Well, that's bright. Wow. Yeah, that's bright Awesome. Good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us. Marcia. It's so good to see you. Good to see you too. Really looking forward to chatting Huge disclaimer. We're obviously one of your investors and happy happy very happy with that and I really enjoy working with you and hopefully you can share a little bit of What God is excited in this conversation and a little bit of insight into Many of your successes, but let's talk about beauty pie first, which is obviously the business you're building now Maybe just to set the scene it'd be great to hear From you a little bit about what is beauty pie? How does it work? And why did you? Start it over the time was right. There's why are you doing this now? Sure Well, I've been in the beauty industry now for 30 years and one of the things that started to really irk me about it was that there really was a monopoly on distribution and And we find that as consumers of beauty products We're paying 20 times sometimes what the actual cost of goods of that product is And knowing that there started to be less and less places for a creator of brands like myself To distribute that would actually end up in building a profitable business a lot of the large retailers We're starting to have their own in-house incubators. So Sephora for instance has its own in-house incubator The altar will have its own in-house incubator boots will have its own in-house incubator So if you're a person like me who loves to create a brand and wants to distribute it There's nowhere to do it anymore Because you'll have the retailer so used to be your partners you were the creator and they were the retailer now being the creators themselves However, they will take your brand, but they won't give it equal showing on the shelves So I thought because I had an incredible network that I've built over the last 30 years of Italian labs and French noses and Swiss skin care scientists that I would go direct to consumer I'd approach all of these labs to create ranges for Club where people could buy without the crazy retailer markups that are inherent to the Traditional beauty industry, so it was a bit of a leap off a cliff I did think everyone in the industry would want to kill me Because I was ripping the doors open and showing you know the egregious markups that existed But it was really the only way forward for someone who wants to do a brand now in in beauty It is so hard because it used to be that You know retailer would take 50% Now they take 70 and as we know if you're not paying a retailer 70% now or paying a landlord you're paying Google or Facebook So the idea for a club that had recurring revenue where people came back Every month or every two months to shop for their beauty products and get much much more competitive prices Just seemed like an obvious thing to do Now the I mean maybe to elaborate a bit more on the pricing because it's On face value looks crazy Well, you have a membership model and then prices which are just radically different to anything you would see On the high street when you were coming in to build a beautify and thinking about this Pricing but my understanding you spent quite a bit of time speaking to academics other people try to understand the psychology of People's purchasing in this category. I would love to I'm sure the audience would love to hear a little bit more about How are you against that where you learn some why you felt this was gonna work and ultimately why it does work as an interesting model Sure. Well as this is my first tech startup And also my first I guess membership business. It's not a subscription. So we don't actually send anything out to people it's more like Really we like to call it like a luxury American Costco, but for all beauty products and wellness products I first read a fantastic book if you haven't read it Called hooked by a behavioral economist named near I L and and I remember actually I Think I was listening to it and walking and every time something that was relevant would come up I would stop and you know take a note and figure out how this might apply to the business and it was full of Really great insights some of them being you know, this is there are 12. I'll probably remember six One is that you've got to have fuel right to get somebody to do something So it might not be that the motivator for someone to switch to your beauty product is because it's cheaper It might be that you've got to still create desire for that product So the same type of beauty marketing the same type of pictures the same Same type of descriptions and the desire building has to be there beauty is about pleasure It's not about rewards, and there are two different Parts of the brain there are two reward systems in the brain one is is pleasure and one is rewards And so you have to make sure that you're stimulating both It's not always just about getting it cheaper. Although getting it cheaper makes you feel egotistically smarter About yourself. So there is a boost In in your dopamine right from feeling like you got a good deal But at the same time there is something called price value inference and if something is too cheap people will think it isn't of a high quality and so the Luxury industries of course have brainwashed all of us for a very long time to tell us that something is expensive It must be good and that's not necessarily always true although more active ingredients in a product will make it more expensive So we had to figure out online how to fight that price value inference if something's going to be a low price How do you then communicate that it's high quality and so we do show two prices online? We show the non-member's price So what the typical retail would be and then we show a member's price So if you are a member what type of price you can access There are so many so many great behavioral economists that if you are doing any kind of model like this You should be studying Dan Ariely Near I L I mean there's hundreds of them and all available on on YouTube, right? If you don't have access to them individually, there's also a great I'm trying it's called nudge stock so if you're if you're looking for more information from the greats of Behavioral economics there is on online and every year Ogilvy sponsors. It's kind of like a conference Based on Richard Thaler's work Which is what nudging people to do things and it's called nudge stock and you can watch Literally 36 hours of nudge stock speeches from all the greatest and smartest people in the world on YouTube an hour at a time. I would highly recommend amazing amazing obviously what one of the one of the things you just talked about obviously is how do you position the product and then the brand to Have they have the appeal of quality? But while, you know massively discounting the price that people are used to paying and you've been raising stuff So building many many brands Kind of have that kind of magic touch, but as you came into this business maybe with a little bit the pricing and the positioning in mind and Going direct to consumer more than ever before. How was that? Brand building experience being how you managed to create beauty pie into a brand which people love They think the product and they recognize what is being incredibly high quality at the same time They are experiencing a radically different price point. That's a great question And we've sort of learned a lot as we've gone along the way. We're always experimenting with different formats of Communication certainly social media has had this incredible surge of popularity in the last few years But is now a little bit on the down slide I think and so you always have to follow what customers are spending their time on and one thing that we're quite I guess quite lucky, but it's all part of my experience to have is Expertise in the beauty area. So for us long-form communication Newsletters emails are really a huge source of shopping revenue from our customers We are able in long form to describe why this product might be better than that product We actually try and do it in good layman's terms, but include Statistics and you know ninety two percent of people who use this for however long loved it And and really describe what a certain product does for you I mean number one and consumer goods is with them If we don't know that was what's in it for me And you just have to always remember to go back to with them because if you're not describing what's in it for them You're losing them, right So it is a little bit old-school to be emailing your customers But we generate so much of our revenue from email And also being able to remind people throughout the journey on the website You know why a product might be different or better We have been hampered by some of our technology. We chose a really terrible platform at the beginning So we're just almost now getting started with what we can do But being able to really educate people we we use in our communications an acronym, which is Frida, so it's fun if it's not fun You know or if it's not reiterating what the proposition is and and what the whiff them is for the customer If it's not educational If it doesn't demonstrate and if it's not aspirational, we don't do it And so we try and keep everybody really focused on on Frida When we're creating any kind of content to to try and stimulate sales or stimulate acquisition of new customers Frida, okay. I'm gonna remember that And You know one of the things that we were impressed with and continues to be the case is you have incredible retention A long-term engagement with your customers now, obviously the membership model lends itself to that if I've started paying for something And I and I get good product, but I'm sure there's a lot more beyond that I'd love to hear a little bit about the relationship you have with the customers Obviously you're delivering a message to them. What are they sending back to you? How do you take on board that feedback and keep the product catalog fresh keep the Relationship fresh and sustain those the level of engagement sure lots of questions in there. I hope you don't forget them all So number one a warning. I think our retention rate might have gone down one point. No. Yes. I know I'm sorry, but it's a terrible economy and there are all these articles out there about people not having their memberships anymore So we may have dropped from like 73 to 72, but we're working on getting that back up Obviously, you know for for generally women, right? We have a small contingent of men and and probably transgender people As members but women love something new all the time. So built into our model We work with about 50 of the different the best Suppliers of beauty and wellness products around the world and built into the model from the very beginning was constant new product drops It's kind of like Nike and sneaker drops, right? But it's beauty pie and beauty product drops So she always has something new to look forward to I think it's really difficult if you don't have Dynamic product range to keep the interest of a customer who is constantly being You