It's hard to find things that won't sell online.
Get your product in front of actual, living, breathing strangers. Your college roommate's approval does not mean there's market demand.
... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.
He who puts ... a product upon the market as it demands, controls that market, regardless of color. It is simply a survival of the fittest.
Koch companies employ 60,000 Americans, who make many thousands of products that Americans want and need.
If no one consumes these products, people will stop roducing them. They will not build it if you didn't come.
You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.
We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.
We can serve our customers well only if our buying jobs are right. You cannot sell if you haven't ordered wanted goods into your store.
We don't want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
Retailing, it's always true that there is some items that I wish we had a lot more of like the iPod and there is some items I wish we had a lot less of.
One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.
Over time, demand from Registry should help support the home product expansion initiative and vice-versa.
It used to be that people needed products to survive. Now products need people to survive.
I didn't know what we would be selling in the year 2000 but whatever it was we would be selling the most of it.
The modern corporation must manufacture not only goods but the desire for the goods it manufactures.
I think that different things sell in different countries.
Recession-resistant development produces things people need. Unsustainable growth churns out tinsel products that consumers have to be seduced into buying - until times get tough, when they quickly give them up.
Kleenex would have made a mint today.
I'm a big supporter of this product for women. And [my relationship with the brand Berlei] was so organic. I would go to the store and buy 40 or 50 bras every year because I could only get them in Australia at the time. And then eventually they heard that I would come and take all the stock.
The general market wants what I do.
I got a call from the Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah had chosen Spanx as one of her favorite products in 2000. I had boxes of product in my apartment and I had two weeks notice that she was going to say she loved it on TV and I had no shipping department.
A few brands have asked me to design shorts for them. I'm not sure about that. I don't want to have them as a mass product, and suddenly everybody is walking around in them.
Fashion is one of the most intellectually vacuous industries. We had to manufacture desires to get people to buy our products. We were selling people countless things that they didn't need.
