Memo: DeFi and The Explorer’s Principle

There is no more undiscovered physical land; there are only ideas that may develop into new land of its own.

Consider Bitcoin, the first blockchain, and the genesis story of decentralized currency. An idea became new land, albeit digital. On that land, systems were built and exchanges were founded. New products like fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens enabled trade. Explorers mined and profited off of a new land that literally came of nothing but an idea. Consider the conclusion of the Bitcoin white paper, released in 2009.

The network is robust in its unstructured simplicity. […] Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.

Unstructured simplicity, needed rules, and consensus. The land analogy holds true. Ideas can become so powerful that new ground to build upon can take shape. It’s time that we develop new systems around the mining of ideas and how we compensate explorers for them. Those ideas commonly lead to new opportunity.

The idea of ideas is misunderstood. We would, once, find a great thinker and wait for her validation. Before too long, the ideas would be co-opted by a larger, more official organization. The idea would be watered down and misappropriated, losing its original potency. By the third or fourth iteration of the original idea, the concept would lose its luster. The idea would meld into something that already existed, something safe and calculated and easy to communicate. And then no new land would be discovered.

Today’s land grab is different. We listen to new ideas from obscure voices on Clubhouse. Their ideas are transcribed and acted upon, losing their luster but not enough to hinder the well-resourced listener from profiting. We witness creativity on TikTok or SnapChat or Dispo that we could have never imagined. Then, the techniques, dances, or meme formats become public domain. We even attach ourselves to foreign creators who’ve captivated American audiences through their intensity, prolific work, and enthusiasm. And then we remove many of their mechanisms for compensation, leaving well-heeled pattern matched men to extract and refine, extract and refine.

The largest audiences of the early-internet era were the victors with the spoils, but the creator economy is surfacing new ideas at their very core. The convention of pattern matching is slowly giving way to the merit of the thinker. But thinking and merit are not enough. Ideas have never been more monetizable than they are today. Our financial systems should reflect this. Land discovery should go to whomever gets there first. The ideal is simple: we should be incentivized to pay our thinkers for the new land they’ve conjured from thin air.

DeFi and The Explorer’s Principle

The creator economy is paywalled. Purchases are one-click. Audio is push notified. But like physical land, virtual land has boundaries. In The Smartest in the Room, I wrote about an obscure newsletter publisher from Honduras named Andrea Hernandez. A lot has happened in the nearly three months since. She’s gained enterprise clients, hundreds more subscribers, and a Clubhouse audience that will surely lead her to greener pastures.

A native of San Pedro Sula, Cortés, Honduras, her audience around Snaxshot has begun to transcend its niche. When she writes about CPG, I listen. Her ideas have been incredibly valuable and the Snaxshot brand will grow because of them. But like many others, I only recently began compensating her for her ideas through a Patreon link that she’s set up for her Substack.

कोई शीर्षक नहीं

it’s so upsetting to me someone literally offered me a $25 Amazon Gift card to pick my brain for ONE HOUR is this what you guys think of me?

Hernandez cannot paywall her Substack because there isn’t access to Stripe in Honduras. Additionally, American corporations who hope to retain her coveted consulting services must pay through Paypal, but only after steep international taxes and other fees. She’s accomplished one of the toughest tasks in the global economy: building an American audience with nothing but consistency, enthusiasm, and ideas. When a resource is mined without proper compensation, it can feel like an exploitation. Hernandez was sure to point me to The United Fruit Company and the era of the banana republic.

She should be compensated for her impact and decentralized finance (DeFi) is the key. In a recent Clubhouse conversation with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Initialized Capital co-founder Garry Tan shared an interesting thought:

The operating system of the global brain is booting up.

There is no operating system without transactions. One solution is DeFi, a financial system that allows for independent operation. The system doesn’t rely on banks, insurance, credit unions or any other financial intermediaries. Consumers can invest, trade, transact, and transfer using currencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin. To better understand the value of these two blockchains, consider that as of this week, the asset trade over the Ethereum blockchain surpassed $8 million in daily sales.

Ethereum, because of this added value, is now the world’s second-highest valued cryptocurrency by market capitalization. But this isn’t about the technology, just like retail isn’t about the store aisles and film isn’t about the physical theater. The value transferred in the store or theater is what defines the success of the store of value. [2PM, 1]

Digital assets can be transferred through smart contracts, digital agreements that trigger the transaction upon fulfillment of the agreement. And all creators should be able to benefit from their ideas in a platform agnostic manner, across any and every geographic region on Earth. The next great innovation in the creator economy is the DeFi layer that allows for the global brain to properly compensate its best cells.