know bombarded with marketing from other People you almost have to be several brands in yourself to keep her interested We of course also remind her how much she saved so it might be on an email It might be when she logs into the website. I personally have saved 37,000 pounds. Wow, it's beauty pie started Of course I buy a lot of candles and I buy a lot of gifts But I always feel like if I'm not gonna if I'm not gonna buy these products Why would she buy these products if I don't like it? You know why is it good enough for me then it's good enough for her So I think of course keeping the quality up And if you are lucky enough to be an industry where you're selling something that you love Making sure that the standard is high enough for yourself We also find it really important to just respect the customer's intelligence. I know that sounds quite basic But it's so important if you're speaking to her that you aren't trying to fool her into doing something and you know it because I think she feels it and then she loses trust and Having a customer trust you and trust your proposition and know that you are being Upfront with them. It is really a two-way street. It's almost like a partnership when somebody is a customer of yours for that long They want you to do well Right and and they are very invested so we to your point also about how do we Include the customer in that product development cycle I'm from from very early on and this is one of the wonderful things about the internet From very early on we've been able to communicate with her directly about what she wants How does she feel about a new product that we've launched? What would she like to see us bring into the assortment? Down to we will say we're gonna launch five new candles, right? Here are their fragrance here their names and here the fragrance triangles Which ones would you buy and why we will take a poll either on Instagram or Facebook? Or we'll do it through like survey monkey and then we'll buy according to what they've said and I can tell you It's never more than 3% off that poll We did another sort of an exit poll and you haven't joined today went for a lot of customers who had come in you haven't joined yet today why not and I was talking to you about this a little bit earlier some we are a membership model So you have to buy a membership and commit to buying this membership in order to access the really lowest prices So we said you haven't joined as a member today Tell us why not right and the question was I'd rather shop at retail and just get free shipping Or I'd rather pay twenty nine dollars a year instead of fifty nine and get fifty percent off in blah blah blah Or I'd rather have I like the membership the way it is Right and of course when you send out a survey you have to mix up the answers So you got to send to different cohorts in different In different order because there's order bias and then you also have to make sure that there's no bias in the question And the way that we've worded it because some people will Always agree with what you're already doing because they don't want to seem disagreeable That's another thing from behavioral economics, right? So you you got to make sure you're doing your surveys, right? interestingly when we did the survey about 27% of the people even though they could be seven saving 70% on everything by joining 27% of the people said I'd rather shop at full price and get free shipping which is not rational But I think what you learn is that people are totally irrational They just the emotions often take over so if you think you're explaining to something to somebody really clearly It doesn't matter you have to watch what they're doing in their natural environment And then work around that and kind of go from there. It's a lot easier now Interestingly 27% of people said they'd like to shop at full price So we put up a full price journey and in the first week 27% of people shoved at full price Is that crazy? I mean and and those people well We don't know how many more times they will shop with us It's likely that they will probably shop at the same interval as members according to a behavioral economist that Consulted about this. So they will actually be very profitable customers for us Given that we have the machine in place. We have all of the products in place. We have the inventory in place You know, we let her let her do what she wants to do And and I think one of our big learnings has been like don't force them to do what? We want them to do let them do what they would naturally do. It's incredible insights I think it's so easy to find one user group Who like buying the product you've decided to sell them at the price you thought how how have you decided to sell it? I'm just trying to keep find more and more of those yeah, and it's a great reminder to remember that actually there will be alternative buying groups Perhaps a rational rational so you're not gonna you're not gonna kind of logically deduce So this is the thing to do and so in your experience that was really learning from talking to them Do you have you been able to leverage data as well to just bought some of his insights? Well given that we have had a terrible platform We've kind of had to build this business so far with blinders on our faces But we now have more data coming in and it's so incredibly helpful However, I will caveat the data tells you about yesterday So in the footwear industry, we would always say that buyers, you know the buyers in the department stores You know their experts at yesterday, they're not gonna bring you the brand new thing So you still have to be out there being a little bit crazy and thinking okay What is the thing that we can't see right and I would always say that to my To my head of e-commerce. They'd be very proud. Well our conversion rate is 3% and I'd say our conversion rate 97% of the People coming in here aren't shopping from us That's 97% that's really terrible and he'd say but 3% is really good No, it's not we're missing the majority the people so then you have to really focus on why are you missing them? And so some of these new user journeys that we're looking at our I Guess our attempt to try and figure out who are all those other people And how do we have something for them as well because we do have the very best products out there We're getting them from the very best sources. We believe in them And it's a you know, it's a great place to shop no matter how you want to shop So why wouldn't you but let's make that really easy for him her them no matter how they come in. Yeah, yeah amazing Yeah, when we invested I think you were just providing the service to people within Europe But then you made the move to the US and it's gone really really well, yeah I'd love to hear a little bit about The challenge how you how you kind of took that on was it kind of copy and paste? Did you have to think about things in a bit of a different way and what's what's led to that success? That's a really great question. I think the US actually we're only in the UK. We're not even in Europe yet Software issue, but that has opened up as well. So this year is like a big year Actually, it'll be next year. That's a big year of opening up for us. So it's really exciting in the US I think what you have to remember is that the US customer has a Lot of choice right it's a plethora of choice out there And there are a lot of things that have already been done And they are bigger spenders and they are so and they want to move really quickly and they're not necessarily as Considered with their cash and of course, I'm generalizing hugely, but it does seem that way so far And they don't necessarily want something that's really inexpensive More customers in the US shopping at full price Because they don't necessarily understand the model and they just want to do something fast So they'll see something they want to click on it. They want to buy it. They don't necessarily want to Consider so the funnel may be different for the US customer If you are on a membership model or a subscription model, you might just want to let them buy the product as well I think rent the runway, which is a business that sends. Are you familiar? I know you're a guy, but yeah, okay That sends up clothing right you can rent your clothing It has started to sell clothing because of course if you Rent something and you love it, you know, why not buy it whereas previously they just rented it So for us what we had to really do is go into the market and then look at What does she what's already there because one of our biggest hurdles with the when we first entered was that she thought We were a subscription box and that's because there are so many subscription boxes that already exist So the heuristic for her was to look at it and think oh, this is another one of those when it's in fact Not we don't send you anything so people would sign up and then a month later. So I didn't get my box And it's like we don't send you a box. You're paying for access to these prices So then we realized well, maybe need we need to send her a box, right? She wants a box raise the price send her a box and then everybody's happy and she gets you know what she thinks so we are currently now Building that team but also looking at with again all the infrastructure that we've built What is the best and easiest way to deliver this in an understandable fashion to a consumer who has seen something? Familiar and make it easily confused because they're just like rushed up their feet Doing whatever it is they do. Yeah, so that makes sense. