Happy New Year all. Over the break I was wandering around a great website for seeing new business ideas at work – Springwise and came across an idea screaming for local adaptation to the Australian market.
This post of from August last year highlights the hook-up between US fashion retailer Urban Outfitters and a custom bike builder Republic Bike.
Urban Outfitters are allowing their online customers to order custom-designed bikes (>500 combinations of those trendy fixed gear types) that are then delivered by Republic Bike.
There would appear to little risk for either party here. Republic Bike get a big boost to customer awareness and presumably gain more from economies of scale than they lose in a cut of the revenue to the retailer. Urban Outfitters get a nifty new offering that they wouldn’t be able to produce themselves (thus differentiating themselves further from other youth fashion houses – something they’d started by offering op-shop style homewares).
Presumably it wouldn’t be hard for Urban Outfitters to also offer the bikes in-store (or at least the ordering process).
Surely there is scope for such hook-ups in the Australian retail space? While not many Aussie retailers have a strong e-commerce interface (probably reflective of our terrible broadband and our highly urbanised population compared to the US), there should still scope for innovative folks like Crumpler and Haul to offer design-your-own while tapping into an existing but underutilised customer base of a more generalist retailer.
Who else would be a candidate? As producers? Retailers?
Tags: Australia, bags, bikes, Crumpler, differentiation, e-commerce, Haul, Republic Bike, Retailing, Strategic management, strategy, Urban Outfitters
International BS Blog 
January 20, 2011 at 11:57 pm |
To update an Aussie retailer did jump on the opportunity with Republic Bike. Very surprisingly it is the very middle-of-the-road-but-having-a-go-at-the-youth-market Roger David!
See: http://www.republicbike.com.au/