AI, Apple Vision Pro, and the Category Redesign of Coatings

Meet Becca Berger, a Silicon Valley-based CleanTech coatings inventor, who is using AI, VR, Apple Vision Pro, and solar power to disrupt paint and wood stains!☀️ 

Most disruptors solve a problem, should we start with the problem?

Wood stain has been a professional's product for a hundred years. The DIY shelf carries the same chemistry the pros use, with the same failure modes, wipe-on, wipe-off technique, layered color tones, multi-day cure, and a smell that drives everyone out of the room.

For a DIYer attempting a high-stakes aesthetic project, that's a bad bet. One wrong move means uneven color, a ruined surface, and hours of sanding to start over. So most homeowners look at their oak end table, picture the driftwood finish they actually want, and either pay a finisher $800 or give up.

The category has optimized for professional control, not consumer confidence. There is no third option. WeatherWash exists to create one.

So what's your solution?

"I built a stain that lets a DIYer get a finish they couldn't get before," she says. "The chemistry reacts with the wood instead of sitting on top of it, so the color develops from the inside. One coat. No layering. The stain stops itself when it gets where you want it to be, that's the part nobody's done before. So the homeowner who pictured driftwood actually gets driftwood, on a Saturday, on the first try."

WeatherWash is currently on shelves at Walmart, with additional distribution through major e-commerce platforms including HomeDepot.com, Lowes.com, and Amazon. That combination gives us early in-aisle validation alongside national digital reach as we expand retail footprint.

She slides a pair of Apple Vision Pro goggles over her green eyes. "But that's just the stain. The bigger problem is that the whole category runs on petroleum. The stain in your hardware store this morning came out of a 19th-century industrial process that's responsible for fifteen billion tons of carbon a year. I want the coatings world off oil." She hands me a pair. "Here. Welcome to the future." 🦄

You're ambitious! What is your endgame vision?

"A category takeover, but the takeover happens by converting Minwax buyers, not by replacing Minwax overnight. The mechanism is the consumer wedge inside a structural softness. SHW's most recent 10-K shows the Consumer Brands Group, the segment that houses Minwax, Cabot, and the rest of the legacy wood-care portfolio, grew 1.9% in 2025, but the entire gain came from a Latin American acquisition. Strip the acquisition out and organic sales were flat-to-down. Across the company, volume is shrinking and price is doing the work.

Meanwhile, DIY participation grew to 56% of consumers in 2024, up from 50% the year before. The DIYer is showing up to the shelf more often. The legacy brands aren't capturing the growth.

That's the gap I'm walking into. My buyer is the LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) DIYer who picks up a can of Minwax, smells it, reads the label, puts it back, and pulls out their phone. They're already converting away from the incumbent, Minwax just hasn't given them somewhere to go. WeatherWash is somewhere to go. One coat instead of three. No respirator. The driftwood look they love on the first try.

The takeover isn't an overnight replacement. It's a slow conversion at the shelf, one quart at a time, by being the brand the LOHAS DIYer reaches for after they put Minwax back. Every buyer I convert is a buyer Minwax doesn't get back, because once a DIYer gets the finish they wanted on a Saturday, they don't go back to wipe-on-wipe-off chemistry. The crossover isn't price-driven. It's experience-driven. We're almost at price parity, at $19.97 on the shelf, making the conversion frictionless."

How will you market those products?

"Right now the engine is Instagram. I have over 31K followers, more than Minwax. More than Varathane. More than the two industry leaders combined have been able to build with the marketing budgets of a Sherwin-Williams and an RPM behind them. That's not a vanity number. That's organic LOHAS acquisition with minimal spend, which is a capability the incumbents don't have and can't buy at any price.

The loop is straightforward. A DIYer picks up a quart, finishes a project they're proud of, posts it. Other DIYers see it, recognize the finish, and want it. They buy a quart, finish a project, post it. The flywheel runs on three things, finish quality the DIYer wants to be photographed with, a founder who replies in the comments, and a community that sees itself in the work. Every project posted is a customer acquisition cost of zero and a piece of evidence that the chemistry delivers.

