#50 - Learning Medley on Indonesia’s e-Commerce market, stories of Patagonia & The North Face and Intuit’s business model
July 17, 2020: A series of learnings from various sources/methods. Learning about the Indonesian e-Commerce landscape and its dominant Tokopedia platform from a conversation, Patagonia and The North Face’s founding stories and the power of their brand from the Business Wars podcast and thinking about Intuit’s business model after learning Scuttleblurb’s article.
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Episode Notes:
Indonesia e-Commerce scuttlebutt
Learning about Tokopedia’s "no warehouse" business model
Gojek and the unique delivery ecosystem
Lazada is the 'style’ platform and Tokopedia is everything else
Tokopedia’s 'no commission’ business model
Young/uneducated e-commerce population
Business Wars Podcast - Patagonia & The North Face
Founders of Patagonia (Yvon Chouinard) and The North Face (Douglas Tompkins) were friends who hiked Canada’s rockies.
Chouinard started Patagonia after Tompkins sold The North Face to Hap Klopp. Patagonia emerged as the offshoot clothing line of Chouinard Equipments
Under Hap Klopp and soon after VF Corp, The North Face focused on creating technical wear for downhill skiers and mountain sports enthusiasts. But they got traction with rappers, and street gangsters. Funny how brands morph in a different way than when founders intended, like Patagonia becoming Patagucci for Wall Street and Sandhill Road.
Most admirable theme is Chouinard’s unique approach to business: slowing growth, trying to stop people from buying more clothes to save the environment, slashing margins to get more expensive and environmentally friendly raw materials, pulling out of wholesaling to limit growth, a continuous focus on weird/unusual approaches to business strategy
Scuttleblurb - Intuit
Accounting software for small businesses
Fast growing, under-penetrated market for self-employed + small businesses. Questionable advantage of “brand”. Switching cost of product seems negligible given inherent churn rate of small businesses constantly failing and the need to constantly deploy sales and marketing to acquire new customers. A continuous need to do this also indicates a weakness of the brand.