James Tyler

The only thing that seems obvious to me is this: if you want to grow an inventory-driven business, you have to grow inventory. And if you want to grow inventory, you have to keep shipping more products that people actually want. What I see in this chart is the opposite. Nike has less and less inventory on hand, while at the same time charging less for that smaller inventory position. That is a brutal combination. You are offering less breadth, at lower prices, with less reason for the customer to keep coming back. And when I say grow inventory, I do not mean just go deeper on the same products. I mean broaden the inventory position. More products, more winners, more reasons for demand to show up. Breadth matters. If you do not keep expanding the set of things customers want to buy, the whole machine starts slowing down. At the same time, their retail footprint is clearly being reduced. Fewer storefronts, less shelf space, less physical presence. The only real way to offset that is to sell more online. And they are clearly not doing that either. To me, all these retail businesses that are slowly dying seem to get distracted by everything except the actual equation. The equation is still price, inventory, and the advertising required to create throughput through the machine. That is true whether you are doing $1,000 a day or $100 million a day. It is the same math. You can literally see in this graph where inventory peaks and then starts rolling over. If you do not grow inventory, you die. It really is that simple.

💯 The business gets as big as the profitable ad-buyable surface area of the catalog. Want to spend more on ads profitably? Launch more products. A rational business is always going to spend up to its profitable maximum. The only way to increase that profitable maximum is more products. People do not buy ads. They buy products. Product expansion is the cure for all. Growth, seasonality, ad spend...everything. I just want to know if he changed his mind yet.

@Seanfrank If you're not launching new products, you're dying. @JamesTyler___

More products. That’s the answer. I’m up 80% YOY this month. Off a very big, 8 figure number. I’m getting the best growth I’ve seen in 5 years. Why? New stuff. Want more revenue? Gotta have something to sell. Nothing is off limits for us.

I get what you’re saying, but I think seasonality is more of a product engineering and pricing problem than a law of nature. To me, a business fights seasonality in two ways. One, it grows fast enough that even its off-season periods keep compounding in absolute terms. Two, it engineers enough product breadth that there is always something relevant to sell during the so-called off-season. Take a winter-heavy brand as an example. If the business is growing fast enough (in product breadth and velocity of advertising), its summer volume can still exceed what prior periods looked like simply because the company itself is compounding quickly. And if summer is still weak, that usually points to a product breadth problem. In other words, the brand has not engineered enough throughput-driving product for the off-season. That is why I see seasonality as a product engineering problem more than anything else. If you sell disproportionately more in winter than summer, then you need to figure out what product(s) can carry demand during summer rather than treating the calendar as an excuse. Then layer on pricing. If you are a winter-heavy brand, your winter goods should still be dynamically priced in summer at the willingness-to-pay level that lets them move at the pace you want, instead of just accepting lower demand as fate. And if you layer in pre-order, that becomes another lever. You can let customers buy the in-season good at a discount during the off-season for future delivery, which helps pull demand forward, drive ancillary revenue, smooth throughput, and keep the business in more of a steady state rather than letting the calendar fully dictate the shape of demand. So to me this comes down to price, product, and inventory management. If you are growing fast enough and you engineer product breadth well enough, there is no reason you cannot grow at the pace of market growth (or faster) every single month. I have a hard time imagining a situation where you cannot engineer your way out of this through dynamic pricing, better product breadth, and near-perfect inventory management. This playbook has worked 100% of the time we've instituted it at the biggest scales in DTC.

I can't say I fully agree with what you are saying for all brands though haha. I see your point and we have been breaking through the seasonality variable for the last 24 months but sometimes it's just impossible no matter how well in stocked you are. I know because I had a lot of stuck inventory before lol

Hudson with Comfrt, Matthew with Medvi, we now have two well known examples of $1B outcome within 3 years. Really take a moment to absorb this. 1 fucking billion dollars. The bar has been raised and e-comm is going to keep growing. In fact, we are still in a once in a generation bull market that will last until roughly 2040. This is when the median millennial (IMO first gen that can be considered digital native) reaches 50 years old (age of peak purchasing power). This is why this image is my profile banner. We are in the good old days NOW. This is what a bull market feels like and this is the easy mode. Peak industrial revolution lasted for 30 years from 1800 - 1830 in England. These trends last a long time. Ignore the volatility, stay alive and we are all going to make it.

@alexisohanian I would. x.com/JamesTyler___/…

I wouldn't bet against Nike.

@_masterinvestor The answer is obvious. x.com/JamesTyler___/…

We are watching major American brands die slowly

Be TJ Maxx or Autozone. Look at that inventory growth management. 🤌

The only thing that seems obvious to me is this: if you want to grow an inventory-driven business, you have to grow inventory. And if you want to grow inventory, you have to keep shipping more products that people actually want. What I see in this chart is the opposite. Nike has less and less inventory on hand, while at the same time charging less for that smaller inventory position. That is a brutal combination. You are offering less breadth, at lower prices, with less reason for the customer to keep coming back. And when I say grow inventory, I do not mean just go deeper on the same products. I mean broaden the inventory position. More products, more winners, more reasons for demand to show up. Breadth matters. If you do not keep expanding the set of things customers want to buy, the whole machine starts slowing down. At the same time, their retail footprint is clearly being reduced. Fewer storefronts, less shelf space, less physical presence. The only real way to offset that is to sell more online. And they are clearly not doing that either. To me, all these retail businesses that are slowly dying seem to get distracted by everything except the actual equation. The equation is still price, inventory, and the advertising required to create throughput through the machine. That is true whether you are doing $1,000 a day or $100 million a day. It is the same math. You can literally see in this graph where inventory peaks and then starts rolling over. If you do not grow inventory, you die. It really is that simple.