The interesting question for the category isn't whether I can scale the loop. It's whether anyone can replicate it after the fact. A flywheel that runs on authenticity is hard to reverse-engineer once it's spinning."

What is the difference between clean tech coatings and regular coatings?

"Clean tech coatings are manufactured with renewable resources and energy sources. The products are designed to enhance energy efficiency, reduce maintenance needs, enable self-cleaning, offer UV protection, cut toxic chemicals, lower emissions, and environmental degradation. WeatherWash is my flagship clean-tech coating; the broader product line operates under CleanTech Coatings."

Do they perform as well as products on the shelf?

"Better, and I can prove it with documents. Every competitor on the shelf right now carries either a California Prop 65 cancer warning, a skin sensitizer classification, or VOC levels up to 50 times higher than WeatherWash. PPG independently validated our sub-13 minute dry time, Varathane's own label says one hour. BEHR's version contains a biocide that requires international export notification as a restricted substance. Minwax Charred carries a carcinogenicity warning. WeatherWash uses low-toxicity, waterborne ingredients designed for consumer-safe application and low VOC exposure.

The honest answer on price is yes, we're about 69 cents above Varathane per quart at retail today. That's the CleanTech premium at current volume. My goal is to eliminate that gap entirely through continuous flow manufacturing at scale, same chemistry, same zero-VOC formula, same sub-13 minute dry time, but at a cost structure that makes us the lowest price on the shelf. The incumbents spent their R&D budget making a toxic copy. We spent ours getting the chemistry right the first time."

How will you teach the masses?

"This is why I'm developing a quality of life app that uses virtual reality and AI to scan colors in the home and make matching recommendations. Think about how Tesla sold you a Cybertruck. You didn't walk into a dealership. You opened an app, picked the configuration, saw it rendered in your driveway, put down a deposit, and waited for the truck to show up. Tesla didn't make the truck simpler. It made the decision simpler, by giving the buyer everything the dealership used to provide at the moment they actually wanted it, instead of forcing them into a parking lot on a Saturday.

That's the move for coatings. The DIYer's current path is three or four decisions and at least two trips to Home Depot, and most of them don't get past step three. The category lost the sale before the can left the shelf.

Spatial computing collapses the path. The room becomes the input. A scan captures the wall color, the wood tone, the lighting. An AI layer recommends matching products and renders them in place before the DIYer commits, entertainment center in WeatherWash Driftwood, next to the wall they already have, on the floor they already have. They order from the room, in the room, on a Sunday morning, and the quart shows up same day. We're building toward that loop.

The chemistry is what makes it honest. A rendered finish only works if the actual finish matches the render, and the only way to guarantee a one-coat match is a chemistry that reacts with the wood instead of sitting on top of it. The visualization breaks the moment the customer applies the product and the result doesn't look like the preview. The platform is downstream of the can.

And the chemistry does something the app can't: it de-skills the application. A DIYer with zero experience gets the Restoration Hardware look on a Saturday. No layering. No wipe-on-wipe-off. The app tells them what to buy; the chemistry tells the wood what to do. The DIYer is in between, holding a brush, and the result still comes out right.

That's the takeover mechanism. Not a marketing campaign. Not a price war. The DIYer who finishes their first project on a Saturday and posts the result doesn't go back to wipe-on-wipe-off chemistry the next weekend, instead they tell three friends, and the friends don't go to Minwax either. The legacy brands keep their shelf space and lose the next generation of buyer at the same time. Slow at first. Then all at once.

Capture the sale at home. Make the result foolproof. Repeat. Whoever owns that loop in three years owns category definition. Apple Vision Pro is one path into spatial computing, it might be the winning platform, it might not. The thesis doesn't depend on AVP. It depends on spatial computing as a category arriving on a timeline that lets the chemistry meet it. I think it does. The chemistry is already here. We're building the rest."

Ok, I get it, that's the tech piece, so what's the problem with oil-based coatings?