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you You know your previous businesses and even beautify the the start were bootstrapped. You didn't take venture capital But now you have taken venture capital in the last few years. What's what led to our decision? What was different about this business and I'll tell you Daniel the venture capital thing. It's quite stressful What don't tell me that but only because it's so much less stressful when you're only spending your own money And so if you are a responsible individual, I'm quite a frugal responsible individual Now I feel like I have to perform for the investors and I hate it But I'll just say a little ad for Balderton if you could not find a more supportive group of investors Then Balderton and also one of our other well actually all of our investors are great but we love Balderton for for There's so much support that's offered And this is my first VC backed business. I always just stuffed whatever profit I had under my mattress and then reinvested it but when I Was doing my first tech startup trying to find tech talent of any grade was quite difficult if you were not VC backed So we would interview people and and think wow, you know, you get to the end of the interview You think this is the one this is one and their question when you would say well Do you have any questions was always so are you venture backed and then my answer was always yet? No, I'm I'm funding it myself and then they wouldn't join Because I think venture-backed businesses are always, you know the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that everybody is like so excited To be in a venture-backed business and of course it provides a little bit more stability as long as as long as there's enough capital And so we found that as soon as we had venture-backing we got a lot of great talent And so tapping into the talent networks that companies like Balderton have and then also the partners and the operating partners who have so much Experience that's been incredibly helpful. So besides the self-induced stress of wanting to do well for you Which I just need to work on that, you know, it's my own individual baggage It is super helpful to have people who know what they're doing in the tech world because it isn't what I come from And it has opened so many doors So I am eternally grateful To to have had that opportunity. It's also really fun. I think for me at this stage in my career this is my fifth business and So to have something where I can enter a completely different realm and really learn every day from so many talented people It's it's quite a gift. Yeah, we've enjoyed working with you I think it sounds like a lot of benefits bit of extra stress But it makes for a kind of accountability. I think you You're a fantastic steward of the money you've been given so thank you Maybe maybe kind of looking forward. What's you've talked a little bit about the US and hopefully you're the rest of Europe next And next year what else is coming down the line to be to play? I think we can So many options. I think we're still learning We're looking at that different models that we can have with the people who want to show You know shop full price the people who want to be on a mini membership The people who are the hardcore members of whom there are a lot And we'll be looking at which model suits different markets Again, we've got that whole machine set up the marketing machine is ready the the manufacturing machine is ready The supply chain machine is ready So we can enter, you know the next market quite easily We just have to do the math and make sure that it makes sense And I think not bite off more than we can chew You see a lot of and I've talked to a lot of businesses who have just opened websites all over the place thinking That that was going to be a good thing to do and it would be profitable But most of them retreat with their tail between their legs if they do too many at the same time So we're going to be quite measured about it Just make sure that we open one at a time or two make sure that we can really deliver you know and go deep and And make a success out of it For you it for you and for me for all of us and for the and for the customers will look that we're out of time Thank you so much. You know, I think it's it's great to get those insights There's so much more you make it kind of sound very easy. We just launch a brand we do this we do that and and the customer loves it Of course, it's incredibly hard and I think you've given us a little bit of glimmer about the magic behind making that successful so thanks again and Great to see you. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you you


Hi everyone. So today I'm going to talk about the role of supply chain in the e-commerce business. Before I delve into the nitty gritty of the role of supply chain, here is a little bit about myself. So right now I'm working as the application product manager in the business systems team at Google. Previously, I had work experience in companies like Walmart and Edgeworth in the supply chain e-commerce and retail domain. And I have also had consulting experience for clients like Apple and Syngenta. And so all in all, I have a decade long experience in e-commerce, supply chain systems, retail technologies, and overall implementation experience. So let me get into why an agile and resilient supply chain is necessary for the e-commerce business. So let's first understand what e-commerce is, right? So as Investopedia explains, e-commerce or electronics commerce refers to companies and individuals that buy and sell goods and services over the internet. It's simple terms, it means running an online business. And since today with the advent of internet, almost any transaction can occur through e-commerce websites today. Nothing is offline anymore, which makes e-commerce business very competitive. Going into a little bit into the history of e-commerce, the history of e-commerce goes back to the early 1990s. The e-commerce phenomenon kicked off in 1991 when the online world became more recognizable. E-commerce businesses can occur through different channels such as B2B, B2C, B2G. You name it, there are different channels today and we will talk more about the details of the channels in the upcoming slides. And by the end of 2001, business to business, which is a B2B model, it became the most effective domain of e-commerce as it roughly made around $700 billion in revenue. So you can imagine that by the end of 2001, the e-commerce space had already exploded. Now we can trace the growth of e-commerce businesses from 2001 onwards. If you speak about its growth in the last decade, according to Google Trends, it has remained steady with nominal fluctuations since 2008 until about 15-16. However, the trend of e-commerce began to grow with a promising incline since 2016 and 2017. And since then, more and more businesses began to create their online presence in order to grow in today's digital landscape. Today it is like infatamable to even imagine that you can have a business or not have a website or an interface of it with the customers. That is, that is a given for any businesses that you want to start today or they're existing in the current market. The best selling products that are emerging from categories like music, books, computers, office supplies and consumer electronics. So these are the best selling products in these product lines. Now, therefore, in order to get a product into the hands of a customer, it is imperative that not only the website but the supporting supply chain and system should be robust. What I mean by this is it's not only enough to provide a website and provide a seamless checkout experience and give you the search capabilities and cutting edge website trends. It's in fact more important that you have inventory in your warehouses or wherever you are sourcing your products from. And the entire supply chain and supply chain picture is robust and you have proper system to support those. Otherwise only having an interface with your customers with not enough inventory and not able to fulfill the orders is not going to help. So there should be a healthy combination of back end supply chain system and the front end UI applications. What is the importance of e-commerce in today's world, right? E-commerce offers a number of benefits of a brick and mortar stores. It allows customers to easily find the desired products through a large database. They can research the product beforehand, compare prices, learn more from customer reviews and then buy it once their concerns are rectified by the online customer support representative. Going to the next slide, this is kind of an infographic showing how e-commerce businesses run today, right? If you can see that you have a store front where you have your different items that are showing in a UI and then you can access those UI through your computer. Definitely you need a computer or a buy to access a website or an online store. And once you have decided on which product you want to buy, you put it in your cart. And once you put it in your cart, if there are any sale or any discounts or if there are any auctions, you avail those. And then you check out with your payment card or any other payment methodologies if you haven't rolled in a form or things like that. Once that is done, you check out and then you buy that product and then your order is tracked in the website. And then it is fulfilled by a warehouse like all those things happen in the background, but this is more of a e-commerce website experience. And then you have 24-7 support in case you are not able to track your online order or you have more questions about when it is arriving and things like that. So this is how e-commerce has evolved over a period of time and how easy it has become for you to order something from a click from your home. So it's that easy. Moving to e-commerce classification, there are different kind of e-commerce businesses today, but the four notable ones are business to business commerce, business to consumer e-commerce, consumer to consumer e-commerce and consumer to business e-commerce. So what are these different kind of businesses? So B2B e-commerce basically refers to trading goods or services from one business to another. So it's between business to business. The B2B model promotes online businesses to interchange goods with each other. For instance, a manufacturer sells his code to a full seller who then sells it to the retailer. In this scenario, the manufacturer and the whole seller are following the B2B model. Then what is B2C e-commerce? It's exactly as the name suggests, right? In the B2C e-commerce model, a business sells the codes of services directly to the individual customers online. So with the help of B2C model, the customers can view and purchase the desired products from the retailers online store. To give you a couple of examples, Amazon is an excellent example of B2C e-commerce model as the individual codes to individual customers. And there have been many B2C companies that have taken the market by storms like Expedia, IKEA, Netflix even because you are able to stream any kind of movie or series you want to stream today, right? So moving on to the next one, consumer to consumer or peer to peer e-commerce. Here, basically, the different customers can talk to one another or do business with one another, right? It allows the customer to sell their goods and services to other customers with the help of the Internet. Makes perfect sense in today's digital landscape. In simple terms, this is like mobile e-commerce. The B2C e-commerce model allows an individual to sell their assets online, for example, car, house or bike to other individuals. eBay or OLX is a great example of the C2C e-commerce model that is running successfully. Finally, consumer to business e-commerce. It is an interesting model which allows an individual customer to sell goods and services to a business. It follows a reverse path of the B2C model where businesses create products and services for the end user. For instance, if you are a software architect or if you are consulting or if you have some niche skill sets that you are able to provide or someone is in need of those skill sets, you can showcase in potential businesses on platforms like Fiverr or Afark. These are the different e-commerce businesses that we have today. Moving on, what are the top examples of e-commerce business, right? There are some pretty major examples of e-commerce businesses that have made it big including Amazon, Flipkart, eBay and Mintra. Going a little bit into a couple of examples like Amazon.com. Amazon.com is one of the