Hat Blog

VillageHatShop.com – 15th Holiday Season on the Web

This Holiday Season marks our 15th consecutive online (32nd overall).  Yes, we were here selling on the “World Wide Web” when ecommerce was an infant.   Much content from our early days is still at VillageHatShop.com: The Hat Glossary, Hat Facts, Books on Hats, Hats in Art, Iconic Hats, Hats and Children’s Literature, etc.  We’ve kept the best of the old as we continue to improve and evolve.

Some National Recognitions During This 15-year Run:

*In December of 1999 TIME Magazine published its very first Online Shopping Guide:  “TIME DIGITAL’S pick of the best sites on the Web – to buy the right gift right now.”  About 100 sites were mentioned.  Only five had pictures accompanying the review; we were one of the five.  We of course were pleased to be in the company of Amazon, Land’s End, KMart, Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, Gap, etc.  TIME text accompanying a picture of our Viking Helmet: “Village Hat Shop stocks an impressive selection of toppers for him and for her.

*TIME followed up by mentioning us again in December, 2000 - their second Guide to Online Shopping.  (By the way, the magazine cover is about Bush vs. Gore, the post-election legal issues.  Time flies.]  TIME wrote, “Here’s a list of the top web-sites to browse …” and for us,  “A wide array of headgear with particular emphasis on Panama hats …..” 

*YAHOO INTERNET LIFE liked us also in 1999.  In their E-Z Shopper: Smart Buys For Busy People, we were one of a handful of “Picks of the Month”. 

*In 2000, we won the national Hat Retailer of the Year award at a ceremony in New York City.  In no small part, this honor was bestowed as a result of our pioneering online efforts in the hat industry. 

*SHOP ONLINE 1*2*3 Magazine mentioned us in their November/December 1999 issue as one of 250 Great Sites.  

We’re not resting on our laurels.  We introduced many new brands from around the world in 2011: Signes, City Sport, Wigens, Sinatra, Geoffrey Beene, Woolrich, Ignite, Highland 200.  We settled into a new fulfillment facility this year – 5-times the size of our former HQ - and have much more inventory on hand ready to ship within a working day of receipt of your order.  Nothing has changed with regard to our status as The Number One Source for Hats Online. 

With competition now coming from many non-hat merchants – generalists from backgrounds in books or music, shoe merchants, comparison search engines, auction sites, etc. – we hope it still matters to shoppers that we are doing hats better than anyone else. 

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2012.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com

San Diego Food Bank

In conjunction with our 15^th Online Anniversary, we’ll be donating .15 of every VillageHatShop.com  order received between November 15^th and December 25^th to the San Diego Food Bank http://www.sandiegofoodbank.org/donate/.  For more on the San Diego Food Bank, see this link: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/sep/01/demand-skyrockets-federal-aide-could-plummet-sd-fo/

Ecommerce 2011: A Merchant’s Perspective

July, 2011

In June, we began our 15^th year selling hats online. As those of you who follow VillageHatShop.com’s HAT BLOG know, I’ve been writing about ecommerce from its virtual inception. Looking over my past musings on this subject, I see that I’ve gone from excitement about how the Internet was going to democratize retail to fear that the same threats that small and medium size merchants experience from giant retail corporations offline would recur online.

There’s a great deal of talk about how ecommerce has escaped the recession. For example, comScore© indicates a 12% increase in online retail spending for the first quarter of 2011 compared to the same period last year. If intending to draw conclusions for merchants who run small online businesses, this data requires examination. For starters, the top 25 e-retailers now capture about 70% of all online sales (data per comScore). Many of these behemoths are the same suspects that we know offline – Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Hewlett-Packard, Apple as well as online consolidators and category killers like Amazon, Netflix, and the comparison shopping engines. I appreciate some of these businesses as much as the next (e.g. I do shop at Amazon), but it boggles the mind to know that the remaining hundreds of thousands of us trying to succeed online are competing for only 30% of the ecommerce shopping pie.

Making matters worse, the return on investment for advertising at online search engines like Google and Bing is eroding inexorably. In 2005, the cost to place an ad between the third and fourth position on Google Search was 38 cents per click (an overall average for all purchased keywords). In 2010, for approximately the same position, the price tag was $1.24 per click (data per Hochman Consultants©). I don’t have 2011 data, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that competing at Google AdWords has gotten significantly more difficult this year. So, what’s happening over at “Do No Evil”? These same dominant players in the Top 25 are bidding on virtually everything. Their business strategy is to create marketing campaigns and landing pages for merchandise categories irrespective of profit in the short term. If, for example, Amazon/Zappos (same company) wishes to corner the top paid advertising positions in the major search engines for say “umbrellas”, they can do so, for a long time, and without profit in that category. Eventually, established umbrella merchants - who need to make a living and cannot afford the top positions in paid search unless they make money - can’t survive. Ultimately, the online umbrella space goes to the mega-corp. What looked like a leveling of the playing field in those halcyon early days of the Internet has proven to be anything but. The nature and logic of capitalism and its tendency toward monopoly has again trumped small retail.