"Three things, and they compound. First, oil-based stain is built for the professional applicator. The technique is wipe-on, wipe-off, layer the tones, work fast before it sets, that's a learned skill, and a DIYer who hasn't learned it gets blotch, drag marks, and uneven color. I lived through that. I tried to do my own pieces and the Minwax wouldn't give me the finish I could see in my head. I'm not a finisher. Most DIYers aren't. The shelf doesn't care.

Second, the chemistry off-gases. VOCs and petroleum-based solvents, bad for the applicator, bad for the homeowner, bad for whoever's in the next room. You don't refinish your kitchen table on a Saturday and chase your kids out of the house for the rest of the weekend. The category has been telling DIYers to do that for a hundred years.

Third, the dry times. Multi-day cure on most oil-based formulas. The DIYer who picks up the can on Saturday morning isn't done with the project until Tuesday, and that's if they got the technique right on the first coat.

So I built a stain that fixes all three at once. Tannin-reactive waterborne chemistry, controlled-stop reaction, one coat, fast cure. No professional technique required. No respirator. The Restoration Hardware look on a Saturday, at a Walmart price. That's the value. The rest is execution."

While she works, I learn that a combination of events inspired her. First was a quote from Tim Cook in the "Elysis" project press release (link.) The second was in Bill Gates book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

"As a passionate artist, I knew I could help Apple's green initiative, but more importantly the applicators. I just didn't know where to start or what to build. I had a hunch that my blog would allow me to explore groups of DIYers to see if they shared my pain. So I started with a discreet survey built around my pain points and I learned that my readers were experiencing the same problems that I was. I called them and just had basic conversations about what they wanted. I thought I knew what they wanted but they asked me to focus on the benefits of water-based wood stain, because that's what they were willing to pay for. I thought a water-based wood stain made sense because very little innovation has occurred in the coatings category in the last hundred years and formulating seemed technically feasible, so I invented one."

CONTRACTOR

DIY

ARCHITECT

So the stain was your minimum viable product, did your customers want more than a wood stain?

"Yes! That's exactly what happened, my Instagram blew up with an enthusiastic group of customers demanding water-based wood stain, but leaving with so much more. I was able to extrapolate that they basically wanted me to make VOC free furniture paint (link), wall paint (link), oil-based wood stains (link), toners and topcoats (link). The survey results have helped with optimizing my strategy. My hypothesis so far, is that, their demands will shape the whole product line. With each new sku, margin costs will fall and the entire line should ease into profit-market fit," Becca explains as she uses an air compressor to mix raw ingredients in a 330-gallon tote."

Wood stain is a commodity, so the lifetime value of the customer is good, but how do you plan to cross what Geoffrey Moore calls the "Chasm," and establish the lifetime value with the majority markets?

"My strategy is to focus on making the business better and let the chemistry do the work. The chasm crosses one DIYer at a time, every project posted on Instagram is a piece of evidence the next DIYer uses to decide. Price parity with Minwax and iterative in-market testing close the gap. Customers can scan QR codes with their iPhones on the quart and watch a video that explains how to apply the product, and the instructor refers them to the next coating. From there, we split and expand SKUs. As the data continues to come in, I'll keep testing it and improving the product fit, just like my UX Software Engineer friend does at Apple, #designthinking. I've generated $1.35M in wood stain sales since 2022, and reducing clients' labor and material costs is what gets the coatings quadrant to $3M by 2028. The product economics need to stay positive. That's the discipline."

Can you tell me about the coatings market?

"The total attainable coatings market (TAM) is approximately $186B. Although wood stain caps at $7B, paint, furniture paint, and topcoats bring in as much as $179B. These U.S. markets are serviced by roughly eight-thousand Home Improvement stores and have over 294M US consumers in foot traffic per week. That's why I want retailers with the highest foot traffic. I know an early entrant isn't going to make a huge dent immediately, but that is where the action is happening, in the retail aisle. I believe the whole product offering, 'my coatings quadrant,' could realistically get the service obtainable market (SOM) to $150M within ten years. Sounds crazy that I'm only at $1.35M in sales and I'm talking about a big number like $150M, right!? Howard Stevenson's quote makes so much sense now. He said, 'entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled,' so let the good times roll!"