The removal of any and all friction from online transactions, whether through fiat currency or cryptocurrency is one of the chief business conundrums of our time. One example of a company aiming to solve the problem is a small, intermediary financial tech company. Uquid believes that creators and retailers can grow quicker by reaching a broader cross-section of potential consumers.

Uquid has come a long way since its launch in 2016. The company describes itself as one of the earliest cross-border digital service providers with a blockchain-friendly payment system. A priority for the team has been to build the ecosystem organically while continually making improvements that ensure it is safe and secure for its customers. [2]

But even their technologies have their limits. Smart contracts, blockchains, and The Explorer’s Principle collide in predictable ways. But it’s the unpredictable nature of ideas and their originators that could benefit greatly from our new infrastructural systems that were merely ideas in 2009 (Bitcoin) and 2013 (Ethereum). Ideas are best carried forward by their creators, the center of today’s digitally-native economy. Whether they’re based in New Zealand, Honduras, Mexico City, or rural Wyoming: we should honor creators by providing them the resources to see their ideas through. As Tan said, “The operating system of the global brain is booting up.” We are long past intermediaries and traditional banking systems being able to support the global nature of our ideas and the commerce that follows.

Imagine if the Bitcoin white paper was published by a second or third-hand observer of Satoshi’s early ideas around decentralized finance. It’s likely that the revelation wouldn’t have been as poignant, useful, or lasting.

Find the creators with new and great ideas, subscribe to them, and pay them. There won’t always be breakthroughs with every conversation or newsletter. But you will eventually find the one idea that may change things and proximity to source is incredibly powerful. That creator will be passionate about the concept and how she fostered it from simple thought to brilliant essay. If we can do better by creators, I believe that we will see more ideas carried to the finish. And perhaps there will be another idea-turned-new-land for the rest of us to explore for ourselves. There’s no physical land left to explore; there are only ideas. There may be nothing more valuable.

वेब स्मिथ द्वारा | संपादक: हिलेरी मिल्नेस | लगभग 2 बजे

Memo: In Good Fashion

The merits of fashion retail have never been logical but for the best operators, there is a way to make sense of the chaos.

Likeability, brand equity, and appeal can shift in an instant. But there are predictors of success and failure. Historical benchmarks have long been available to serve as guideposts for the savviest retailers looking to navigate tumultuous times of the present. Manufacturers have thrived during war, recession, protest, and pandemic, and only the poorer performers cited external factors as cause for concern.

A common misconception in the digitally native vertical brand industry is that the previous year of the pandemic is thwarting the growth of fashion retailers, harming sales projections, stifling growth, or shuttering doors. The hard data contends there’s more to the story. Of the current top 100 fastest-growing direct-to-consumer brands tracked by 2PM, 40 are fashion retailers, while four are in the top 10. This has been a breakout year for fashion.

Updated for the week of 2/8/2021

A number of modern brands deepened community and developed foundations for explosive growth over the last 12 months: Parade, Rowing Blazers, Madhappy, Aime Leon Dore, Tracksmith, Buck Mason, Gymshark, and Monica & Andy are but a few. For the retailers who struggled through the last year, this memo can serve as a helpful reset.

The average American buys a piece of clothing every five days. A study of historical crises will show that our behaviors do not slow to halt during moments of distress. Instead, they change; we allocate our spend differently. We limit our purchases to “affordable pleasures” or we shift to differing styles that represent the feel of the moment in question. We are wired to buy things to wear and we do so frequently, even the most frugal of us. What changes is how we express our individuality in evolving times.

Consider Ralph Lauren’s rise in the late 1970s and early 1980s despite a catastrophic American recession. A 1990 article in Utah’s 171-year-old daily paper Deseret News began:

If the 1980s were a movie – and the metaphor is almost unavoidable given actor/president Ronald Reagan’s domination of the decade – the credit lines would have to include costumes by Ralph Lauren. [1]

The designer identified and marched forward on a new approach to an established idea, the article explains: The New Traditionalism or “the baby boom’s kitschification of the middle age.” Lauren wasn’t the first; an even greater example of this strategy is 1947’s launch of then-obscure designer Christian Dior’s first line.

In 1947, my first collection was successful beyond my wildest dreams. 