best examples of thriving e-commerce business that initially began as a retailing platform. However, with the passage of time, they moved their operations online and became one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world. Now, a thing to note is although the headquarters is located in the US, Amazon established different websites in various developed countries such as UK, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, China, even India, right? Amazon.com supports and offers retail websites for various popular organizations including Mars and Spencer, Lacoste, NBA, Beep stores, Target, etc. Another kind of e-commerce business is Wabi Parker. Wabi Parker is an American online i-ware retailer that is headquartered in New York City. They primarily sell prescription glasses and sunglasses through the website. However, they also have more than 80 retail stores in the US and Canada. The third one is ASOS. ASOS, which stands for As Seen on Screen, is a fashion brand that showcases the latest trends as seen on celebrities. Since the e-commerce company boomed into a multi-billion dollar business, it has suddenly learned which marketing campaigns are the most effective. So, this is at a high level, what are some of the e-commerce businesses out there which have made it pick in this landscape. Now, what are the different types of e-commerce business? One of them is dropshipping. Here, you don't have to store your inventory. So, you basically don't have to bear any kind of inventory canning cost. So, the dropshipping business allows you to purchase a product once you've already made a sale and have been paid by the customer. Once you get paid, you can purchase a product from a third party manufacturer or a supplier and ship the product directly to the customer. With a dropshipping model, the store owner don't have to worry about ever seeing or handling the inventory. So, like I mentioned, no inventory canning cost, no need to bother about, hey, I have to get rid of my inventory if it is low selling and things like that. Then the second one is whole selling and warehousing. An interesting business model that allows you to purchase products in bulk and stock the inventory is warehousing. So, here you are basically in charge of the inventory and you are actually storing those. The whole selling business model gets you better prices simply because you are buying the product in a bulk and not making a one-off purchase, unlike the previous model that we talked about. Though you can do shipments like bulk shipments and dropshipping also. Now, this midway model, the whole selling midway model allows the business to sell goods in a large volume and when do they make a profit? Because they have huge volumes of inventory. So, the whole seller sells goods to the retailer who then sells it for a profit. You also sell goods individually on your website in order to enjoy a better profit margin. So, you can define the different channels that you want to sell your goods because you are in charge of your inventory. So, that gives you a lot of flexibility here. Now, the third one is manufacturing and white labeling. The manufacturing business model has stood its ground since decades. And this midway model gets paid to create the good. As far as white labeling is concerned, you are technically developing the product yourself. Instead, you are licensing or subcontracting it, which allows you to put your brand's name on it as if you are the owner and creator of that product. And finally, subscription e-commerce. Unlike a traditional e-commerce business where one transaction takes place, subscription business model allows the customer to subscribe to a plan in order to receive regular deliveries of the subscription box. Moving to the next slide and here I'll talk about what does an end-to-end supply chain look like? End-to-end supply chain involves an entirely integrated process from product design and procurement of raw materials and scheduling production and then final delivery of finished product to the customer. It is further extended to after-sales service and reverse logistics depending upon the nature of the business. Now, what are the different stages in an end-to-end supply chain, right? So you have to plan for your product. You have to, based on historical sales or based on benchmarking of similar products that have been sold in the past, you do demand and supply planning of the products that you want to sell or buy. Once you have made that demand and supply planning, you source and procure the materials from different vendors. So supplier selection and creation of purchase order based on your supply plan is the second step in this end-to-end supply chain process. Now, based on your purchase orders, the vendors can, like your company, can either manufacture the products in-house or they will buy it or contract it to some other vendors who are specialized in the manufacturing of this particular product that you are trying to sell. And once that shipment of goods is ready, then you have to go through in more logistics, inventory management and transportation steps. What that means is the manufacturer can send the shipments via ocean, rail or air depending upon how important the shipment is to you. Now, depending upon the mode of transportation, the cost will vary. So if you are procuring it via air, then it will be the most costly. If you are going via ocean, it will be the least costly and things like that. And that is where the transportation cost comes into picture. You have to decide how do you want to procure your goods and services from the manufacturer, whether it is in-house or contract manufacturer, so that your cost is manageable. And at the same time, you are able to fulfill the orders of your customers. And then inventory management, when you are getting the shipment from your manufacturing location, you have to put it in some warehouse location where you want to sell your products from. Let's say, for example, you are procuring goods and services from, let's say, India or Vietnam, and you want to store it in US, then you have to decide where exactly you want to store it, what are the storage space, what is the cost of storing the inventory, and are you able to track your inventory systematically so that you are able to track each and every product that has come as part of the shipment. And then inbound logistics is overall procuring of inventory from your contract manufacturer to your warehouse. That entire step is called inbound logistics. Now, once you are able to secure your products into your warehouse, you are in a position to sell those products to your customers. And there can be different channels like we just discussed. It can be B2B, B2G, B2C, depending on whatever channels you are in. So you have to pick back and ship those goods from your warehouse to your customer location, depending upon whether it's a B2B channel or a B2C channel. And again, there will be transportation costs involved here. And this is called as forward logistics. And your strategy is based on the channels like online B2B and whatnot. But the end-to-end supply chain does not end here after you have sold the product and transported the product to your end customer. There is something called after-sales service. Now you have to make sure that the end customer has actually received it because it is very essential to provide a seamless customer experience so that they keep coming back to you to buy more products. That is how you will make a profit in the long run of the business. And then reverse logistics, which is the most important part of the supply chain. You have to take care if there are any returns, requests or replacements. This is very important because this is where you seal the customer confidence in your whole supply chain process. Say for example, I got a product and I don't like the product. It is damaged or it is under warranty. So I would like a seamless returns or repair experience as well because I have paid my money to buy this product from your website. So that is what an end-to-end supply chain looks like. And to optimize the end-to-end supply chain, the above components needs to be well-integrated. We cannot even a single step cannot work in silo. That is what an integrated supply chain looks like. It requires an enterprise resource planning ERP system that provides real-time information with visibility across the supply chain. There are a lot of ERP solutions in the market today. For demand and planning, you can maybe look at Anaplan JDA and whatnot. And for core ERP suppression for inventory and financials, large companies have implemented solutions like Oracle, SAP and whatnot. So depending upon the requirements of a business and what kind of software you want to implement that gives you the best possible outcome in terms of business value, you have to take a decision with your internal system, team and external implementation partner and take that call accordingly. These are some of the best approaches that can help optimize the supply chain, right? Better prediction of customer needs by implementing a demand and planning tool. Lean approach to inventory management to reduce waste and unwanted actions. This will speed up the order fulfillment process and increase inventory accuracy. Human resource planning to respond to certain changes in the supply chain, root cause analysis to identify issues in the current process and design effective solutions. Implement end-to-end benchmarking to measure the efficacy of the supply chain. Now what are the benefits of an end-to-end supply chain? With an integrated end-to-end supply chain design and visibility across the supply chain, businesses can better serve customers. The benefits are some of the benefits are like this, like you get to provide seamless flow of activities across the supply chain. You will be able to track each and every step in your supply chain if you have better systems implemented. Reducing delays with the ability to detect any issues across the supply chain. Let's say for example, there are different touch points of handovers. Say for example, your manufacturer is saying that here I have sent out the shipment from a factory, but your system is yet to receive that shipment. It's not showing on your system. So you will have to, you will have that visibility okay, even though the manufacturer is saying that here this shipment has left my warehouse, but it is yet to show in the system so you cannot take really the next action on that. So you have to make these processes very tightly integrated and provide visibility to all the handoffs in this entire supply chain. You will have better relationship with your suppliers and customers because you are able to track each and every step with these stakeholders, right? You will have complete visibility of all the steps that can reduce risks, operating cost and predict and plan to meet the needs of market changes. So essentially like having a robust system infrastructure will help you whether any kind of unforeseen circumstances like COVID or if for example, something is stuck and you are like very