Ideeli has a terrible name – way too easy to misspell – but a sharp business model: they take discounted women’s luxury goods and they make them available woot-style through an invite-only network. Write up in the NYT today, found it via SAI. But neither source plays up the sharpest part of the model – to get in on the deals earliest, you have to pay $7.99 a month for the privilege.
In an online world of ‘free’, congrats to ideeli for being sharp enough to realize that for their target audience, eight bucks a month is peanuts. Hell, I’d be priming the pump and growing the community by buying the season’s it-purse in bulk, taking a loss on each item, and subsidizing the sale through the membership fees. (After you hire new webdevs, of course – I can log on using Firefox, but when I’m using the latest fully-up-to-date version of Camino I’m being told I need to ‘upgrade my browser’. And while you’re at it, probably a bad idea to leave a phone number for ‘testers’ only commented out in your page source.)
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