After departing the army in 1942, the 37-year-old Dior joined the Lucien Lelong fashion house alongside a gentleman named Pierre Balmain, the house’s other primary designer. Drio, along with Lelong and Balmain, labored to maintain France’s fashion industry throughout World War II. Five years later, Dior launched his design house’s debut fragrance. The bottled Miss Dior perfume was a tribute to his sister Catherine who was liberated from a concentration camp just two years prior. Inspired by the country’s Belle Époque period of the late 1800s, Dior preceded Ralph Lauren in a period-driven return to tradition. It was his admiration of that period, 50 years on, that influenced a femininity in his design that would eventually take the contemporary fashion world by storm.

Fashion has never been logical. Sometimes, timing is as much a factor as anything else. For Dior, timing couldn’t have been better. Fast Company’s Liz Segran recently covered COVID-19’s effect on fashion trends. She cited Dior’s prescient strategy and brilliant timing:

During World War II, for instance, women wore jeans and overalls as they took over men’s jobs. Then, in 1947, Christian Dior unveiled his debut collection, which featured figure-hugging jackets, fitted waists, and A-line skirts. It was a radically feminine look that repudiated the utilitarian, masculinized garments of the previous years—and that was the point. Around the world, women swooned over this style, dubbed the “New Look,” which became a dominant fashion trend of the late 1940s and early 1950s. [2]

This next part is prescient. In that Fast Company report, Segran went on to explain the dynamic of women wearing men’s workwear, including overalls and denim, during the war. She cited author Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell explaining how, even after the war concluded and the pendulum swung to a radically feminine look, the fashion trends of the war persisted:

After a crisis, there is a backlash, but there is also a lasting effect. Both of these can be true at the same time.

The war years normalized a new era for womenswear, including pants and garments that were never before considered customary. This sheds light on the potential post-pandemic behaviors of today.

The retail industry has suffered from foundational issues. The reliance on debt leverage to fund growth and inventory has contributed to legacy companies filing for bankruptcy. Of these, J.Crew, Brooks Brothers, JCPenney, and Neiman Marcus are three of many.

However, like womenswear post-World War II, the reset is not as clear as once thought. America’s current comfort in casual wear is likely to persist in the home and places of work for years to come. Consumers did buy clothes to wear during the pandemic despite the remote work trend, stay-at-home orders, and distance learning. The clothes or the messages by the retailers were just unique to the time.

Good Fashion, Bad Everything

This year, traditional retailers like VF Corporation’s The North Face grew in prominence through careful merchandising, streetwear adoption, and savvy collaborations (See: Gucci). Lululemon’s stock is trading near all-time highs. And Gucci has become the “preferred” luxury brand of Generation Z.

While many brands are suffering, and some have had to take drastic measures like permanently closing stores, other brands like Dior or Louis Vuitton have been performing well, indicating that the pandemic is hitting brands with pre-existing conditions harder. [3]

Direct brands like Parade climbed from relative obscurity to $10 million in annual revenue. Rowing Blazers, a traditional menswear retailer, showed up on everything from NBA stars to Princess Diana in Netflix’s The Crown. Madhappy used savvy merchandising, a persisting message, and their partnership with LVMH to earn Lebron James’ attention in the NBA bubble. The brand is now one of the most coveted streetwear brands born in the last five years. Gymshark accepted its first funding, landing at a valuation north of $1 billion. And Tracksmith, the amateur running brand, finally caught the attention of the mainstream after years of quiet growth. It is now featured across the airwaves thanks to the success of their succinct and aspirational advertising strategy.

Like Ralph Lauren’s rise to prominence during an economic recession and political and cultural reset, and Christian Dior’s establishing of a new post-war tone for American women that flew in the face of other trends, the brands that succeeded during our most recent global crisis did so because they were properly equipped. In each case, they all share (1) smart marketing, (2) savvy merchandising, (3) a messaging strategy that cuts through the worried noise, and most importantly, (4) appreciation for the history of the industry.

For the brands that struggle to regain their footing, at least one of the above four are missing. The pandemic has served as a mirror for modern and traditional retailers alike. Walk into a J.Crew and you may feel soulless. Walk into a Rimowa store and you will feel the sense of New Traditionalism that catapulted Dior and Ralph Lauren to generational success. An over-reliance on physical distribution, pay-per-click advertising, traditional merchandising cycles, academic marketing strategies, and stale interpretations of customer profiles are the preexisting conditions that culminated with the current state of retail distress.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Study the best practices of the past. There will always be momentum shifts, forth and back, over time. The brands that survive are studied in sociology, customer understanding, brand history, communication, and the experiences that elevate a product into a moment. These brands capture more than eyeballs; they capture imagination. It’s the one constant of an enduring brand over decades of ebbs and flows.

