A leading business journalist takes us inside a business revolution: the upstart brands taking on the empires that long dominated the trillion-dollar consumer economy.

Dollar Shave Club and its hilarious marketing. Casper mattresses popping out of a box. Third Love’s lingerie designed specifically for each woman’s body. Warby Parker mailing you five pairs of glasses to choose from. You’ve seen their ads. You (or someone you know) use their products. Each may appear, in isolation, as a rare David with the bravado to confront a Goliath, but taken together they represent a seismic shift in a business model that has lasted more than a century.

As Lawrence Ingrassia–former business and economics editor and deputy managing editor at the New York Times–shows in this timely and eye-opening book, a growing number of digital entrepreneurs have found new and creative ways to crack the code on the bonanza of physical goods that move through our lives every day. They have discovered that manufacturing, marketing, logistics, and customer service have all been flattened―where there were once walls that protected big brands like Gillette, Sealy, Victoria’s Secret, or Lenscrafters, savvy and hungry innovators now can compete on price, value, quality, speed, convenience, and service.

Billion Dollar Brand Club reveals the world of the entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporate behemoths battling over this terrain. And what fun it is. It’s a massive, high-stakes business saga animated by the personalities, flashes of insight, and stories behind the stuff we use every day.

Reviews

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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