Nina Mullen's Profile

Totally agree with both Charlotte’s and Gabo’s points. We will have to see whether the business model can be adopted but I see no reason why not considering how well it works for Inditex!

Tulio, this is a really interesting post. One of the other features of Grindr that I know of is that you can actually change your location to be somewhere where you are not physically present, for example, you can be in New York and set your location to Paris. I think one downfall of this functionality is that users are no longer even looking at profiles or chatting with people who are in meet-able range. What is your take on this feature? What value does it bring users?

Michelle, I really love that they have seemingly created an integrated market where there was none before. It seems kind of like Craigslist for artists or something of the like. I think that one logical next step would be to start selling art directly from the site and removing the gallery from the process. I do not think they would want to eliminate the partnership with the gallery entirely, but perhaps have some artists just selling directly. Is this something they are already doing? If not, do you think their operating model could make that shift?

Gabo! Love that you chose Harry’s. As you mention in your post (and Ryan in his previous comment) the vertical integration in manufacturing really is key to Harry’s business model. While I was working there, one of the key things I did was work with the factory to deal with capacity constraints. For any small business getting a major factory to prioritize your line over other more established customers is extremely tough, so having your own manufacturing facilities really gave us a leg up. The razor blade industry is actually even more consolidated than other industries manufacturing wise and there are really only five manufacturers in the world who can produce quality blades, even more of a reason that Harry’s had to own their own. Great post!

Thank you for your comment, Jonathan. You bring up a very important point, I do not think that fast fashion can exist at the prices that we see today while also having a respect for social standards. However, I do think there is the possibility for the two to coexist should prices be raised. There are some companies today, such as Everlane, that have focused on this connection between high quality social standards and cheap clothing. There is nothing inherent to Zara’s business model today that would prohibit them from righting this issue.

Love this post, great prose and get drawings! What stands out to me here (aside from the absolutely killer illustrations) is the importance of the flat organization structure of this organization. Because all of the Dabbawalas are considered equal once they are bought into the organization, they are then empowered to correct any one issue should it go wrong. There is no escalation of issues and no bottleneck because of this. This aspect reminds me of the move to a single cell structure in the Dore, Dore case as well as the airline customer service changes made by Jan Carlzon (LEAD case). Once the entire operation was controlled by the workers, and workers were empowered to do what was most needed at any point, the efficiency was greatly increased.