resilient in responding to these different market changes. And there will be transparency and ability to view blind spots. There are no offline transactions. Everything is systematic and you are able to take a call and do historical analysis of the different transactions that have taken place for your business. Reduce labor and material costs by removing waste in the process. Now moving on, this is a pictorial representation of what an endurance supply chain looked like. Like I said, you plan what amount of or what quantity of goods and services you need to manufacture or in-house or you want to give an order to some vendor or contract manufacturer depending upon the kind of business you are in. So you have to plan and align your supply chain plus resources. You can leverage any kind of software tools to create your demand plan, create your supply plan and then you create your requirement document. Then you source, based on this plan you source it and then you manage different material categories, you manage your suppliers and then you order the materials from them by cutting a purchase order, creating a materialist that, hey, I need this product lines with this quantity and this is the cost of each of these. And based on that lead time, they will make, either you are making it in-house or you are getting it done by a vendor or supplier. They will schedule the production, they will assemble the product, they will perform quality testing, everything is looking good or not. And then they will deliver the product. And this is where you have to do manager inbound logistics and warehousing where you want to get the product and store it in your warehouses. You have to plan and manage this inbound material, you have to operate your warehouses. If you are in a B2C channel, you have to open your shipment and store it in the warehouse accordingly or if you are in the B2C channel, you may not even choose to open it. And then you operate the outbound transportation. And finally, if there are any return processes, you find that after opening the shipment from your supplier, you feel like some of them are damaged, so you should have systematic return processes implemented. You receive and credit return product, refurbish or scrap return product and these are some of the processes that should have been implemented to account for this kind of processes. And finally, an event. So it's very essential that you have good reporting capabilities since you are storing all this data in your databases. You should have... And if your management is tracking different KPIs, you can create dashboards, operational dashboards and executive dashboards depending upon the requirements of your business so that you can do trend analysis of which is your based performing product or how the sales have been doing here on your recon week, month on month, things like that. Based on all this analysis, you can deploy your supply chain strategy, you can do your sales and operation planning for next year and this will give you a robust end-to-end supply chain management capability. Now I have taken a couple of examples of the large-scale e-commerce businesses where they manage their businesses in the current landscape. So first, one of the examples is Wavefair. So Wavefair is an e-commerce platform that sales furniture appliances and other home-related products. The company works with hundreds of brands such as Bosch, Kohler, Samson, Threepost and many more. On top of that, Wavefair owns and operates a few lifestyle brands, like Johnson, Maine, All-Modern, Peri-Kohl, Berkeley and etc. Lastly, the company also sells Wavefair branded items that are only available on its platform. How does Wavefair makes money? Wavefair makes money from the sale of products, installation services, advertising on its platform as well as interchange and interest fees. The company initially operated primarily on a drop shipping model. It has ever since pivoted wholesale cost business model in which it purchases items and bulk and sells them at a profit. Now, like I have been mentioning that how important back-end systems and a logistic infrastructure is essential for your e-commerce business to succeed. So let's take a look at how Wavefair manages their logistic infrastructure. Wavefair's logistics network was built specifically for the home category where items can be bulky, heavy and prone to damage. By building its own infrastructure, Wavefair reduces shipping time, minimizes damage during shipping and saves cost per shipping and bulk. The goal of the logistic investment is to get closer to today and ultimately wonder shipping on as many products as possible. The logistic network is entwined from supplier to doorstep and their logistic network comprises of three main parts, international supply chain, products from international supplier, mostly in China are aggregated at consolidation centers where they are packed into shipping containers before being transferred to ports and delivered directly to a castle gate location. What are castle gate locations? Wavefair fulfillment centers enable suppliers to forward position their inventory in warehouses close to customers and have link to day shipping. Wavefair receives fees from suppliers or using castle gate inventory management and fulfillment services. About 20% of orders are fulfilled through castle gate and this production is increasing. The remaining orders are fulfilled by Wavefair's historical method where orders are dropped shipped directly from suppliers and delivered by external carriers like UPS, Fed, etc. or any third party trucking or last mile home delivery agents.  Wavefair ships a majority of large parcels by directly managing middle mile and last mile deliveries enabling shorter delivery times, higher quality deliveries, less damage per service and more accurate delivery tracking. Next slide. The territorial representation of how Wavefair delivery network has been able to reduce the number of touches and the delivery time as compared to the traditional drop ship model for large parcel example. So as you can see in Wavefair model they have consolidated the warehouses and their docks and they do full truckload transportation for only Wavefair products and Wavefair last mile delivery agent or third party then transports the goods to the end customer in New York or wherever the customer is based on. Earlier there were multiple stops in the traditional drop ship model as you can see there were different touch points, multiple stops and carrying non Wavefair products. So this led to a lot of delay and the entire supply chain was longer than what was anticipated. So this is how Wavefair has optimized the delivery systems which is a great example of why you should have robust systems and capability to support your online e-commerce business. Moving to the next example which is Home Depot with over 2300 physical stores in North America accompanied by a strong online presence the Home Depot business model is focused on the sale of tools construction products appliances and services for home improvement projects. And how does Home Depot makes its money? Home Depot makes most of its money through sales of home improvement goods and related services. Home Depot sells a wide range of building materials decorative products, home improvement goods garden and lawn products and whatnot. And they generate massive revenue from the sale of these products. Home Depot offers professional services to its customers to its worst network of professional contractors, tradesmen, remodellers and small business owners that assist customers. They help customers to handle small and complicated home improvement projects. So this is how Home Depot make their money through sales and through their installation services and other channels, right? Now coming to their supply chain fulfillment network so Home Depot has an only channel supply chain fulfillment network. Digital is unequivocally Home Depot's fastest growing business but online sales growth is actually being facilitated by the company's brick and mortar store network. Around 40% of Home Depot's digital sales are fulfilled by the physical stores. The Home Depot retail strategy has immersed us one that combines elements of both online as well as stores channel to drive sales growth. The fulfillment option that Home Depot currently offers are BOPIS, buy online pickup and store, BORIS, buy online return to store and buy online shift to store own channel fulfillment options. So what I'm trying to get at is Home Depot has actually raised the gap between their online business and their offline distribution network by implementing an omnichannel supply chain fulfillment network and they have been able to achieve it through different methodologies like BOPIS. You can buy online and you can just come in and pick up and store and this has been implemented across all the e-commerce businesses today and then BORIS, you can buy online and you can return it in the store as well. And yeah, and they're also trying to get into other methodologies like BODFS like buy online and then deliver from store. Home Depot's omnichannel supply chain fulfillment strategy is exemplary and it hasn't just been built by a great focus on accommodating the rapid growth of its e-commerce capabilities. Rather, that home was restructured its whole supply chain network in order to integrate the experiences of each in store and online commerce. And this is a pictorial representation of one home demo experience or omnichannel home Depot experience as you would call it. They have stores which drive greater convenience and speed for customers. They have associate management and a competitive and agile workforce. They have interconnected experience. They try to create the best interconnected experience by harmonizing the experience between stores and online. This improves personalization as well as enhances website ease of use like search, user experience, et cetera. Then product and innovation, definitely if your product is not good, then you won't sell it, right? So they maintain the position as number one retailer and product authority. They optimize their assortments, advance localization and first to market approach, expand decor categories online. And they have, like I said, they make the revenue through professional services as well. They deliver their one integrated approach for the through customers that build new personalized B2B that experience fraud and assortment and expand interconnected experience for services. And of course, supply chain and delivery which is one of the most important key of the end-to-end supply chain experience. They offer fast and most efficient delivery and home improvement. They have expanded same day and next day delivery option, open and additional fulfillment centers or faster customer deliveries and whatnot. And this is one of the last examples that we would work you through which is the Uber Eats business model. Everyone knows what Uber Eats is since most of us uses Uber for our day-to-day transportation. Uber Eats has a three-sided marketplace connecting a driver or restaurant owner and