All of the above is operating within a macroeconomic climate that doesn’t help matters. All ships aren’t rising. I won’t digress into a political or economic treatise, but suffice to say that the clout that we hundreds of thousands of small Internet merchants wield in policy debates compared to the Top 25 and their ilk, strikes me as roughly equivalent to our relative strength online (70% them, 30% us). At this time, there is little evidence that in the near term there will much increase in the demand for goods. So, remaining viable requires gaining or holding one’s share of the stagnant size pie (market share).

Alas, we are not dead yet. Those of us who are running businesses where we know our products well and subscribe to age-old values of good customer service, good quality fairly priced merchandise, good information and communication, and all the rest, have survived. We continue to be found because we understand what thinking people want. That’s our only advantage. So far, it’s sufficient. We don’t have the resources for teams of in-house IT staffs that spin out the latest bells and whistles for improving web sites and the means to market to each person on the planet, individually. (“Personalization” is the latest buzz word in marketing. Soon you may turn on your computer and if you are “thinking” hats, you’ll receive 25 messages or banner ads – all from the Top 25 e-retailing giants.) Nor do we have the deep pockets that allow for money-losing/market-capturing advertising campaigns. I may be delusional, some kind of crazy romantic, but I don’t think this article is the last gasp of a dying ecommerce merchant. If, as I believe, people still want authenticity, then, we will be found. The entire world is not “virtual” (yet); many of us still seek a genuine destination (a there there, something with substance). And if you seek, ye shall still find human-scale businesses run by people who believe the world of commerce is more than a business plan and balance sheet to be perused by Wall Street or venture capitalists.

Admittedly, my tone is a bit more shrill as time goes on. We live in the age of the unthinkable; no one is predicting the breath-taking events that are unfolding with little or no warning. Will monster-size corporations and their allies bury us, or will the worm turn, and a new democratizing paradigm reign again?

Fred Belinsky©
VillageHatShop.com

 

Taking Account of Ourselves

                                     Village Hat Shop  Then and Now

In June, we will begin our fifteenth year selling hats at VillageHatShop.com. It is difficult to fathom how far this sales channel has evolved. In the beginning, to my great surprise and delight, it really was a "if you build it, they will come" opportunity. A search for "hats" elicited a handful of replies; a strange amalgam of search results. If memory serves me well, there was in fact a hat retailer – a single store operation in Washington State – who preceded us on the web. This early adaptor never developed and is a nonfactor online today. Another result was for a straw hat – similar to Panamas – made in a small village in Campeche, Mexico. This obscure hat material made in an off-the-beaten-track corner of the Yucatan Peninsula, woven in underground caverns by descendants of the Maya (who did not speak Spanish) had a promoter on the Internet (before the word "internet" was in our vocabulary!). Aside from another result or two, that was it for a "hats" query in early 1997. Today Google returns about 74,500 results for this keyword.

These good old days are long gone. If you build it now, they will not come-unless you do a whole lot of other things well, and work it very hard. VillageHatShop.com has come a long way in this short time; if we hadn’t we would not still be here. The trajectory of where ecommerce is headed requires ever more diligence if we are to continue winning and holding your business. The novelty of buying online ended years ago; now it’s perform well or lose your customer. We are up to the challenge. Satisfying the needs of our customers are what we have always believed was fundamental to successful retailing. So, we aren’t intimidated if this is to be the criterion that separates the winning merchants from the losers – it ought to be.

I am a different merchant than I was fifteen years ago. I’m stretching and growing – in some ways that are more dispassionate and data-driven, while holding dear to the zeal and idealism that helped bring The Village Hat Shop to where we are today. Finding the right middle ground is not easy. On the one hand the goal is survival, beating the competition. However, if the values of the business are not clearly focused on making a positive difference in people’s lives-and, by extension, the greater community - than why bother?

Fifteen years ago, the world of commerce as it exists today was unthinkable. Where will it be fifteen years from now? I hope that the relationship between customer and merchant and merchant and employee will always be the sine qua non for success in retail. If it is, we may still be around. Search (in engines like Google and Bing) as we know it today, I believe will be gone. But somehow people will get connected to good businesses (likely, more efficiently than now). So being a good business, by all measures is all that matters, and all that will matter.

