Hi there,

For the past month, I have been thinking of creating a platform that serves as the DoorDash for local gifting, whereby your friends and family living elsewhere could input a few of your interests and be given a recommendation of a couple of small businesses in your city that would deliver a suitable gift for you. The goal is to boost small business sales and also introduce folks to businesses in their own cities that they may not know about. 

I began walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn to assess small businesses' interest in boosting their e-commerce sales. After speaking to a dozen business owners, I realized that many of them either don't have e-commerce set up or only have partial inventory listed, which would hinder them from joining the platform I hoped to create. During my conversations with shop owners, they expressed a variety of challenges they faced that I had not considered.

So, I decided to start this newsletter to highlight small business owners (starting in New York) and their successes and struggles. This will help me (and hopefully you!) better understand the common challenges facing small business owners.

Let’s get to it.

This week’s Small Biz:

👗 Muléh

Muleh is Javanese for “home”

Vici, who is Javanese American, started the store 30 years ago. Vici comes from a finance background but have always loved fashion. She started the boutique in D.C. and moved it to Manhattan. She goes on annual buying trips to Europe, where she has established decades-long relationships with brands with a level of quality trusted by her loyal customers, most of whom have lived in Manhattan for decades.

😬 Biz problem: Clothing and retail stores find it hard to offer free return policies that customers like because they still have to pay credit card fees for returns.

• Initial Transaction Fees: When the original purchase is made, the merchant pays processing fees to the credit card company and payment processor (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc.)

• Refund Transaction: When a customer returns an item and receives a refund, the merchant still pays processing fees for the original transaction.

• This is costly for local merchants and makes them unable to offer flexible return policies that help them gain and retain happy customers.

💡Buzz solution?

• Create a tool for predictive analytics to identify and reduce high-return product lines

• Create a more effective tool to track and analyze return patterns and reasons to address root causes

😬 Biz problem: Sizing standards vary between countries and brands, which makes shopping challenging for customers.

• Customers walk into the stores thinking they are a certain size, but they are actually a different size in that store

• Salespeople do not want to offend customers by telling them to try a larger size

• Bad sizing/fit is the biggest reason behind clothing reasons, solving this problem would help businesses’ costs associated with returns

💡Buzz solution?

• Find a way to standardize sizing across brands: for example, if I am a 6 in Lululemon tops and 4 in bottoms, what size am I at Uniqlo? What about at a less-known brand?

• Create a body scanning solution that offers accurate measurements for customers that can help sales associates assist in-store customers and integrate with e-commerce platforms