a customer with Uber Eats platform at the center. The three-sided marketplace moves around three players. Restaurants play commission on the orders to Uber Eats. Customers pay the small delivery charges and at times cancellation free. Drivers are making reliable delivery sometime. The ambition of Uber Eats is to become the go-to last mile delivery platform. It started with food delivery but it aspires to become the go-to place for last mile delivery. And like I mentioned, they have this complex three-sided network dynamics between eaters, restaurants and drivers. The existing online platform gives riders and drivers additional options. Like Uber, Uber Eats distribution leverages on a solid running infrastructure which have been stretching open built over the years and a playbook to connect local and national policy makers to stabilize the service forward. And this is a pictorial representation of your customer basically places and orders Uber Eats. Uber Eats has its network with the restaurant partners. They place the orders with them and then a delivery partner will pick up the order from the restaurant and deliver it to the customer place order. Now these are some of the key challenges that are faced by firms in e-commerce space today. Data security, online identity verification, attracting the perfect customer, customer experience, seamless customer checkout and whatnot. Customer loyalty, customer should come to your websites for buying certain goods and services and not go to other customers with the plethora of options that are available to them. Converting shoppers into paying customers, keeping the prices competitive, having effective inventory management strategies. You should have the stock in place for the products that you're trying to sell through your website, right? Otherwise the customers will move to some other website. You have to keep in mind the shipping cost that you're getting from your contract manufacturers. You should have effective technology and infrastructure management. You should have effective product return and refund policies. And you should have good omni channel strategies as well so that to bridge the gap between online and offline e-commerce marketplaces. And then finally you have to invest in sustainability to make sure that you are not causing unnecessary harm to the nature that we are thriving in, right? So finally, how can an e-commerce product manager help? These are some of the roles and responsibilities of an e-commerce product manager on a day-to-day basis, right? You ensure that e-commerce sites run smoothly. There is no glitch or there is no issues with the interface that you are providing to your customers. You are able to build robust systems to handle inventory and financials. You invest in systems that provide end-to-end visibility of a given product lifecycle. You define efficient processes in conjunction with your stakeholders. You aim for a true omni channel experience. The different examples that we spoke about, everyone was investing in an omni channel experience because that is the need of the art. The demands and the feedback of the customers are heard. This is how you will make your customers loyal to your products and to your e-commerce business. Ensure that the quality of the new products are as per industry standards. Develop product strategy based on the prevalent state of e-commerce business and create your product roadmaps. You create a high level of website, mobile or functionality and deliver the optimal user experience. You should have different channels in conjunction and walking in tandem with one another. Your mobile experience should be similar to your desktop experience. You assess business developers and analyzing all the business requirements to coordinate your efforts to increase the businesses. This is how as an e-commerce product manager we can help this entire end-to-end experience seamless. What are some of the key takeaways from the presentation today? You should know what your customers want and implement in your systems with the help of your internal stakeholders like your engineering counterparts and your UX designers counterpart. You should be able to provide personalized experience to your customers so that they keep coming back to your website to order more. Finally, ensure your supply chain is agile back-to-back or robust systems and infrastructure. We saw a lot of examples of the companies who are doing this really well. That's all from today's presentation. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you so much.


Welcome to the channel. This is reliable Rudy and today. We're going to finish our Apple charting series And then we're going to move on to some some more Examples sort of like Apple, but they're going to be requested by the viewers So my goal is to have viewers request tickers and I will evaluate them through the entire reliable Rudy process But in today's video, we're going to be going over an example swing trade I call it the back test of the neckline and how I think that trading strategy Corresponds with the Apple's price today, but first I'm not a licensed financial advisor Everything in this video contains only my opinion and is for entertainment purposes only so Real quick we're going to go over a back test of the neckline. It's very simple. You have a left leg Here is your fall in stock price. You have a left bottom be made Now this run that the price goes up is going to form your neckline Now this could end up turning into some sort of double top structure where it gets hard rejected But ultimately this is where our neckline is going to be formed now from this double top I'm looking for a right bottom that is higher than the left bottom and That is going to be followed up by a Extended right leg now when I say extended right leg it could extend however much it wants to But it's got to extend over this left leg. So let's go over it again. We have a left leg We have a left bottom. We have our neckline. We have our right bottom That's higher than the left bottom and we have an extended right leg that reaches higher than my left leg Now all that leaves left is the back test of the neckline. So let's say in this trading example I Don't want to take the very tippy top price. I could Potentially buy a put a small order in for the exact price But I don't I want to be a little bit picky with this because and you're gonna understand why here in a second But if I was going to pick a price I'd want to take the double top and I'm saying that if the price ever falls to right here I'm going to buy it for a potential swing trade Now how I'm going to calculate this this swing trade is with a risk reward strategy Now what is my risk going to be? Where would I potentially be looking to sell this stock? If? I'm messing up. Where would I potentially sell this stock if the price kept falling from where I bought it? So I bought the neckline at the price keeps falling I'm saying right here that this is going to be where I put a stop loss in below this double bottom Now the price fluctuation from this is roughly 36 dollars. So obviously this example is a little bit On the far side, but if this is my risk reward, I'm going to draw out a two to one a three eight My bad a one to one a two to one a three to one And I'm saying that If I have a thirty six dollar risk a three to one risk reward puts me at 36 times three a two to one risk reward thirty six times two and a one to one risk reward is a thirty six dollar Trade that is what I'm looking to get out of the stock So I hope you can understand that if I don't explain that very well It's I don't I don't know how us to explain it, but we're going to go into apples chart and see if there Is any examples of this? Now I can see my very first look right here is this I'm looking for higher lows like this Now I can also see I have a left leg I have a neckline I have a right bottom and I have an extended right leg that reaches over top of my left leg Now I'm going to draw this one out for you, but this isn't the one we're going to talk about very much So here's your neckline that gets formed Here's your extended right leg now I'm saying now where would you want to put your neckline now back to my example? You have this double top structure, and then you have this higher low Where am I going to want to buy take an entry on this back test of the neckline? I could go right at the start I can see on that very first candle you actually do get some solid buying pressure But you see the price drops a lot lower Now if this were my entry for the back test the neckline you have multiple trading days right here where people can fill out a position for a swing trade and If I were to be set in a stop loss I'd probably set a stop loss right there now one the one risk reward Probably puts me right at this double top this congestion right here Now I could draw out the rest of this trade But we're going to jump into the next one because I think the next one holds a lot more weight to it So we're going to clear this drawing and the one that I'm looking at is actually right next to it So I can see I have a left leg. I have a neckline I have a right bottom and I have an extended right leg But what's interesting about when this price falls right here? We never actually quite reach that neckline so Let's say I was being greedy and I said well I'm going to wait until this neckline and the price is sitting $3 away from my neckline. No, I'm waiting for that neckline. Okay. Well, you missed out on it Well, you can see when we come back and eventually back test this neckline Look at this wick of buying pressure right there You know how long these guys waited for this price to get there from October to May They waited over half a year for the price of Apple to get back to that neckline But that patience paid off So we're going to look at this trade now going into our left Our left leg. I'm going to draw my left leg real quick. That is the that is the fall. I'm looking for I'm looking at Well briefly show this example So you can see this nice w we had our extended right leg And now I'm expecting the price to eventually back test the neckline. That is theory. That's all it is So we're going to draw this trade up But first I keep saying but first look at this five-wave structure at the downside. We got a one two three four Five now just so happens that we put a higher low in off this five-wave structure One two three we have a clear five-wave structure and a clear ABC correction to the upside ABC Now right here. We just have another five-wave structure one two three four five Now you could say this isn't a wave one you could say this is a waved one and this is a one two three Four now after a wave four you're expecting to wave five now You see how he set this triple bottom all three of them lower highs This is a bear trap because he bears are expecting this price to get taken out and For the price to eventually trade back Down to this gap you can see on this day we gap up the bears are saying okay. We're going to push the price to that gap But we hold above that the bulls hold us above that price How interesting