"Giants invariably descend into suckiness" (parte VIII)

Parte I, parte II, parte III, parte IV, parte V, parte VI e parte VII.

"When something is commoditized, an adjacent market becomes valuable"

Esta é uma frase que muito aprecio.

"Like many former stalwarts of a now-crumbling print industry, the greeting card market has seen better days.
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Hallmark, once the Q-Tip or Band-Aid of greeting cards, closed its distribution center in Enfield, Connecticut, in 2015, and has downsized its full-time staff by more than 50% in the past few years, with continuing news of store closures. And the digital startup Paperless Post, which previously offered both printed and digital cards, recently decided that paperless was indeed the way to go."

Suckiness...

"The shaky prospect of going into any print-based business makes it all the more unlikely that the graphic designer and illustrator Anna Bond, who founded the paper goods business Rifle Paper Co. in 2009 with her husband, Nathan, out of their garage apartment in Winter Park, Florida, should find such great success nearly 100 years after Hallmark was founded.
Rifle reported $21.4 million in company revenue in 2016, and bested that figure with $22.3 million in 2017, with more than 90 product offerings that extend well beyond the stationery and greeting cards for which the company is best known. Here’s how Bond, a 33-year-old Floridian who until 2012 lived in an apartment above her in-laws’ garage, built a multimillion-dollar empire—and proved that print isn’t dead yet."

Recordar na parte VII:

 "But you likely need to trade out your mass-marketing business model for a niche, premium, and specialty model and scale strategies for a superconsumer strategy."

 Trechos retirados de "How One Designer Built A $22M Company–Selling Paper"