वेब स्मिथ द्वारा | संपादक: हिलेरी मिल्नेस

New to 2PM? Read the rest of the 662nd edition.

Memo: The Forgotten Middle

The shift to eCommerce has been overstated, according to one common refrain. There’s some evidence to back that up: total eCommerce penetration accounts for an estimated 14.3-16.1% of all retail sales in 2021, a small slice. Anecdotal support of physical retail’s continued prominence is also regularly called to mind. In a well-researched essay by Elena Burger, an investment analyst at Gilder Gagnon Howe & Co, she explains: 

The takeaway shouldn’t be “eCommerce is eating the world” it should be “despite lockdown, store closures, mass layoffs, and global logistics networks that rival militaries in terms of sophistication, eCommerce was less than one-sixth of sales in the US.”

Intelligence, for the moment, is outpacing life. [1]

The essay is tremendous. A number of takeaways will leave you wanting to understand more about the fascinating times of digital agglomeration’s clash with traditional retail. My concern, however, is that it glosses over two larger issues: retail infrastructure is not solely resting on New York’s soil (the city is mentioned 12 times throughout the essay), and throughout the country, pockets of front-office employment has evaporated. As retail store managers and associates have faced furloughs or worse, there is opportunity for lateral movement to other retailers, brands, or comparable industries. This is not so with the tens of thousands who’ve lost their jobs in front-office retail.

One brand’s success in an area like Soho, New York is often held up as the anecdotal argument that retail’s demise isn’t so dramatic, with stories that read, “Retail is not dead, look at what Allbirds is accomplishing in physical stores!” Yet if you zoom out, recent reports from CNBC tell a different story: rents have fallen to $367 per square foot, a 62% decline from the area’s peak in the spring of 2015, and are declining 25% year over year [2]. The average gross margin of a major retailer fell from 28.44% to 16.76% between Q2 and Q4 2020, with EBITDA margin falling nearly 100 basis points over the same period [3]. Meanwhile, foot traffic has yet to return to pre-COVID form.

We built a bubble of physical retail that reflected changes in America’s social fabric. We did not account for what an even a single-digit change in foot traffic could do to those creations. Ms. Burger explains:

In that period, engineering solved the rather unwieldy problem of “how do we bring an unfathomably large number of people together so they can shop, and justify the millions of dollars we just spent building out this department store or mall.” While developers had other tools to ensure profits (mall operators used a 1954 tax change to accelerate their depreciation schedules and, in turn, realize higher tax write-offs) this is something really worth highlighting. [1]

It’s important to note that preceding this 1954 tax change was another major shift in society, taking place earlier that same year.

The U.S. Supreme Court abolished segregation in schools after Brown vs. Board of Education was decided. This meant that urban areas around the country were characterized as unlivable by some. Nowhere was this felt greater than in the midwest, where affluent families and government-funded veterans moved to the suburbs to allow their children to avoid certain schools. […] This massive exodus to the American suburbs corresponded with a construction boom in the outskirts of many metropolitan areas. [4]

We built these new malls as a means to modularize new cities removed from urban centers. We built these malls far too fast and far too often. America is simply over-retailed. Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population at the center of American cities declined nearly 17% while population grew by 72% in the suburban areas. Before the 1954 tax change was enacted (accelerated depreciation), there was one regional mall in the United States. By 1956, that number rose to 25. There was 6 million square-feet of retail in 1953 and nearly 31 million square-feet by 1956.

We did not account for a future of re-urbanization. We did not account for a future that saw a decline in car ownership. And we did not account for a future that saw digital means of trade as an alternative to the physical.

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When you learn just how little retail’s physical development is tied to population growth, you begin to understand why so many retailers relied on debt and persisting sales promotion to account for waning interest. eCommerce does not have to exceed 30-40% of total sales to negatively impact the retailers who failed to prepare for a future without the consistently high rates of foot traffic that mall developers advertise. In fact, eCommerce as a percentage of retail only needs to remain where it is to continue disrupting America’s 70 year-old model of mall retail. And eCommerce is not responsible for the “contraction of physical retail.” It’s more complicated than that.

Authentic Brands Group’s recent acquisitions are shaping up to be a bright spot in the mall retail sector (Frye, Nautica, Nine West, Volcom, Barneys New York, Forever 21, Lucky Brand, and Brooks Brothers among them). But there are a number of retailers whose positions are increasingly vulnerable. Foot traffic remains unreliable at many malls across America. A number of major retailers are enduring disruption, some worse than others. Your mall is overwhelmingly represented by one American city that is 560 miles away from Manhattan and 2,800 miles away from Los Angeles. It’s the forgotten middle.