@bandholz @ShopifySupport @harleyf I didn't think they could make it worse than the last update...but they did.

Some user feedback @ShopifySupport @harleyf. The new date selecting tool is incredibly cumbersome, over-engineered, and non-intuitive. What use to take about 3 clicks now seems to take 7-8 clicks.

@moizali @NYCMayor He'd need to understand the basics of supply and demand first.

If @NYCMayor was in eCommerce, he'd be running the first $100 Billion DTC only brand. Man is the best I've ever seen at content, and I've seen them all.

Some of you have never read “Dynamic Learning for Joint Pricing, Advertising, and Inventory Management” by Huseyin Gurkan, N. Bora Keskin, and Rodney P. Parker, and it shows.

@GoddessOfSin666 @Aella_Girl you're*

@JamesTyler___ @Aella_Girl Your talking to a business woman and sex worker like they don't know how basic marketing works..... We know how products work, we know how money and income works. You didn't even answer the question asked 🤣

How do people market products normally? Like if I made a product and wanted to hire someone to do marketing (like idk. ads? finding influencers?) where do I find this and know it's an effective hire? Are there marketplaces for this? Idk what the meta is besides 'go viral'

There’s actually a bigger question to answer first. Before you hire someone to “do marketing,” the first thing to understand is your TAM, meaning total addressable market. In plain English: how many people would find your product useful if it were free? You probably already have an intuition for this. You likely have some sense of what percentage of the U.S. population, or even the world, would genuinely want the product if price were not part of the equation. Then I’d think about three price points: high, medium, and low. Of all the people who would have happily taken the product for free and loved it, what percentage of them would still be willing to pay at each of those prices? Once you have that in your head, you can start to estimate the total revenue ceiling of the product. For example, let’s say you made a widget and you believed that 1 in every 1,000 Americans would buy it at a $30 price point. Using a U.S. population of roughly 340 million, that implies about 340,000 buyers. At $30 each, that is about $10.2 million in potential revenue. That does not mean you get all of that tomorrow. It means you now have a rough sense of the size of the hill you are trying to climb. Your job is basically to ride the S-curve up that hill. And depending on your own reach, you may already have enough distribution to fund the first tranche of that climb yourself. In your case, X alone might be enough to validate demand and finance the early stages. This matters even more if the product is physical and not digital, because physical products require inventory. If you sell something for $30 but it costs $12 to produce, then a meaningful chunk of that revenue is already spoken for. You can use that math to understand how much capital it would take to manufacture the total opportunity, and then how much gross profit might be left over to fund advertising over time. What remains after production cost and ad spend is what eventually makes its way into your pocket. So the real question is not just “where do I find marketers?” The real question is: what does it cost to generate enough exposures to make the relevant portion of my TAM aware of the product, at a price where enough of them are willing to pay, and does that math actually work? That is the core meta. A good example is Tesla. Tesla historically spent basically nothing on traditional marketing. Why? Because if the product is meaningfully better than the competition and you are already constrained by manufacturing capacity, spending on awareness does not create incremental profit. If they are already selling as many Model Ys as they can make, more marketing is just wasted motion. My recommendation would be to pre-sell the product first. In other words, design the product, understand how to bring it to market from a physical-goods standpoint, and then offer it for sale before fully scaling production. Kickstarter is the obvious example. My guess is that an Aella Kickstarter would probably do pretty well. And that would tell you something extremely valuable: whether there is enough real demand to justify bringing on an agency to run ads. Once you have that signal, yes, there are plenty of direct-to-consumer e-commerce agencies that do exactly what you’re describing, from paid ads to influencer management to creative strategy. I’m sure some will even reply to your post. But I think there are a few steps before that, and those steps matter a lot more than people realize.

@RomanEcom One product* away

The reality in D2C: You’re one creative or / and a funnel away from changing your life

@shanksyouu @DaveDiederen

@DaveDiederen In stock and on pre order at the same time is the dumbest shit I've ever seen

Comfrt is doing something smart on their PDP that most stores haven't figured out. Two add-to-cart buttons. Same product. Different prices. One for in-stock: €73.95 - ships now. One for pre-order: €48.95 - ships June 5. That's a €25 discount for waiting 10 weeks. Most brands treat pre-orders as a last resort. A sign the product isn't ready. Something to hide. Comfrt turned it into a choice. And that choice does 3 things at once: 1. It captures buyers who were about to bounce on price. It builds revenue before the stock even arrives. And it tells you exactly how price-sensitive your audience is, in real time. 2. The pre-order button isn't a backup. It's a conversion lever for people who needed one more reason to say yes. 3. You're not discounting. You're selling patience. If you've got products on backorder right now, this is worth testing before your next restock.

@ecomrudolfs @DaveDiederen

@DaveDiederen They are most likely testing this because of cashflow

With a strategy like this, price and preorder price are a function of current inventory to control the future stream of demand relative to incoming at the SKU level. The price of both in stock and preorder want to be dynamic. This is not a set it and forget it type strategy. In addition, its not just the price that wants to be dynamic and AB tested, its also the fulfillment date(s). Price elasticity + date elasticity with multiple price and wait & save options allows for incredible control of inventory.

@DaveDiederen That’s a really steep discount. How they figure how much to discount by (factoring in cost of capital)?