Do you have an economic model?

"The forward looking model with retailers is [(price) x (number of skus) x (number of stores) x (number of shelves) x (inventory turns) ^ Brand] = Revenue. These coatings work like a funnel. You do your end tables and then the kitchen table has to match. Of course, the entertainment center can't stick out, so it becomes a project as well, and then your headboard. Next, the walls need to accent the furniture. The exterior of the home will need to be refreshed and, finally, the deck has to be done. In a short amount of time, the whole process starts again because trends change. Increasing customer lifetime value would hinge on trends, product education, and seamlessly moving clients onto their next project. I have a healthy profit margin, but the key lever for growth is expanding into five hundred big box retail stores every quarter."

Who is your target customer?

"Our target DIY client is referred to as LOHAS (link). They talk to me through Instagram, which is a great place to A/B test them. IG is a high-density network where LOHAS will recommend products through word-of-mouth. LOHAS feels what I felt. Simply put, they want products that do 80% of the work for the end user, while they do 20% of the application. They want fast cure times, with one step-application, not several layers. They want clean coatings and resist using products with strong chemical odors. LOHAS wants a guide to reduce the risk of project failure. They tend to make purchasing decisions based off their values rather than price. They're educated and intelligent. They want the RH colors, but they want to save money and brag about how they did it themselves. They want a community to do projects with and share projects with, on social media.

In 2020, LOHAS represented one-third of home purchases. The majority of Home Depot ($157B) clients are DIY consumers who are fixing up homes to sell or repairing homes they've just bought. I see a lot of LOHAS crossover between the world's two largest retailers, Walmart and Home Depot. The LOHAS market is much bigger than just coatings. These are the clients responsible for Lululemon's success. The LOHAS market represents $472.5B (TAM) in revenue as of 2022."

What is your biggest hurdle?

"Distribution! For the last hundred years, my competitors have held a strangle-hold on the retail shelf. Although that is starting to change. Kelly Moore just went out of business, so there is going to be $457M worth of paint purchase orders on the market. Also, PPG is refocusing their energies on specialty lines looking to be a "bigger fish in a smaller pond." In the DIY space, Sherwin, BEHR, and Benjamin Moore are using price, operations, and ubiquitous shelf availability to hold marketshare and increase sales at approximately 2% year over year growth. Price is one of my biggest hurdles because I haven't crossed that chasm to the eight-thousand retailers that my competitors have, so I don't have that experience yet."

Becca attributes her success to lessons she learned in her MBA operations class. She has capitalized off of continuous flow manufacturing (CFM) and just-in-time delivery (JIT) processes that she learned in MBA case studies. What are some constraints that you're experiencing as you scale?

"Warehouse capacity and price parity to start. When we first launched in gallon milk jugs on my apartment deck, space was an obvious issue, and costs were high. Now that we've grown into multiple 330-gallon totes, our next increase will put us in 15,000-gallon stainless steel vats. The biggest constraint of any CleanTech product is going to be price parity.

Right now my price on the shelf is $19.97. My competitors are around $15.97 to $19.39. The end consumer is paying a CleanTech premium when they buy WeatherWash. In truth, you only have to use one of my quarts compared to the multiple quarts you have to buy to match my colors with Minwax. But, with more orders, my total manufacturing output will increase, and labor efficiencies will improve. I'll pass those decreases on to the end consumer and get my price in line with my competitors. I might even land at $14.97 on the shelf. That’s when the conversion really accelerates, because it’s no longer a premium decision, it’s just the better product."

As states have begun to regulate paint and stain emissions, do you see any opportunities to capture those laggard markets?

"States could accelerate the inevitable switch from oil to water through regulation. California has already started regulating the coatings industry in a way that forced many manufacturers to leave California. I think a better solution would be for lawmakers to use tax incentives and subsidies to shape consumer behavior. It would be nice if state and federal governments would give CleanTech coatings the same incentives they give solar and wind. Could you imagine the impact regulation would make if lawmakers required 25% of paint and stain to be carbon-free? The same way they require 25% of grid energy to be renewable? The reduction targets two primary points of emission. Reduced carbon from plant manufacturing and reduced carbon/VOC off-letting from product application.

