty.

1 or 10 liters of hand sanitizer, 100 or 500 rolls of toilet paper, 10 or 20 boxes of wipes,… will all finish then what? Back to square 1 to replenish. Psychologists say a mix of herd mentality and over-exposure to coverage of the virus is to blame.

Meanwhile, retail stores are & will be facing 2 majors challenges. The first challenge is the logistical bottleneck to replenish their shelves and the second is the supply shortages mostly linked factories and suppliers.

Which also led many retailers to limit the purchasing quantity by client and many supermarkets were forced to take this action in order to ensure they have enough supply.

Until humanity finds a solution, vaccine or cure for this virus, Keep Your Faith in GOD!
And always remember, everything will be okay in the end, if it is not okay, then it is not the end.

More readings:

COVID-19: Implications for business

Covid 2019 Trackers

Boxed.com is an American online and mobile membership-free wholesale retailer that offers direct delivery of bulk-sized packages via the Boxed app or the website. Boxed product offering has been compared to that of Costco. It is based in New York City and was founded in August 2013 by Chieh Huang, Jared Yaman, Christopher Cheung, and William Fong.

Boxed is headquartered in New York City, and has four fulfillment centers around the country: in New Jersey, Georgia, Nevada and Texas, which allow orders to be delivered within two days. The company also has a support office in San Mateo, California.

In 2016, Boxed was backed by $132 million in funding by investors including GGV Capital and DST Global.

In 2018, Boxed received $111 million in series D funding from Aeon Group, one of the largest retail chains in Japan, valuing the start-up at $600 million.

Lately, the death of retail as we know it is everywhere on the internet. Big brands disappearing overnight, stores shutting down by dozens daily, malls becoming ghost towns and everybody is pointing at the internet being the reason behind this.

Well, I am a big believer of brick-and-mortar retail and no matter how big the internet and Amazon.com will get, in my opinion retail is here to stay but conditionally.

If retailers want to live, they need and should innovate. The beauty of brick-and-mortar retail is the flexibility.

The flexibility of changing what is not working, finding new ways to make their stores better and more attractive, spending more time on their shoppers behavior, re-engineering their concepts, analyzing their data, adapting new communications channels, taking a step back and looking at the wider picture of the situation and correct things.

It is not true that the internet is killing the retail when the internet retailers are opening physical shops. This simply means the actual business model of the retailers is not working anymore and they need change.

Change is not easy, especially for the old school retailers. with large, very large stores, hundreds of employees on the floor, endless aisles and a heavy machine to operate. The new retail business model should be lean to survive, with a very lean structure just to quickly adapt to changes, move on and live a happy retail life.

Easy.com is a well known British group having under its umbrella an endless number of brands combined with the word Easy, their most famous one is the low-cost airline EasyJet, the founder of Easy Group is Stelios. Not long ago, Easy Group also launched EasyFoodStore with a very simple business line “No expensive brands, just food honestly priced”.

Yesterday, Carrefour Belgium opened its 1st store called Easy Market along with their Carrefour icon and previously they opened also in Belgium 2 stores called Easy Caddy without any link to the Carrefour brand. The main idea behind these 2 concepts is to test a low-cost stores which are too big for the Carrefour Express concept and too small for the Carrefour Market concept. Both Easy Market and Easy Caddy use the famous orange color used by EasyGroup for all its brands and products.

EasyGroup is very keen about its branding and colors, they have a dedicated page on their website for this matter entitled Brand Thieves, we need to see where this going to get on the brand trademarking side, the word easy and the orange color, unless there is a deal about it.

If you have any information concerning this, please feel free to share it.

I was kind of disappointed seeing no one is interested in “offline” consumer and retail (except if you are an online or e-commerce oriented). A very big industry and sector that touch the lives of millions if not billions worldwide but investors most probably prefer the fast bucks lane and are in continuous search for the next Facebook or Uber.

I would like to launch a consumer & retail oriented incubator and accelerator with no geographic restrictions, but looking for people sharing the same vision and dream to build it together.

If you are a consumer and retail incubator and accelerator that I missed finding in a way or another, please get in touch.

if you are a consumer and retail passionate, let’s do this together.

Being smart and wise come with time, experience and mainly age, anyone can easily decide which path to follow and practice to be smart and later wise by being the CEO of their own life and evaluating people, promoting, demoting and/or terminating their presence.

And when it comes to making decisions and choices, things get complicated depending on your age, the same question or decision is being looked at very differently for someone in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s. The older you are, the more you will say I wish I knew this few years ago.

