Shoestring Theory

Currently documenting the house that is eating our lives, we will return to regularly scheduled programming in a couple of more months

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Who owns Route 66?

April 21st, 2010 6 Comments

A friend alerted me this morning that an item had been removed from his Zazzle store because it contained imagery related to Route 66, the iconic US highway that ran from Chicago to LA. A company based in the Netherlands, Tempting Brands, apparently claims to own the trademark to Route 66 and has been sending […]

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Some business trends going into the new year

February 14th, 2010 No Comments

Once upon a time, we’ll refer to this as the pre-house days, I used to talk about running a small business on this site. I would like to get back to that, perhaps not every post, but at least on a regular basis. As the country has moved through the recession, there are some buying […]

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Prostores and eBay sync/multi-channel inventory features reviewed

November 21st, 2008 No Comments

This is a bit dated, as the ProStore features I’m discussing were released in the spring, but I was late picking up on them. My previous disappointment in some ProStores features hadn’t led me to be a quick adopter on some of their changes. I was also delayed further by activating the two features below […]

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How the “Free” business model works

February 28th, 2008 No Comments

Wired’s got an interesting piece up on the nature of business models that rely on a “Free” product. Think things like flickr, YouTube, Jonathan Coulton, Facebook, etc, though the opportunities range far beyond that. It’s not groundbreaking, but strikes me as more of an introduction to an in-depth conversation. Which is convenient, as Chris Anderson […]

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Definition: The magic supplier

February 1st, 2008 No Comments

A mysterious supplier who can beat my prices on every item I carry, but is always out of stock. A routine email for me to receive: “Hi, I usually buy this product at five percent of what you are selling it for, but my supplier is currently out of stock (shocking! –ed). Would you be […]

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