Page 13 - DMGT550_RETAIL_MANAGEMENT

Retail Management

Notes 1.5.2 Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Retailing also provides opportunities for people who wish to start their own business. Some of
the world’s richest people are retailing entrepreneurs. Many are well known because their
names appear over the stores’ door; others you may not recognize. Retailing View 1.2 examines
the life of one of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, Sam Walton. Some other innovative retail
entrepreneurs include Jeff Bezos, Anita Roddick, and Ingvar Kamprad.
Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com): After his research uncovered that Internet usage was growing at a
2,300 percent annual rate in 1994, Jeffrey Bezos, the 30-year-old son of a Cuban refugee, quit his
job on Wall Street and left behind a hefty bonus to start an Internet business. While his wife
MacKenzie was driving their car across country, Jeff pecked out his business plan on a laptop
computer. By the time they reached Seattle, he had rounded up the investment capital to launch
the first Internet book retailer. The company, Amazon.com, is named after the river that carries
the greatest amount of water, symbolizing Bezos’s objective of achieving the greatest volume of
Internet sales. He was one of the few dot.com leaders to recognize that sweating the details was
critical to success. Under his leadership, Amazon developed technologies to make shopping on
the Internet faster, easier, and more personal than shopping in stores by offering personalized
recommendations and home pages. Amazon.com has become more than a bookstore. It now
provides its Web site and fulfilment services for retailers, in addition to hosting storefronts for
thousands of smaller retailers.
Anita Roddick (The Body Shop): Anita Roddick, who passed away in 2007, opened the first Body
Shop in Brighton, England, to make some extra income for her family. She did not have any
business background but was widely traveled and understood the body rituals of women. The
small store that initially sold 15 product lines now sells more than 300 products in over 2,000
outlets throughout the world. From the start, Roddick recycled bottles to save money, but such
actions also became the foundation for The Body Shop’s core values. Today it endorses only
environmentally friendly products and stands against animal testing. Roddick used her business
as a means to communicate about human rights and environmental issues. Many of the products
in the Body Shop contain materials bought from farming communities in South America and
thereby help those communities maintain their way of life. In 1989, Amazonian Indian tribes
were protesting a hydroelectric project that would have flooded the rainforest and their native
lands. Coming to their assistance, Roddick drew up a plan to prevent the project from moving
forward. She then determined that Brazil nuts produced a moisturizing and conditioning oil and
made a deal to buy the nuts from the Indians who gathered them. Today, the Body Shop continues
its business relationship with this tribe.
Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA): Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of the Swedish-based home furnishing
retailer chain IKEA, was always an entrepreneur; his first business was selling matches to
neighbors from his bicycle. By buying matches in bulk and selling them individually at a low
price, he discovered he could make a good profit. He then expanded to selling fish, Christmas
tree decorations, seeds, and ballpoint pens and pencils. By the time he was 17 years of age, he had
earned a reward for succeeding in school: His father gave him the money to register a company.
Like Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, Kamprad is known for his frugality. He drives an
old Volvo, flies economy class, and encourages IKEA employees to write on both sides of a
paper. This thriftiness has translated into a corporate philosophy of cost-cutting throughout
IKEA so that it can offer quality furniture with innovative designs at low prices.

Task Name the top ten retailers of the world and try to find out how much they
contribute to the GDP of their home nation.

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