Jeff Bennett's Blog

As a kid I remember fondly the trips to the shoe store, Goodwins, on Main Street in my hometown.  My Dad was a childhood friend of Mr. Goodwin.  We went for “back to school” and “Easter.”  The process of buying shoes was personal.

I have been involved in eCommerce since the mid 90’s and surely you could see the efficiencies the Internet could bring in many categories.  Amazon nailed it in books early as an upstart eCommerce site.  Many have followed with great success.  But wh0 would have ever thought that someone could nail it in the shoe category?

Intuition would tell you shoe selling on the Internet would be impossible.  Actually it is not.  There are actually two Shoe sites that have flourished:  Zappos and Boston-based ShoeBuy.  How did they do it?  Big catalog of shoes…and advantage for an eCommerce site versus the small shoe shop in town.  Make it easy to buy with great sites.  Make it free to ship to you and return if the shoes do not fit or you don’t like them.  Simple concepts but powerful in enabling these eCommerce sites to flourish and leverage the power of the Internet as a network to reach millions of customers.  Hats off to Tony Hsieh and his team @ Zappos.  Hats off to Scott Savitz and his team @ ShoeBuy.

Tony has written his first book to share the tale of Zappos, “Delivering Happiness.” Tony shares the different business lessons he learned in life, from a lemonade stand and pizza business through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more.  The reader gets a behind the scenes look of how Tony and his team have pulled what I thought would be an impossible mission into reality.  Tony shares the tales of how they built the company, their relentless focus on values and culture that has had a profound impact on the success of the business.  Ultimately, he shows how using happiness as a framework can produce profits, passion, and purpose both in business and in life.

I really enjoyed reading this book.  I hope you will give it a read too.