How is your product innovative?

"My product is innovative because it is tannin reactive. Once the stain is applied, a natural reaction occurs inside the wood, and the wood changes color. That controlled-stop mechanism is protected as proprietary know-how, with the formulation, processing conditions, and reaction window maintained as trade secrets. Consumers can't tell the difference between real driftwood and the wood that I stain, which is great because my stain gives them an unlimited supply. Innovation is easy to spot when you're reducing labor costs and reducing material costs."

What's the difference between Sherwin William's manufacturing process and yours?

"When I built my manufacturing plant, I followed Bill Gates' advice. He said, 'we need to do three things to avoid a climate disaster. 1) We have to get to zero. 2) We need to deploy solar and wind faster and smarter. 3) We need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way.' My manufacturing process is innovative because I did all three of those things.

I approached manufacturing with a simple constraint: reduce energy intensity at the process level, not just at the facility level.

First, I developed a waterborne formulation designed to eliminate VOC-heavy solvents and reduce hazardous inputs.

Second, instead of relying solely on grid or panel-generated electricity, I use direct solar-thermal input to heat and process batches inside the vessel. That reduces external energy demand during production.

Third, I’ve taken that same formulation and process into retail distribution, including Walmart, proving the model can operate beyond the lab.

Historically, coatings manufacturing scaled on the back of inexpensive fossil energy. I’m building a version of that system that works with lower-energy inputs and cleaner chemistry.”

Weatherwash Plant

On scale, these 19th century industrial operations account for one-fifth of global energy use and are responsible for roughly fifteen billion tons of carbon off-letting annually. As the oil supply decreases, prices will continue to increase. Eventually, the oil demand will be higher than the oil supply. When that happens, I expect that low-carbon and carbon-free manufacturing processes, like mine, will disrupt old-school oil-based manufacturers." Becca tosses what appears to be herbs into a large plastic tote. She pinches a little of this, and a little of that, and folds raw materials into the product with a wooden oar.

Are your materials renewable?

"My formulas use renewable raw materials and low-energy processing, including solar-thermal input. I measure output as gallons produced per unit of energy consumed, and at current scale, the process materially reduces carbon and VOC emissions compared to traditional coatings.
As we scale, we plan to validate the full lifecycle impact with third-party analysis. The objective is straightforward: drive coatings toward a net-zero manufacturing model."

Circling back to the stain, your product is truly magic in a quart, but your operation is next level. You said that you use the power of the sun to make the product. Can you tell me how you do that?

"Everyone talks about using solar to power the plant. I wanted to know if I could use it to cook the batch.

Instead of relying entirely on electric or fossil-fuel heat, I use direct solar-thermal input to heat and process batches inside the vessel. The formulation and process are designed to absorb and retain heat efficiently, which reduces the need for external energy during production.

As we scale, automation and additional energy inputs, including solar-generated electricity, will support higher throughput. The goal is to build a manufacturing system that reduces reliance on fossil energy at both the process and facility level.

That’s what I see as the future of low-carbon coatings manufacturing! 🇺🇸"

How do efficiencies play a role in CleanTech?

"Efficiencies are the key to real CleanTech results! The built environment is responsible for 29% of the 52 billion tons of annual carbon emissions. I have five main efficiencies that can reduce that percentage right now: raw materials, workspace, energy, labor, and plant power. I have one goal in mind when manufacturing: my energy efficiencies must maximize outputs and minimize inputs. I would say my operation is 78% efficient right now. When we scale to our goal of eight thousand retailers, I expect my efficiencies will go down at first, but once we get past the experience curve, I think they will be closer to 92%."

If you had one wish, what would it be?

"Distribution at the speed the chemistry deserves. The product is ready. The application is foolproof. The marketing engine is running. The rate-limiting step right now is shelf, getting the can in front of the LOHAS DIYer in every market where she's already looking for it. If a wish gave me 5,000 stores tomorrow, I'd take it."

