Shopping online for fashion – this has been a big debate since a very long time. Retailers realized the potential of distributing their merchandise online and also the necessity to stay competitive in the market. Basically any bigger player in the fashion industry has an online shop nowadays.

If you compare shopping online and offline, the online experience does not really reflect the experience that most shoppers are looking for. You need to go from one website to another and sometimes you would find a department store, like de Bijenkorf. Still, these stores have physical locations, a sophisticated distribution system and warehouses. Now let’s think about this quote that has appeared quite frequently in the last months:

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

Continue reading The new models of fashion e-commerce →

In the past few years, Uber has tried out a variety of new services, ranging from on-demand picnics and ice cream trucks to healthcare. The result is “a reputation for testing the market with little things to whet the appetite to then do something big” (Biggs, 2014). For decades, Ansoff’s (1957) framework has been used to map such growth opportunities, but applying this framework to businesses with a multi-sided platform is difficult. In this blog post, I therefore propose a revised version of this framework, called: Growth strategies for two-sided businesses, and provide further explanation by showing how it can be used to map Uber’s growth opportunities.

Continue reading Ansoff (1957) meets consumer value creation and Uber’s growth opportunities →