right so you have a potential five-wave structure a potential ABC correction that Looks like it could be another five-wave structure But holds and we get our X our extended right leg So that's a little bit of going into our previous videos I'm not even gonna draw that up. We're actually going to focus on our trade So if this is my back test of the neckline, where would I set a stop loss? Well, how about this price action right through this time period right here where we can't decide for whether This is a five-wave or an ABC or how about how about right at the bottom of this because there is a lot of congestion right here That we're just not sure of and we have a nice set of support to set a Our stop loss at so we're going to set that up right there and I can see this is roughly a 13 dollar risk reward So if I'm going up from 135 I'm looking for 148 so that line right here is that 148 that's our one the one risk reward Now I'm looking for 61 right there. That's a two to one risk reward and Our three to one risk reward is going to put us at 174 roughly Now give or take this is how I would have probably had the trade set up now If I was looking to buy it I probably would have bought it on this on right here But I would have been very eager to buy more on this low now I'm going to show you why now I'm going to mark this horizontal line with a different color We're going to make this one white now I can see Not only did this neckline have really good support, but you also have a short-term neck line inside of my risk area so I can almost put Good money down on it that if people were buying this neckline for this reason They were probably interested in buying more of it at this support bill right here Because this is almost looking like another neckline So it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if on this day you had the same exact buyers as the people on this day, but Looking more at the trade we're gonna take this white line out. I'm getting off track. I know this video is Man getting a little long We're close to wrapping this up so I can also see at my one-to-one risk reward So here you get triggered in on the trade you can see we put a double top into our one-to-one risk reward You have more opportunity to buy it now our current price is sitting at our two-to-one risk reward Isn't that strange now looking at today's candle From the price action today. This is not a bullish looking candle. This candle is telling me, okay We're going to come down fill this gap probably meet in with this trend line that we've had set in multiple videos How is the price gonna act from there? Well you have potential double top that you're gonna have to monitor But if you can get through this it's potential that we can get this three-to-one risk reward Now what do I also see at my three-to-one risk reward? We're going to zoom in on it this line right here that I'm hovering over is my three-to-one risk reward I Can see we have a gap filled no more than 90 cents away from where I had my four to one or my three-to-one risk reward marked so if we can't find a way to get over the 702 retracement and This trend line holds The next place on my chart that I'm really focused on Apple's price is right at that $175 gap because that's also meeting in for a three-to-one risk reward on my back test of the neckline trade that we set up Now I hope you guys can see exactly what I'm looking at right here before I finish this video out I'm going to draw this in one last time So that you can see exactly what I'm looking at. We might even switch it to a week chart So there's my extended right leg Now I'm saying one day the price is going to back test the neckline and this is the price action We've had from the back test the neckline those neckline buyers. They're they're making some good money off of this Not only all kinds so all these videos that I've made is all Corresponding evidence not evidence, but corresponding to what I'm looking for They're all telling me the same exact thing during this time period and that this is a little bit of a bullish time But is this a time where people are going to take profits? I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball I'm just presenting the stuff that I go through in the reliable Rudy process and This is going to wrap up the Apple charting series. I hope you guys enjoyed the content as I mentioned before I'm looking to make videos on viewer Viewer Recommended ticker. So if you guys want me to look at a particular stock now it can be I Would prefer them to be profitable if you guys are still listening to this video But if they're not profitable, you know, I can work around it and make different types of videos on that But that is going to wrap up this video. I hope you guys enjoy it and thanks for watching


Using the Mississippi River Trail Bikeway, bicyclists can ride from the Mississippi headwaters down to the Gulf of Mexico. But a 34-mile long section from Crow Wing State Park down to Royalton was never completed. As Mel Meyer reports from Little Falls, one group is seeking $2.5 million from the legislature to build that section. The Camp Ripley slash Veterans State Trail Committee has been meeting monthly since 2009 to advocate for the trail. At first, not too many people understood what the trail was about and the benefits, but a lot of people are coming around now and they're getting excited about it. While the town is excited for the physical benefits of having the trail, the multimodal trail would bring in riders and their wallets. I can only imagine that once we make it easier for folks, they'll come through and be able to enjoy the other great things that we have in town. Little Falls has plenty to offer from a bustling downtown with restaurants, shops, hotels and more. The city is host to plenty of historic landmarks as well. A little bit of something for everyone. A tourist doesn't need to do anything but ride their bike, eat here, sleep here and make the best of their trip with their family, with their significant other, with friends. There's plenty to see and do even as many places had to close during the recession. Can some of those jobs be replaced and see growth in that tourism industry and change and revitalize the economy? It's with this message in mind that the group is ready to head down to the statehouse with about 5,000 signatures supporting the trail. The residents continue to say, what can we do? What can we help with? How do we show people this is important to us? The group has done a lot of the legwork already with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Transportation. This segment would be particularly unique with most of the trail combining space for bikes, ATVs and snowmobiles. And they usually don't combine paths but in this 34-mile stretch, that's what we're trying to accomplish so we welcome everybody to our town. The group says that even if they are able to secure the funding today, it still would take years for the segment to be built. Outside Little Falls in Bolos, I'm Mal Meyer, Lakeland News. The state money would be used for the first section from Blanchard Dam to Little Falls. The group would then seek additional funding to complete the trail from Little Falls north to Camp Ripley. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


The global debt crisis is coming and in this video I want to show you what's going on in the global debt environment, why it is so important to know what's going on and why it's extremely dangerous. We are in a 75 year debt cycle at the top of it and sooner or later it will burst and it will be very very painfully. There are several scenarios that can happen. We will discuss them but first look at the velocity of money. The velocity of money shows how much of the available liquidity is actually used in transactions and this is measured by dividing the gross national product to the total supply of money and you can see that the US velocity of money is at historical lows. It has never been so low in history. This means that the money remains in the banking system, financial system and doesn't go into the economy. It doesn't add to your wages. It doesn't spur inflation. It doesn't increase productivity. It just makes the rich richer those who own stocks. Similar situation is in Europe and Japan and that's a very very big problem because those countries are taking on both loads of debt to cover for this situation. So the velocity of money is slow and we have more and more debt. This means that there are less economic transactions which don't allow for debt repayments to come from a fundamental basis. Let's take a look at the total household debt versus the real GDP. In the last 20 years household debt in the US has tripled while the real GDP increased only 70%. So debt is really much bigger than the GDP growth. Without the increases in debt GDP growth would be negative which is a terrible terrible thing and this acknowledgement that debt fuels the economy means that when there is a reversal in debt when you will not be able to take on more debt to buy a new car, a new house, a new television, a new phone whatever then the economy will be in big big trouble. Just an example look at how did the debt for cars increase in the last 40 years. It increased tenfold in the last 40 years which means that most of the cars on the road now are financed by debt. Nobody's buying a car with cash and this is all fine as long as interest rates stay low as long as there is no inflation. If interest rates start increasing then you cannot pay off your car or you cannot buy a new car or you cannot refinance your debt and then the economy starts turning negative because car makers can't sell anymore cars and we see that happening already. Before a recession if you look at this chart for the last 40 years car sales dropped first and then recession comes 1979 1989 2000 2008 first we have a small drop in car sales and then we have a recession look at where we are now similar pattern to the past ones. Another important thing is that the big chunk of car loans 33% are given to subprime borrowers with the fi ceo score below 550 so we are practically seeing the same thing that happened with subprime borrowers in 2008 and buying houses now buying houses is regulated so let's give subprime borrowers a brand new car that's an excellent investment usually brand new cars increase in value every year while they will still have to pay the debt so we have a new subprime crisis coming great news if we take a look at the global environment the situation is terrible in europe most of the countries have a depth to GDP ratio above 80% of the significant european countries only germany and let's put netherlands as a significant country has a depth to GDP ratio below 80% italy is above 100% 120 greeces at 179% this means that as soon as interest rates or inflation increases most of those countries go bankrupt as they will not be able to finance their debt levels without huge inflation or increases in taxes which is a painful deleveraging and negative economic activity so the economic activity positive and current economic activity in europe