As 2019 came to a close, I was sitting around a table with retail of executives from L Brands (Victoria’s Secret, Bed Bath & Beyond), Designer Brands (DSW), Ascena Retail Group (Justice, Lane Bryant, Ann Taylor), Abercrombie & Fitch, and Express. Each headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, the stakes of the conversation were alarming. According WWD, Columbus is the third-ranked city for fashion designer employment behind New York and Los Angeles. This region of Ohio depends on corporate retail like Pittsburgh once depended on steel mills or Detroit boomed on domestic automotive manufacturing. Even a fractional change in the retail ecosystem can cause seismic damage to the city’s tax base. The city’s economic development website boasts:

The Columbus Region is home to some of the world’s most recognizable retail and apparel brands who drive innovation globally – ranking No. 4 along large U.S. metros for concentration of retail headquarters. A concentration of headquarter operations is joined by businesses focused on market research, analytics, design, technology and omni-channel efficiencies – creating a market that uniquely connects retailers with customers.[4]

Well into the day, eCommerce rose to the forefront of the conversation. While some of the leaders were prepared for an eventual digital-first economy, few were eager to depend on it so heavily and so soon. By the second quarter of 2020, digital and logistical infrastructures would be put to the test as mall foot traffic fell precipitously. That foot traffic has yet to return to its pre-COVID form. And neither have the gross margins that sustain the large corporations that depend on them for the maintenance of five-figure workforces.

Retail is resilient but all retailers are not. Since that conversation, the collective of brands in that room has eschewed thousands of front-office jobs, disrupting suburbs and schools and places of worship that depended on the consistency of enterprise retail. The reality is that the No. 4 metro for retail employment and the No. 3 metro for fashion design has been impacted by the shift to digital agglomeration. And it’s a leading indicator for further disruption, if I have ever seen one. We are talking about a class of corporations that are commonly operated with extraordinary amounts of debt and little room to tolerate disruption. In The Credit Report, I explained:

A number of key retailers are carrying debt-to-EBITDA ratios that are not sustainable under COVID-19’s conditions. For example: JCPenney owes $8.30 for every dollar earned, Office Depot owes $4.60 per dollar earned, and Walgreens owes $5.80.

Perhaps the traditional retailers who’ve relied so heavily on foot traffic will find new ways to build omnichannel successes. It is a matter of margin, room for error, and tolerance for disruption. Retail is on shakier ground than many can understand. Here, in the forgotten middle, I see the struggle to pivot towards a digital-first economy. Digital agglomeration [6] and eCommerce are undeniable factors in this newfound vulnerability. It may be difficult to see at the New York or Los Angeles street levels, where luxury brands and popular stores are still thriving despite it all. But, without considerable changes, the mall retail system is incapable of tolerating further disruption. The shift to eCommerce is actually understated because the old guard will have to adopt the technologies of today just to survive the decade. In a wonderful excerpt, Burger explained:

Because technology made the relationship between the consumer and consumerism more convenient, and because its acceptance was relatively uncontested, shopping itself sponsored the complete alteration of urban and suburban sprawl. [1]

In the 1950s, malls were the retail technology of its time. Seventy years later, you wouldn’t possibly rely on olden technology to power retail for the next seventy. Mall owners will require its retailers becoming great eCommerce practitioners. Without that, these developments will struggle with delinquencies and vacancies, perpetuating a ruinous cycle. Physical retail needs eCommerce more than ever.

वेब स्मिथ द्वारा | संपादक: हिलेरी मिल्नेस | कलाकार: एलेक्स रेमी | लगभग 2 बजे

Editor’s Note: Elena’s essay is one that is sure to take the retail ecosystem by storm, and rightfully so. Within the hour that it was published, seven different people sent it my way. It is well-researched and well-positioned. The author is a hedge fund analyst, which informs her views. She explains that the narrative around eCommerce’s impact on physical retail is overstated. She and I hopped on a traditional old phone call to discuss what we agreed on as well as what I would contend with or elaborate further on. What I most appreciated about the exchange is that we discussed ideas candidly and constructively without as much as a prior introduction. It’s what I hope happens more often in this era of Substack creators, newsletter operators, and operators-turned-writers. If you’re new to 2PM, read the rest of this week’s Monday Letter here.