Nick Swinmurn: Unsuccessful Search For Shoes

Zappos (the Company) is an online shoe retailer that started its business in 1999. The Company later expanded and increased the variety of the products it sells by adding clothing, beauty products, and housewares product lines. Additionally, the Company created a brick and mortar storefront to expand the business from online only and increase sales. The Zappos Customer Loyalty Team Case Study emphasizes the customer service department and the drop ship method.

Zappos is an online shoes retailer that started its business in the year 1999. Later on the company had expanded its business to include the beauty products, clothing and even the housewares within its leading e-commerce website. This case emphasizes on the customer service department of Zappos Company and initially the business focused only on the drop ship method. Later on the company also increased the variety of the products. The company had also created a bricks and mortar storefront to expand the business and increase the sales of the business.

Founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn, Zappos.com, initially named ShoeSite.com, has grown from an inventory-less, “drop-ship” shoe sales website that connected customer orders with shoe suppliers to an Internet shoe mega-retailer that recorded a reported $2.1 billion in revenue in

Tony Hsieh graduated from Harvard University in 1995 with a computer science degree and went to work for the computer software giant Oracle. Then he quit.

In 1999, Nick Swinburn was walking around a mall and could not find the right color and design of shoes. He created a shoe company online. He eventually started selling on Amazon to increase sales. Zappos is a great company, and believe in social responsibility. They don’t attempt to get into price wars with competitors, instead, they focus on giving back to the community. Their items are a bit pricey for those who live paycheck to paycheck. It is like buying a Jaguar, BMW, or Lexus. Those that can afford the brand will buy and those that can’t will buy cheaper brands. Zappo’s knows this, so they or company that takes care of the people that got them to where they are now. Without the customers, the business will fail. The community

The threat of new entrants into the online shoe/apparel market is relatively small due to the fact that Zappos is such an established brand and has specialized their business model. It would be far too expensive for a new company to copy the characteristics of Zappos including their next day delivery and large overhead. The fact that Zappos was losing money initially illustrates this difficulty. Another issue that would create a high barrier to entry is Zappos commitment to the consumer through overnight shipping. Zappos stated that the overnight shipping caused them to leave their warehouses open for the entire day. Any other company would

Zara is established in 1975, as the flagship brand of Inditex group, which founded by Amancio Ortega. In a short period, Inditex group has become one of the world’s top fashion retailers with more than 4000 stores across 82 countries around the world and more than 50% is accounted as Zara’s. Another Inditex brands which operate worldwide are Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Stradivarius, Zara Home, Pull and Bear, and Uterque. By seeing the Inditex’s brands list, it can be concluded that Inditex almost covers all aspect in fashion industry (Zara 2008).

The movie The Field of Lost Shoes, purely based off of the Battle of New Market, is both accurate and inaccurate when displaying soldiers’ lifestyle and their experiences that occurred during the Civil War. The movie is inaccurate in a way that is portrays soldiers having to leave their jobs, when they really did have jobs they had to leave. The movie is accurate in most scenes. Its accuracy proves to be correct in the scenes that women had to step in as nurses and help the wounded, soldiers leaving their loved ones, the horrible conditions that the soldiers had to fight through, and when groups of stable soldiers went to the field’s aftermath to rescue wounded soldiers and their loved ones. Overall, the movie is consistently accurate all the way through to show how the Civil War impacted the American lifestyle.

Over the years, what we know as the retail industry has changed. With fast access to information and increasing demand from customers, the retail industry have been fighting to overcome challenges to keep up with the changing times. Zara, a flagship brand under the Inditex Company (Industrias de Deseno Texti S.A) founded in 1975, achieving huge success within the retail industry in most focuses of operation.

Zara was founded by Amancio Ortega in 1963. The business began as a small outfit producing lingerie items. The first Zara

Zappos' corporate culture began with a guy who decided to buy a shoe online. Hsieh tried looking for his shoes online and was again unsuccessful. Although there were a lot of pop stores selling shoes online, what was interesting to Hsieh was that there was no major online retailer that specialized in shoes. So, since it was 1999 and anything seemed possible at that time, Hsieh decided to quit his day job and start an online shoe retailer and in that day, Zappos was born. Also His epiphany was the result of learning through research that companies serving customers with a higher purpose outperformed those that focused on market leadership and

Zappos.com is a privately held online retailer with an extensive product category mainly including apparel, footwear, handbags, and watches. Headquartered in Nevada, it primarily operates in the US with about 1,300 employees and revenues mounting to $635M in 2008. Thanks to its strength in offering an outstanding customer shopping experience and strong corporate cultures and values related to customer service, it was the largest online shoe retailer in 2008, with a positive growth outlook. However, in the face of possible economic

Zappos.com is an online clothing and shoe company or shop that is currently based in Nevada, Las Vegas. The company was founded in the year 1999 by Nick Swinmurn. The company’s initial inspiration came after he was not able to find one of his favorite pair of shoes, the air walks, at the local mall. The same year, he approached Alfred Lin and Tony Hseih with an idea of selling different types of shoes online. However, Hsieh was skeptical at first and went to the extent of deleting voice mails sent by Swinmurn (Harnish, 2012). After Swinmurn stated that the footwear in United States is

Nick Swinmurn struggled to find the perfect pair of shoes in his local mall. He browsed through many stores and failed to find the correct size shoe, in the right color, with the right style. This is when he thought to create an online shoe store that made shoe shopping easy. Every style, color, and size all on one site. At the time the internet was just starting to come alive and currently 5% of the shoe industry was being sold through mail in catalogs. This encouraged Swinmurn and lead him to believe there would be success with an online shoe store (Hsieh). He originally named the site, shoesite.com, and in 1999 he went on his way to find investors to jumpstart the website. He fell upon Venture Frogs, an early stage venture investments

Amancio Ortega, had a simple idea of linking customer demand to manufacturing and manufacturing with distribution, when creating ZARA in 1975 in la Coruña, Spain Zara came under the holding company Inditex in the year 1985 and is today the biggest fashion brand of the group. Zara believes that the prime factors for running a successful business are quick response to customers, use of computers, and disintegrated decision-making (McAfee, Dessain, & Sjoman, 2007)