Our founders spent some time at the recent Internet Retailers Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, and a good portion of that time was spent in the company of our bestest friends at Volusion. Here you’ll see Volusion’s video recap of the event and starting at about 1:22 you can see Dane and Kevin (from left to right) talking about the future of eCommerce. Their answer is pretty lengthy just because it would be rude to say, “The future of eCommerce is Brand Labs,” before throwing some gang signs and walking off camera (which was the original plan).
Last week, our founders (and senior corporate officers) Kevin Harman and Dane Downer, attended the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition in Chicago. In addition to representin’ for Brand Labs, they had the opportunity to meet with our friends at Volusion, including founder and president, Kevin Sproles (seen here chatting with Kevin and Dane).
Attendance for the conference was up significantly over last year and the prevailing tone was overwhelmingly optimistic, as eCommerce continues to assert its critical position in the world of consumer retail operations as a whole. The obvious buzzword (or buzzphrase, if you will) was mobile commerce, and as the first developers of a mobile Volusion platform, we weren’t surprised one little bit. Hit the jump to see a few pics of Brand Labs with all the party people…
Yesterday, Google announced the introduction of Caffeine – a new, multi-layered, super-technical upgrade to their search engine. Despite their efforts to explain the change textually and visually, it’s still too complex to be broken down into a blog post. The breakdown is that the search will now be faster, fresher and (ideally) more relevant. From our perspective, it just means that ongoing SEO has never been more important.
We have always been pretty inconsistent in describing what we do here at Brand Labs. Sometimes we design web sites. Sometimes we design websites. Sometimes we just design sites. In our defense, there has never been a recognized, definitively correct option to describe this thing you’re looking at, but the fine folks who put out the Associated Press Stylebook (note: not style book) have finally laid this issue to rest by proclaiming in their 2010 edition that the correct term is website. One word.
There. Now everything is fixed and we can all go about the task of living our lives unencumbered by the weight of this grammatical ambiguity.
Dane Downer and Kevin Harman (our vice president and president, respectively) will be attending the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition at McCormick Place West in Chicago next week. They’ll be there for all four days of the conference and would love to meet up with any of our current (or potential) customers who are interested in chatting about eCommerce.
If you’d like to set something up, you can email Dane at dane.downer@brandlabs.us or Kevin at kevin.harman@brandlabs.us, or just look for these happy, smiling faces on the show floor (Dane’s on the left, Kevin on the right). They’re prepared at all times to drop some eCommerce knowledge.
Regardless, let’s just say that Volusion is up for a bunch of trophies in the upcoming Stevie Awards (the American Business Awards) on June 21. We wish them the very best of luck!
Consumer product super-conglomerate Procter & Gamble has just jumped into the direct-to-consumer market with the launch of their generically-named eStore.
The impact of this move on the retail world is potentially huge; it threatens the (already waning) relevance of brick & mortar stores by (again, potentially) undercutting them pretty dramatically on price. This early effort doesn’t seem to be pushing the envelope on that front, but time will tell how low online prices can go when the middle man is removed from the equation.
… we see a couple of takeaways relative to our personal business model. First, we’ve already been experiencing a rise in manufacturers entering into DTC marketing and it’s something that we encourage. There’s no better way to control your brand by talking directly to your consumers. Second, should this trend catch on, it will become a lot easier for all online merchants to compete. It levels the playing field. If all (or most) of your competition is online, you can compete head-to-head, without having to concern yourself with the apples to oranges comparisons that come with competing against brick & mortar operations.
LessConf is a conference with talks ranging from startups to design to marketing to business. It’s a casual two-day event in Atlanta, Georgia with awesome speakers here to inspire you.
That sounds good. We’re in. As a matter of fact, our president, Kevin Harman will be attending both days of the conference.
So, if you see a guy that looks just like this, feel free to come right on up and say hi. He’ll happily answer your questions about Volusion, eCommerce, online marketing or the proper way to serve Corona.
For those who don’t know, there’s an app called Foursquare whose primary function is to allow its users to “check in” at specific locations. Check in more often than all of your peers and you become “Mayor” of that location. Up until now, the only benefit of Mayorship were bragging rights, and possibly a discount of some sort at that particular location. Starbucks has just changed all that.
Until June 28th, Mayors of any Starbucks location will receive discounts at all Starbucks locations. It’s the first national discount utilizing the app, but almost certainly won’t be the last.
A couple of days ago, Volusion announced the upcoming introduction of their new Partners Program. In addition to being thrilled about the program itself, we were also flattered that they chose us to represent the type of partnership that they hope to build with each of the program’s members. You can read the announcement here. (Read all the way to the end to read our contribution.)
Of course, we’ve always made our feelings about Volusion pretty clear. We’ve counted and there are over 23 bazillion uses of the word Volusion scattered throughout our site and at least one member of our staff has the Volusion logo tattooed on a very private region of their body, so we’re obviously down with the V, but it’s gratifying to know that our devotion is reciprocated. How reciprocated? Well, here’s what Volusion has to say about us:
“Over the past ten years, we’ve had the privilege to develop several relationships in becoming a leading ecommerce provider. One that stands out above the rest is our partnership with Brand Labs, an indispensable asset to our community. When we launched the Volusion Partner Network, we gladly welcomed Brand Labs as an Agency Partner. We are eager to further extend our collaboration with Brand Labs into the future by focusing on what is best in helping our merchants succeed.”
James Booker – Business Development Manager – Volusion
… to be fair, we added the bold to the “indispensable asset” part, but that was our favorite bit.
We look forward to the continuation of our long and happy partnership. Thanks Volusion!
Dane Downer and Kevin Harman (our vice president and president, respectively) will be attending the 
