Our latest bet: “Retail is dead” and Bulletin is here to rebuild it
Today I’m excited to announce that we invested in Bulletin. Bulletin is building the future of retail beginning with their two spaces in NYC. You can read more about it over on Mashable, TechCrunch or NJBIZ (from our recent fireside chat at Propelify). The founders, Alana and Ali, hail from a background no where near retail – they met while working at the content marketing startup Contently – and that’s possibly what excites me most about this team. Their vision for the future of retail includes a world where retail is not about sales but about experiences. It’s a future where individual stores don’t exist to purely profit but instead exist to build a community around brands and their customers. It’s a future that’s not measured in revenue per square foot but by impressions and actual, measurable engagement.
Their latest store, Bulletin Broads, launched last weekend in partnership with Planned Parenthood. Today, it’s filled with over 30 brands built by and for women and speaks to a future where women and men are equal (none of this 70 cents on the dollar crap) and acts as an outlet for up-and-coming brands to touch their consumer in a way that’s only been reserved for the biggest companies in the world. By leveraging simple sharing economics, Bulletin makes it affordable for these smaller brands to host workshops, events and other in-store activations. Bulletin’s digitally native brands don’t have a Nike or Apple marketing budget, but understand how critical it is to engage your customer face-to-face and connect product to experience. In Bulletin’s new Williamsburg store, it’s already happening. If you’re in Brooklyn soon, I urge you to check it out.
When I met Alana, I was immediately drawn to the parallel with some of our earliest days at WeWork. We focused on building a future where workspace was not a utility or a reflection of how much money a company could spend on rent but was much more about a world where “global scale” was possible for a company of two. It was a future where the best businesses would choose to work together to create value and the best founders would push to build teams who worked to make a life, not just a living. WeWork, similarly, is also not measured in square feet per member but by their access to a network of over 100,000 other like-minded individuals and growing companies and movements all over the world.
I believe the future will look a heck of a lot more like WeWork and Bulletin than it will be cubicles and department stores. We’re already seeing how important flexibility is to today’s generation of creators (74% of millennials want flexible work schedules) and it’s likely they’ll seek the same thing for their companies and brands. Bulletin is powering that. Being able to shift where and when their products are seen, how they’re touched and who gets to interact with them will simply be par for the course for small and growing brands all over the world.