What would you give up?

"Take a look around you. Everything I have here is for sale, including things you can't see, like equity. Hang tight, it looks like my staff is overflowing a tote. I gotta go. Are we done here?"

*****

That's a wrap.

I'm surprised Becca can even hear me over the air compressors, the shouting, the continuous lid hammering. She is laser-focused on the batch and somehow answers every question even though we're interrupted a dozen times by managers and employees. The operation is a real operation. That part is not a pitch deck.

Here is what I think a coatings strategist would take away from a day at WeatherWash.

The chemistry is substantiated. Tannin-reactive waterborne stain with a controlled-stop reaction is a genuine chemistry differentiator, not a marketing claim. A polymer chemist can understand the mechanism quickly. Getting it to stop consistently across different wood species, moisture levels, and real-world application variance is where most attempts break. That’s the moat.

The manufacturing is real. Solar-thermal direct-capture cooking the batch inside the tote, 78% efficiency today, 92% target at scale. The numbers will need diligence. The operation will not.

The brand franchise is structurally interesting. 31,300 Instagram followers, more than Minwax, more than Varathane, with no paid acquisition spend. That's an organic LOHAS-acquisition capability the incumbents don't have and can't buy at any price. It's the part of the asset that compounds the longest.

The platform is roadmap, not product. The room-scan visualization layer, the AI recommendation engine, the rendered-in-place finish preview, direction of travel. Becca and her team are building toward it; they're not selling it yet. The chemistry is the wedge. The platform only works because the chemistry already does.

The category is at a moment. The legacy DIY brands are flat-to-down on volume. DIY participation is up. The next-generation buyer is forming preferences online, on Instagram, on Vision Pro and whatever comes after, and the brands they pick today are the brands they'll buy from for thirty years. The question for any incumbent is whether they want to compete for that buyer or watch a one-woman operation in California acquire her without them.

The ripple thesis, in one sentence. Light bulbs, alternating current, and the automobile redrew their categories not when they were invented but when the supporting infrastructure caught up. WeatherWash is the chemistry. Spatial computing is the infrastructure catching up.

An incumbent can try to replicate the chemistry, rebuild the community, and retrain the DIY customer, or they can acquire it already working. The question isn’t whether WeatherWash fits inside a coatings portfolio. It’s whether a coatings portfolio can afford not to have it.

Want to support WeatherWash?

Go to your local Walmart store or go online to Walmart.com, HomeDepot.com, Amazon.com, Lowes.com or Becca's website, WeatherwashCoatings.com. Just search for WeatherWash and don't forget to leave a review! 😊

Digital Frontier: The New Land Rush!

To digitize or not…Is that the question? COVID is shaking things up in the retail world. This year, digital startups may look like frantic Irish immigrants planting their stakes in the e-commerce land grab. Like Tom Cruise in Far and Away, companies will be expanding market share. 

Who can enter? Really anyone! Meet one competitor in the e-commerce coatings race, Becca Berger. MBA turned entrepreneur extraordinaire. This Silicon Valley CleanTech inventor owns a company called WeatherWash Coatings, an earth-friendly reactive stain that turns raw wood into barnwood by using tannic acid inside the lumber to achieve a specific color. Her product has no VOC’s. She invented the most cleanest product on the market. If you check Home Depot online, her reviews are 4-5 stars. Recently her product launched through Walmart online, and from day one sold as much as ten brick and mortar stores. How is that possible? 

Rebecca has a strong foothold on Instagram with 28,000 followers. Type “wood stain” on Instagram’s search, and she’s often ranked #1. She has over 17,000 followers on Facebook. An impressive portfolio. Support videos. Chat support. Phone support. A blog. An app and an algorithm. She doesn’t even have a brick and mortar store. She doesn’t want or need a storefront. 100% of her sales are e-commerce. She started with stains because it’s niche, and the most significant competitor, Minwax, lost distribution with Home Depot after Sherwin Williams acquired the lagging brand for an eye-popping $11.3B. 