Personally I wish I have read the below quote many years ago, but surely it is never too late to catch up!

photo credit: https://unsplash.com/

It is the 31st of December and we are getting away from an another ~365-days around the sun~ and welcoming a new round!

And suddenly everybody remember that it is time for resolutions that most of them won’t survive till the end of January of the new year or even mid-Jan and most probably the superstar of resolutions is “I want to lose some weight” which won’t work for 99.99% of the people making that specific resolution.

Okay including me ;-)

While going thru my flipboard yesterday, an article entitled “16 Career-Boosting Lists to Make in 2016” got my attention, written by Adrian Granzella Larssen, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Muse.

I suggest you read the article and try making the 16 lists or some of them which looks to be fun doing.

1. Companies you want to work for.
2. 10 innovative ideas off the top of your head.
3. People you should know to get ahead.
4. Books you want to read.
5. What you want to happen in 2016.
6. What you want to leave in 2015.
7. Your career bucket list.
8. “Got a minute?” to-dos.
9. “Got a slow day?” to-dos.
10. A “not right now” list.
11. Your biggest accomplishments.
12. Lunches to make.
13. What you’re grateful for.
14. Things you do better than most people.
15. Things you want to try.
16. Sayings to live by.

Happy New Year!

And some of these people are so unethical in business that they don’t bother themselves calling or emailing saying that they could not keep the promise they made to you and you keep waiting and wondering what you should do next.

Then and suddenly they give you a small light of hope that they did not totally forget about you and you are on their list but they need more time to come back to you and early next week or the week after you will have the answer you are expecting.

As time is passing by, you start asking yourself, should I call , should I email a reminder, do they care for their business, am I valuable for their business? And at one point you get angry and feel the urge of calling this guy and saying whatever you feel about him.

But wait!

Why should you do that? You have other options, if he does not care about his business or clients, why should you? Use your other options, move forward and forgive his inappropriate and indelicate behavior, but don’t forget because one day he might come back asking for your business, then would be the right time to teach him a lesson!

You can also read my previous related post entitled “When In A Moment Of Anger“.

I am a big fan of Jeff Bezos and this is not a secret on my blog, the guy is into retail and consumers. I was reading an article some time ago about his apparent heir to run the company and the article starts where the 50 years old, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said he’s having so much fun that he still dances into the office each morning.

Should not we all dance into our offices every morning?

Indeed we should even if we don’t like our jobs (millions of you out there), we should not keep a small detail or a colleague or a direct manager with a bad attitude or character ruin that morning dance, the endless flow of work and daily tasks should not stop the flow of music.

Yes this office dancing theory looks very perfect but do your best and put some extra effort to make it happen every morning, it will help you moving forward.

Jeff Bezos photo credit: Emmanuel Dunand/Getty

I started few days ago reading Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business written by Hiroshi Mikitani the CEO of Rakuten.

I will not discuss the detailed content of his book which is extremely interesting to read for every person involved in daily consumer related business activities not matter the industry, even that his company is mostly focused on online marketplaces but a lot can be learned from this gentleman and the culture he created for Rakuten in Japan and its subsidiaries worldwide.

Mikitani is a visionary and this is very obvious in his book or when you take a look at the global success of Rakuten which means “optimism” in Japanese, he started a very small company and took it big and i am sure his dreams are way beyond what he already achieved.

You can feel how Mikitani is keen about lifting every one around him up to the top and setting his standards very high, his vision of going global and making all the needed efforts to achieve it without losing focus on the core business and the fundamentals.

He easily can be an excellent business mentor for many <failed CEOs who unfortunately think they have what it takes to run a company or create a business culture> thru his book at a very marginal cost, by just buying his book(s).

But the question is if humans are not resistant to change, the positive change!

I am looking forward to finish this book to start his latest one entitled The Power to Compete: An Economist and an Entrepreneur on Revitalizing Japan in the Global Economy.

Rakuten Group is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer- and business-focused services including e-commerce, eBooks & eReading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. Rakuten Group is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania.

Friends, not the tv series, but the friends we have in our lives and who are divided on many categories. Every now and then we look at these categories, we try to sift them and mostly we move friends from a category to another given the moments and experiences we have lived and this behavior looks so natural as humans.

Then you meet 1 new person, in a social gathering or at your workplace or thru common friends.

At the beginning, you are cautious then with time you start discovering how good this person is and how much value and positivity he is bringing into your life. With more time, you get to know how ethical and transparent he is to this friendship, and how this person sometimes becomes a mentor on many and different subjects (life and/or business), then you realize that all these positive qualities and attitudes are given to you without expecting anything in return while he keeps pushing you all the way up by being extremely supportive and without judging you.

