The case against curation.

Instead, we’re creating a system built upon resonation.

This post is written by b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby. It’s the third of eight installments chronicling his store tour and sharing insights from the retail sales floor.

The b8ta Seattle team.

Day three. Seattle.

I spent a rainy Sunday at b8ta Seattle at University Village, one of my favorite malls in the country. Seattle was the second flagship we opened after Palo Alto, and we spared no expense designing this wonderful store. Unlike b8ta New York City and b8ta Corte Madera, Seattle has an expanded assortment of products of all types.

Shoppers here definitely skew to early adopters, with lots of families, teens, and children. I estimate about half of our visitors were returning and half were new. In our larger stores, we introduce many new products a month and we have many people who come multiple times per month to make sure they don’t miss out on anything. In November alone we launched 29 new products in Seattle.

I love seeing the kids from our return families who literally run into the shop full of excitement about seeing what we have now. That excitement for technology and understanding how it works is how I got into programming as a teenager, and eventually became a software engineer as I started my career.

Because we have so many types of products in Seattle, one of the most common questions I got as a b8ta tester was around how we pick products, how we curate and end up with such cool stuff. My answer is that we’re not curators, but our contrarian philosophy around merchandising has led our stores to have hands-down the most interesting, fun, and dynamic assortment of technology products in the world.

Let me walk you through it.

We’re not like a regular retailer, we’re a thoughtful retailer.

The way a traditional store selects products is through a buyer or a curator. The buyer is an expert in a particular category of products, and uses a combination of analysis and intuition about which products might resonate with their shoppers. Once products have been decided upon, it must also make business sense for the retailer to buy the product from the vendor at a margin that they think would be profitable for them. And the vendor must agree that the retailer is a good fit for their products as well.

When analysis, economics, and brand response don’t match up, the buyer looks for the next best alternatives. Now sprinkle in relationships developed over beer and baseball games between buyers and vendors, strategic conflicts, bad moods, and buyer budgetary constraints. And just for fun, imagine the impossibility of curating for hundreds of stores across the country where shoppers have different preferences.

Curation doesn’t always work in the customer’s favor.

You can start to see why curation as a merchandising strategy just never produces good customer-focused outcomes. Using algorithms only solves some of the problems. The main problem is deeper—that the retailer, brand, and customers don’t have aligned interests.

At b8ta, we want to provide infrastructure to every technology brand that has a critical business need for physical retail. Sometimes that need is awareness, sometimes it’s engagement and demos, and sometimes it’s service or logistics. Whatever it is, we work with the company to help them build a great experience. By taking out the buyer or curator from the equation completely, we’ve created a system with no barriers (other than cost) to a brand entering our stores.

Getting into a retail store should be as simple as wanting to be there.

In addition to creating the infrastructure, our software and design team has made the onboarding process into b8ta so easy that it could be done in 15 minutes with practically no human intervention. So with no barriers and simple onboarding, the question is not whether a brand can come into our stores, it’s only whether they want to.

With the effort of our teams to create an environment, software, and services that brands love, we’ve been able to attract the world’s greatest products, from the ones that are just launching, to the brands we know but have something new to share.

It’s why we say b8ta is a place to see what the world’s creating.

As it all comes together, b8ta stores actually get better over time.

When a product resonates with customers and b8ta’s infrastructure and offerings resonate with the brand, they keep their great products in our stores longterm and keep swapping them out for the latest versions. When a product or brand doesn’t resonate, the brands leave and we bring something else in its place. Now rinse and repeat dozens of times per month in every store. The stores get better and better over time, and never feel stale. It’s a software and business model-powered feedback loop played out in real life.

In a nutshell, that’s our anti-curation approach to curation, and it’s really much more like resonation.

The power of anti-curation: My notes from the day, taken with Neo smartpen.

• A woman and her husband came to check out Flybrix and Cue for their eight-year-old nephew who loves robots and legos. Who doesn’t?
• Devialet Phantom was bumping all day in Seattle. The sound quality is unbelievable. The song of choice up in Seattle was “Limit to Your Love” by James Blake, but we also had requests for “Kings of Summer” by Ayokay, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.
• Many people came to check out smart locks with us, and we have a great selection between August, Friday, and Otto in Seattle. There was a lot of interest in how they could use these devices with Airbnb.
• Best quote of the day was from an older repeat customer who said, “You should open a store in Bellevue Square. Lots of Microsoft employees out there. You know, Microsoft employees love Thai food.”
• Light Camera received lots of interest from amateur photographers. One feature request unique to Seattle for Light and other products was waterproofing!
• A 15-year-old 6'3" basketball player was in love with Sugr Cube. I was personally impressed by it’s gestural control interface. It’s a fun gift item.
• Aura Frame was a 10-second sell when two parents of young children realized they could automatically stream every photo of their kids to their grandma in Chicago using Aura’s software with built-in face recognition.
• A customer asked if the SimpleHuman smart mirror had a strobe lighting effect, so as to check whether her makeup would look good at a nightclub. It didn’t have that feature, but a good replacement was a LIFX with its strobe effect next to the mirror.
• Merlin the Hedgehog visited the store, an adorable African Pygmy Hedgehog.