         

         

The largest entrants in the digital market space race are undoubtedly Walmart and Home Depot; Walmart is the world’s largest economy. Depot is the world’s second-largest economy. Four years ago, in their 2017, 10-K report, Depot revealed they plan to compete with Amazon by spending $11B on “store, supply chain, digital experience, and people.” With that kind of funding, the retailer known as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla expects to be on equal footing with Amazon’s 1-click, 2-day order fulfillment by the end of 2020. Can Depot achieve the “flywheel of success” by buying success? Maybe? It should be duly noted that part of Bezo’s high growth strategy is attributable to acquisitions like Zappos, Petco, and Whole Foods. But Depot is not in acquisition mode, so most likely not.

         

In 2001, Home Depot opened its online store. Nineteen years later, they are still nowhere near Amazon’s e-commerce platform. According to Depot’s 2019 10-K, their ambition is to be a “One Home Depot experience.” However, that vision is not clearly defined. What is clear is that Depot’s initial $5.4B investment in e-commerce is taking longer to recoup than expected. Why? There are many reasons, but one major obstacle is that 90% of developed software will not be utilized. Not to mention when the software is finally available, the hardware used to write the software is outdated. More software development questions will buzz around like murder hornets, “What is our hardware budget? What should we expect to pay for software development? How long will it take? Why isn’t it working? Can we outsource development?” Bezos has already answered ALL of these questions, and he did it about nineteen years ago. 

Bezos developed a sturdy platform from HTML source code to the back-end JavaScript. He also custom built the hardware so soundly, he is one of the few companies that survived the dot com bust. He then expanded Amazon by investing in more hardware and software. Bezos owns AWS and an undisclosed share in Google, meaning that large retailers relying on Google’s SEO or Amazon’s AWS services will compete with Amazon on Amazon’s hardware/software. The end game may be what happened to mom-and-pop bookshops, here today, gone tomorrow. 

Competition is also ramping up. E-commerce is a different game than retailers are used to playing. Historically, retailers had to battle for sales in newspapers, radio, and TV ads. Suppliers were never a threat. Each retailer competed on price, product, and availability. Now retailers could lose sales to suppliers. A cheetah gazelle relationship is developing between the two. So, who is the cheetah, retailers or suppliers? That’s hard to answer because suppliers like Sherwin Williams are building websites that sell directly to end consumers while simultaneously maintaining 4,106 brick and mortar stores. But they aren’t the only ones building websites. Inventors like Becca, mom-and-pop shops, Walmart, Depot, Sherwin, Ace, and Amazon all have websites. The cheetah is whoever gets to the Do-It-Yourself or Do-It-For-Me e-commerce consumer first, captures the gazelle, stakes their claim, expands their fences, and grows market share. 

Amazon will maintain a steady lead once it grows into hardware and paint because the e-commerce onboarding process for Depot and Lowes can take up to a year and costs suppliers several thousands of dollars, which means lots of suppliers won’t even make it to Depot/Lowe’s online e-commerce platform. Not only that, but Depot is marking suppliers’ products up 100% even though they aren’t shelving suppliers’ products, picking, packing, or shipping. The value seems to be the brand. Lowe’s onboarding process is equivalent to Depot’s. Sherwin doesn’t even have a process for onboarding suppliers. They have an email that they don’t reply to. Most of these overlooked suppliers will go straight to Amazon for no other reason than it only takes fifteen minutes for suppliers to onboard, giving Amazon a favorable lead. Of course, a faster cheetah i.e., inventor, could sprint to the lead by leveraging platforms like social media, a professional website, and leveraging relationships with established e-commerce brands. Still, these contenders are often acquired early on, so finishing the race becomes questionable. 

In a nutshell, Mr. Bezos may have fired the first shot for the digital market space land grab, took his place on the start line, and quickly sprinted ahead of the competitors. Time will tell who captures the most valued digital spaces and carves out their claim. Will it be retail brands? Suppliers? Inventors? Mom & pop? or Amazon?

Zack Lovelady