Yes, quality friends can still be found! I have found one.

Dear Brian Acton and Jan Koum,

I would like to thank you for bringing the Whatsapp application into our lives, on Android, iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia but there is one big problem you did not pay attention to.

Your problem are your Lebanese users.

While I am not sure how many users you have in Lebanon, but i can imagine they are a lot and these are dangerous users. Because instead of driving safely, they are busy using your application.

Since forever, whiskey, beer and other alcohol producers used to market the sentence “consume responsibly” or “don’t drink & drive” in all languages, because people believed that alcohol is the main reason for car accidents, but I don’t think it is anymore and especially in Lebanon.

Lebanese are so busy Whatsapp-ing while driving and this is becoming more and more dangerous, it is becoming so obvious when a car is zigzagging that its driver is not focused on the road but trying to find the right letter to type on his smartphone keyboard.

Now that Whatsapp is owned by Facebook after your $19 Billion deal with them, maybe it is time to try coming with an option to disable the application while in motion inside a car.

My idea might look weird, but surely will save lots of lives.

Thank you
a Whatsapp user

The above photo appeared originally on the Mashable website post entitled A Glowing Russia Resurrects Soviet-Era Parade After Crimea Conquest.

When scrolling the post, i stopped at the photo where this old lady is proudly wearing a t-shirt showing in the background the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin and on the front the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev but also at the same time carrying a BILLA bag, a European supermarket chain originating from Austria.

A contradiction. [Difference Between Communism and Capitalism]

When younger, this same lady had to wait for hours to buy a product from a retail store, a block of cheese, some bananas or cigarettes, this is the kind of stories I used to hear when I was a kid about the Soviet block when we used to enjoy living in a free market and had the chance to buy anything we want as long as we had the money for it.

Nowadays she can visit any retailer in Russia to buy anything she likes without having to wait, except at the check-outs, but the question is, can she afford it?

I also remember a Slovak friend, telling me once over a dinner in Bratislava, “when i was a kid during communism, i used to spend time with my friends dreaming about what we might be possibly missing on what is behind those mountains, and now all i have to do is to drive behind those mountains for a dinner or some shopping or anything else”, and what is behind those mountains is Austria.

If you ever visit Russia, you will easily realize on the streets, that it will be hard for the communist system to have its come back, but nevertheless, some have the right to dream about it (what is called Democracy).

And if anyone can translate what the t-shirt of this old lady in the photo is saying , that would be great.

Gulfood was held in Dubai this year from the 23rd till the 27th of February. And like every year thousands of suppliers, exhibitors and visitors from all over the world come to the show to meet old clients and seek new leads in their businesses.

Below is my short analysis about the visitors profiles (with a little sarcasm for some categories).

The catalog collectors: people who just go around all the exhibition halls to pick up every single catalog from all companies and after going home, most probably these will end up on the garbage, without mentioning the effort they put in place to carry them from hall to another.

The free food seekers: people who visit this exhibition or any other food related show just for the food they can get for free while strolling around the halls and end up sick because they eat more than their stomach can take, but simply because it is free.

The sample collectors: this category mostly attack on the last day of the show, but you can meet them everyday in the halls of the show, just dropping by and asking if any free samples are available to give away. the last day is catastrophic because of this category.

The bag collectors: 1 bag can take another 100 bags inside of it, these people have the hobby of collecting lots of bags, to be used on a later stage for different purposes and these can also be from the catalogs and samples collectors categories.

The Mobile Suppliers: different products suppliers who do not participate in the show, but come over as visitors and try to catch the maximum number of clients by going from booth to another and offering their services. At one point, they become very disturbing.

Price Shoppers: these are mainly traders and wholesalers who would like to buy specific products, but visit the show and move from a stand to another and try to make quick deals (which is not why such exhibitions exist), they stop at every booth for few seconds, ask about the price of a specific product and move on, always annoying visitors.

Smart Ass Businessmen: this is a funny category for me, because every time they enter any booth, most probably they are quickly spotted, because of their approach and the quality of questions they ask, losers and good luck for them.

The real businessmen: of course this is the category every exhibitor is seeking to meet during the show and there are plenty of them. Once they enter the booth, you can identify them because they behave differently and once the conversation starts, you can quickly tell they are serious and you would like to pursue business with them for the long run.

