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 Which company had a better year last year?  Company A - generated $39 million of revenue last year - 67.5% gross profit margins - grew its customer base from 10,000 customers/month to 120,000 customers/month throughout the course of the year Company B - generated $11.7 million of revenue last year - 80% gross profit margins - grew its customer base from 10,000 customers/month to 120,000 customers/month throughout the course of the year   99% of people would answer, “Company A.” 99% of people would be incorrect if provided only with the information above. Why? Well, two reasons that can be...

Over the past few years, the subscription box business model has taken off. Birchbox pioneered the model and their success has prompted a number of others to follow in their footsteps. (By the way, at the end of our series, you'll come to realize that Birchbox really isn't a subscription-box driven business...stay tuned) An interesting aspect of this subscription box model is its attractiveness from an operating perspective. Investors are pretty bullish about the subscription box model (or at least they were) and after some study and number crunching, we understand why. Over the course of the next two blog...

  If you are one of the few people who still believes that the whole e-commerce/ online retail thing is just a fad, I suggest that you open up that flip phone of yours, dial 411, and ask to be connected to the nearest Borders store. (By the way, if you really do call, let us know how what happened.) But jokes aside, e-commerce and online retail has been around for a few years and it doesn't look to be going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, there is even vigorous debate as to whether physical retail establishments will, for all...

The U.S. economy is massive and one could point to a number of statistics to back up that claim, including Total U.S. Retail Sales. As illustrated in Figure 1 below, over the past 10 years, Total U.S. Retail sales have consistently been greater than $3.5 trillion each year and in 2013, Total U.S. Retail sales totaled an incredible $4.5 trillion. To give you a sense of how large that figure is, in 2013, Germany, the 4th largest country in the world as measured by GDP, had a GDP of ~$3.7 trillion. In other words, the market value of all final...