and japan can be just thanks to huge debt burdens from governments from central banks from consumers and that's not a good sign another country that is a lot in depth and they are increasing their debt to gdp hugely is china however china is growing at the 7% yearly rate and it has to increase its gdp per capita fivefold to reach the developed country levels therefore i'm very positive about china because their system is different they are communist they're not capitalist people listen to what the party has to say and do it no matter what so it's a different mental system we cannot assess china the same way we assess europe or the us be wary of that nevertheless the debt is huge so if the perception comes that the debt is really huge there will be a crisis in china too so we already have the us europe japan and china highly indebted when that turns when interest rates increase where there is a run on liquidity we have a global debt crisis and it can happen like that and it can happen tomorrow or in the next few years but it will happen mark my words now you would think there is no other way than to take a lot of debt to grow let me show you an example that you don't need a lot of debt or you don't need increasing debt to grow you can grow by increasing your productivity your knowledge your capital and so on and that's what india is doing the indian government debt as percentage of gdp has been stable in the last eight years and india has been growing at amazing rates eight percent per year however they are not increasing their debt which means that their growth is fundamental is strong comes from productivity not from debt growth and they show that it's possible to do so we in the developed world have to change something in order to grow at a healthy and sustainable rate just increasing our debt creates a huge burden for future generations which will have to pay off or pay the consequences of hyperinflation devaluation of money huge increases of the cost of buying things from india sale of assets loss of value of pension funds and so on and so on and so on so the scenarios are many i will discuss them in separate videos however when the deleveraging comes it will be painful especially as economic growth is not based on healthy fundamental increases in productivity but just on increases in debt and leverage and everybody knows that you cannot increase your debt forever that's wishful thinking and that will lead to severe consequences so what we can do to protect ourselves is to be hedged hyperinflation huge debt amounts that have to be paid makes me think of hedger portfolio with gold even if gold is at one thousand three hundred now it was at three hundred two hundred fifteen years ago i think it can go to ten thousand in the next ten fifteen years especially if there is financial turmoil so if you're hedged whatever happens whenever it happens you are set and that's the message from today there is a crisis in the world there will be a crisis in the world everything is based on debt it will implode so just be hedged thank you for watching click like if you like the content share it with your friends if you think it's meaningful to them share your opinions thank you for watching again and i'll see you in the next video


Und dann freue ich mich, euch für den ersten Tag vorzustellen zu dürfen.  Und er wird dir zeigen, wie du es dir selbst tun kannst. Danke. So, das ist mein Gespräch.   Man könnte es automatisieren und es ein bisschen mehr komfortibler haben. So, based on this, I built something. And now, I think it's really important to do a talk on this. So, what do you need from my solution? You need a VM or a VPS, a virtual private service. That's using a Debian 10 host. This is what I felt most comfortable with. Furthermore, you need a domain, which you can use and input subdomains. This domain is used so other people can reach your work adventure instance. And you might need a little basic knowledge of Linux, Debian and Ansible. So, what do you have to do? I guess you have a blank Debian machine and you configure all the domains you have. What kind of subdomains you have to configure? You can see in the readme of the repository and I will show you next. And then download the whole repository. In this repository, there's configurations you have to do to optimize the deployment process. For example, the domain you want to use. The room you want to use by standard. And what kind of user you want to use to connect via SSR to the host. And if you then use the Ansible Playbook, you have this command. And after that, you need to reboot it. Some packages are open that need to reboot. And as soon as the machine is back, you change to the opt-work-adventure-contract docker file. And then you start docker. So, what does Ansible do in this case? Debian 10 is up to testing. The host system is made late. There's packages that are installed. A user is set up. You can use to connect to the host. There's a lot of security settings that are optimized. Firewall rules, for example, configs for the SSH demon. That prevent the root user to connect via SSR to the host. These are all measures to make sure everything works fine. And you don't have to worry. After that, docker and docker-compose is installed. So you don't have many more issues there. After that, you download the work-adventure repository and it's prepared for you. Afterwards, you need a few config files. You don't have to do anything more to change it and you can start over right. How is work-adventure set up? Each function has one container. The main part is the reverse proxy. This is made with traffic. It's like a reverse proxy. But this is running inside of docker and connects to the container. This makes optimization possible. Some proxies can't do this. Furthermore, Let's Encrypt is installed and you don't have to care about that or where you can get the TLS certificate. And yeah, start and stop is realized using docker-compose. So, well, some people might think I'm in a hurry. How can I get work-adventure running? What I found out was that most difficult is to get the jason file connected that sets up the information for the TLS certificate, for example. Furthermore, you can have issues with the docker-socket that's not reachable. It should be at least readable, but I really set it to read only. But it's important that traffic doesn't have to do this. Make sure you have all sub-domains configured. Traffic won't start properly if this is not set up properly. At the initial start, you need a little time until traffic runs and to get all the containers running. It might irritate you, maybe. But the maps, what about that? You can set any map and visit any map you can find openly and publicly. In this marked area it's the quasi-url to the map. For example, we from the ROM-Zitlabour have set this one to the launch event for the SE3. Anyone who goes to your host are on the same map. You can also do your own maps. There's information on the WorkAdventure and other sources. But make sure there's a lot of bugs still and position information isn't interpreted properly. So make sure you keep in mind that you might get frustrated. But on Jitzy, Jitzy is really mighty. You can use any Jitzy-Server you want to use and get reachable for you. I think I don't want to set up my own Jitzy. Jitzy needs a known VM on your own cluster. WorkAdventure doesn't do this. So, if you have a division of these two systems, you don't need your own Jitzy. Jitzy can be configured in different ways and has a lot of parameters. Generally, this might need a completely own talk, but I won't do this here. I spend a lot of time in monitoring and in logging. I don't want to focus on docker commands. I'm a real admin in this case and traffic also annoys me. It's kind of difficult to get it out of the system. I might take a little bit of time for this. Thank you for your attention and you're always welcome to ask me questions. Yeah, definitely. Thank you for the talk. There's always a little work behind this which is not seen in this introduction talk. As soon as we have our questions, people from the stream write your questions in the chat. How many people did you show WorkAdventure and how many people did you help? I think about four or something. I talk to four people for a longer time and help them debug things and do things. It's open for questions and feedback and also thankful for this. So I want more people to use this. What's the most frequent question you get? Why does the container not start? This is basically the summary of it. Sometimes it's a little frustrating to get proper error messages from the docker. For example traffic and the front end is a little buggy sometimes.  Maybe this might work a little better in the future to get all this information to the people to make finding errors easier. Well, there's actually a few questions from the stream here. What kind of spec should the server have with how big of a amount of people? So I tried it with 120 people and I had the second smallest version on Hetsna. Barely needs storage. I think it had 10 or 20 Gigabits.  It's a Node.js container. In the end you have 500 MB or 1 Gigabyte on dependencies. But that's basically it. As far as I can see the usage load isn't that dramatically high. I don't know how it scales with 100, 200 people but I couldn't test it. Future is long. The Ansible. Is it used locally or remote? I'm using it locally. But even some admins use a Windows desktop but it's a little painful. But it was easier for me to put it onto the VM and use there. This is pretty straightforward. Next questions. Question on Jitzi. Is there something I have to take a closer look at when I'm doing this? I personally use my own Jitzi which I set up on a different instance. A lot of different things are running on this machine so I don't want to talk about load and stuff like that. People, for example, who use the public Jitzi from Jitzi This is integrated using a variable in the maps as properties. You can also set up Jitzi rooms using properties and per area you're using It works through layers and certain layers can have a certain Jitzi room and you can say, okay, we have a big meeting room and a big Jitzi which is only there for this so I can say, okay, special property for the Jitzi server and this is a Jitzi room and just go. I had Jitzi issues with authentication if you have authentication and user management set up for this there might be people who have more details inside for my Jitzi instances I said, okay, I don't care I switch off the authentication but there's a possibility to use JWT tokens to restrict the use on WorkAdventure As I see the pad, it's a hot topic many people want to set up a WorkAdventure but we're running out of time, the slot isn't too long just tell us how people can reach you to further discuss all the questions You can reach me using Twitter Furthermore, I'm in the Matrix room of the R2R these are the basic contact options it's also possible to reach me using GitHub for example you can write to me there and I will figure stuff out with all this talk and the Q&A we'll see each other later during this event