Sometime ago I was reading an article over the net about managing your moments of anger and how to reply to angry emails and keep the life and business ethics running smoothly without ruining your relationships. The writer of the article was proposing to start a new email and writing in it all what you are feeling, good and bad things (but most probably you will include the bad things) then not sending the email to the person in question but instead to save it in your draft folder and come back to it after a period of time, till you cool down.

Few days later and luckily after reading the article, I had to deal with someone (will keep calling him someone in the blog post instead of losing time finding him a more appropriate word, as it is not worth it). This someone behaved in a very weird way (and not for the 1st time) and I was so angry that I wanted to say many things I felt just in his face and suddenly I remembered this famous article and I directly went to my Gmail, and started writing until I decided that it was enough and without reading back what I wrote I saved the email in the draft folder.

I came back to it few times later and it was so interesting seeing what people can say in a moment of anger (no matter if what you are saying is right or wrong), at one point I really felt relieved because I did not send the email, not because I am afraid of this someone, but because I think some people will not change no matter what you tell them, or how nice or bad you are to them.

And because those who don’t understand your silence, will never understand your words. Cheers To Life!!!

Then everybody wants to be successful in their work and life, and to be successful we should try, try hard and even harder. Success does not come while you are sitting back having a beer. You need to work hard, try, learn, fail and then try again and again. Lots of people will try to stop and discourage you, VCs will tell you things you don’t want to hear, they will send you to burn in hell with all your excel financials that you spent days and night fixing meticulously. And you say to yourself, I will keep trying.

And suddenly something bad happens in your life, a family issue, you lose money in the stock market or even get fired from your job and the only choices on the table are between awful and shitty. So you are standing alone with no idea what to do next.

And this is the time when you need to reset.

When a relationship ends (no matter what kind of relation it is) it is a matter of fact. You don’t face a gradual ending, it just stops and ends. And it takes you long time to reflect on what happened and why it happened. But believe me, the more you reflect on the reason, the more you will be delayed in doing more interesting things. And this brings a quote from Mad Men: “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened”.

Take a mental break from all your ideas, projects and dreams and try to come back with a fresh mind. This looks easy to write in a blog post, it’s hard to do, but not impossible to achieve and then make a heavy comeback and most probably you will think that what ever went wrong was one of the best things that could have ever happened to you because you were so focused on the end that you missed everything in between.

After feeling energized, enter an empty room, and write every idea you have on a white paper and place them on the floor, take a wide look at them and start prioritizing by numbering them and then plan how you want to achieve them. If you have tried previously on the same ideas and failed then try a different way that may lead you to the same result.

But you will be vulnerable at this stage in your life, because telling people what you believe in is quite hard and it takes lots of determination. And it won’t happen overnight, but surely you will find some people to connect with.

Most important is to make choices that can make you happy in life and always remember what Tony Gaskin said: “If You Don’t Build Your Dreams, Someone Will Hire You To Help Build Theirs”.

If you are an employee, it means you have a boss. No matter at which level you are working, it means you have a boss. If you are a newcomer to any business or holding a managerial position, then you have a boss.

And as we would all agree, bosses come in 2 different packages: the clever and the stupid.

If you have a clever boss, then you are in heaven. And most of the times, you would wish you are as clever as your boss is. You admire his personality, his attitude, his character. The way he is managing people around him, taking decisions, playing smart games, giving you the option of having a brain exercise every day, for every case or business situation and the best part is when you learn from him. This learning would be your asset, taking advantage of him or even abusing his cleverness (that is fine for a good cause). Leaving the office every day and taking home with you something new originating from your clever boss and feeling happy because he is challenging you to find solutions, to come up with decisions, the right ones.

This is the ultimate dream of every employee, being respected and appreciated by his boss for the job he is doing, for the effort he is putting in place to make things happen and when you find out that your boss is aligned with you then you will be happy employee.

If you have a stupid boss, then you are in hell. Things will by themselves become hard to achieve. It would be almost impossible to convince such a boss with anything you know or you experienced. And it is quite weird that stupid bosses are most of the time stubborn people (but luckily you might also find a stupid boss who is ready to learn, good luck). These stupid bosses are hard to please, no matter what you do or the result you present, they are always not happy and they want more without taking into consideration the variables involved in the story.

This is the ultimate nightmare of every employee, being stuck with a stupid boss and trying hard everyday to keep his mood the same or doing things he is not convinced in 1st place to do, but just applying the orders he is receiving, without mentioning the tiring mental situation he has to survive with such a boss.

You might be wondering what kind of boss I am dealing with???

Photos Credit: http://www.neatoshop.com/product/Clever-Stupid