Fred Belinsky
VillageHatShop.com

Waving the White Flag

I’m about to commit generational heresy. I can already hear the criticisms from my boomer compatriots ("Good manners never go out of style," etc.). In fact, I have done my fair share of kvetching about the lack of good customer service in retail (I’ve probably posted half a dozen articles on this subject over the years). But, this battle is being lost and I am accepting reality (maybe I’m becoming a Buddhist?).

I now believe "the problem" is a blameless generational difference in world views. I’ll get to some theories about origins, but first I’ll attempt to describe the respective behaviors. My generation believes (and behaves as such) that a welcoming smile and a "hello" are not only good manners, but good business. We believe people should a priori acknowledge and appreciate one another suggesting a world view that people are basically well-meaning and friendly. These on-the-surface (superficial) actions connecting one to another are fundamental to our value systems (at the very least, life is about being pleasant to each another).

Not so fast. The younger generation does not put much stock in perfunctory warm greetings and sociable body language. They are responsible, hard working, value professionalism and creative output, but simply don’t care as much about being friendly to strangers. I’ve been in the belly of the beast – Google headquarters, online marketing summits where I am by far the oldest person at the table, young successful architectural firms, etc. – and these very smart and successful young people, graduates of the country’s top universities, are not so much arrogant (like many of my friends contend), but simply highly focused on their work and less interested in unrelated chit chat. They don’t care about "how you are", and are fine if you skip "how are you?"

Before we get all bent out of shape about the decline of Western civilization, take a breath. I employ 48 people. Only a handful of us are over 40. I work with these "kids" every day, and by and large, they are good people, reliable, rightly proud of their accomplishments and contributions. True, they don’t greet customers in the manner that I’d ideally like to see, but my reconstituted goal, as their boss, is to train them to be ambassadors from their generation to ours (older people are not "right", but they are customers). By the same token, people from my generation can be ambassadors to the younger generation. For example, tipping a waiter or waitress who is efficient (but not friendly) on the basis of service, not smiles (or lack thereof).

Tolerance and acceptance of this sub-cultural distinction will come more readily if we understand how it came about. Being older and wiser, and the parents of these kids, it behooves us to try and understand them whether or not they reciprocate. We can be role models in building bridges toward understanding one another. Furthermore, we lived through, as well as contributed to, the environment that resulted in the cultural changes that we are now criticizing:

1. Our society drilled these kids with the fear-based message "Don’t talk to strangers." (By contrast, we would hitchhike fearlessly, and talk with most everyone.)

2. Generally speaking, the personal lives of these kids have been more complicated than ours. Although the Father Knows Best/Leave It To Beaver/Ozzie and Harriet depiction of American life was never really accurate, this archetype is long gone. Heroes like Beavis and Butthead, South Park, The Simpsons, etc. are wry, laconic, ironic, impolite, often disconnected from the dominant culture. Given their personal experiences, this is a more authentic depiction of modern life and therefore gets emulated.

3. Our educational institutions devalued teaching Humanities in lieu of subject matter that was necessary for standardized test taking. (Hypothesis: There is a correlation between this generational change of behavior – i.e. reluctance toward perfunctory politeness – and academic achievement).

4. The lives of our politicians, media personalities, clergy, etc. don’t contribute to the creation of a society where one’s default assumption about "us" is necessarily positive. When these kids were young and impressionable, our President’s explanation of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and the truth that ultimately came to light must have been disillusioning. [Drawing any conclusions about my politics will likely be incorrect.] Perhaps our right to "respect" needs to be earned, and not assumed.

Whether this list even scratches the surface of an explanation is not the point. Whatever the reasons for these generational changes in behavior, they exist and are come by honestly. It is what it is (I am a Buddhist!).

There are advantages for each generation – besides the Kantian imperative of understanding each other for its own sake – in appreciating the other’s sub-culture. In business, a polite 30-something may get the job, or get the sale, or get the client when engaging a 50+-something. A 50+-something, by accepting the values of the 30-something, stays engaged (helping to avoid crotchetiness), learns new tricks. By giving "this pass" to the younger generation, we can quickly move on to less superficial content, where we just may be surprised by what we’ll learn.

Where does this leave me with regard to a business/retail strategy? As I alluded earlier, instead of trying to change anyone’s behavior, my goal is to be an ambassador and encourage diplomacy, training employees to be ambassadors as well. When visiting another’s culture, shouldn’t we be respectful while working to understand who we are dealing with? To some extent, we try and adopt their style and learn their language. I’d be satisfied with that outcome.

Truce.

Fred Belinsky
www.VillageHatShop.com