E-commerce is the catalog business. It is confusing to call it 'e-commerce' because you will conceptually lose the smooth progression from the printed catalogs to the web.

The Sears stores were, in fact, add-ons that appeared after the catalogs became ubiquitous.

This assertion:

>Said differently, if your business is standalone e-commerce selling third-party brands, good luck. You can’t generate enough operating profit to scale beyond getting noticed, counter-attacked, and at best acquired. You are forced into stay right where you are.

...is basically correct for most categories. It's really hard for businesses like Macy's and JC Penny and the rest which are primarily retail businesses to compete in the catalog business. Amazon in particular is moving into apparel and is doing a capable job of it for brands that their customers are already familiar with.

Is this true for the venture funded web catalog business? Yeah, but venture economics are usually terrible for web catalogs, and there are many venture corpses built upon dumb assumptions about 'branding' to attest to this.

The linked puff piece in this article praises NastyGal, which is, again, a venture funded catalog. It is a nice catalog with excellent photography, fast load speeds, and OK copywriting. The selection is also solid with an oft-changing inventory, but I would worry about the bad demographics and limited spending power of the target market. It wasn't so long ago that a similar brand with a similar style (American Apparel) was the new hotness. AA collapsed because of the reversal in commercial real estate and the prolapse in the spending power of its target market. Escalating advertising costs, high shipping costs, and bad market demographics threaten the venture funded nuCatalog model. Why do today's young women buy stuff from Forever 21 etc.? It's because they have no money.

"I'm starting a pants catalog and putting it on the web" sounds a lot less ~web 3.6 future internets~ than something about butt algorithms and personalization. What it still amounts to is selling pants through the mail. Catalogs on the web are a fantastic opportunity for everyone except for venture capitalists, in my view, just because the economics are not venture economics, and VCs are just killing each other pointlessly by bidding up advertising and labor costs for everyone. The opportunity is there, but these are not opportunities that venture investors are really well suited to navigate.

"We sell $80 khakis that fit" is not a great USP because Banana Republic does this also.

The big problem with selling fitted clothes via catalog is that unless the customers are familiar with your fits, they will tend to shy away from fitted clothes, and will instead stick to accessories or items with well-standardized fits like shoes. They bring up all these brands that do well selling via internet catalog that do so because they have elastic waistbands. Lululemons have some wiggle on the fit in the way that men's khakis do not.

Fitted clothes now have a nightmarish sizing problem due to retailers attempting to make fat people feel better about their hyperfattitude by making the sizes on everything totally nonstandard. This has some unfortunate spillover effects online as everyone has to modify their fits.