L2 Predictions The First Trillion Dollar Company

In anticipation of the inaugural Intelligence Report®: Amazon, L2 Founder and CEO Scott Galloway shared some insights on how digital continues to reshape our economy, and made some predictions about how the retail giant might reach the trillion-dollar mark before other giant Apple.



Amazon’s investment in infrastructure is nearly unprecedented, and most recently they’ve been building warehouses just outside major urban centers. Galloway predicts that in three to four years, Amazon will be able to deliver to a majority of households most anything they might need on a daily basis – within four hours.



Amazon has also continued to invest in its grocery delivery service AmazonFresh, in what Galloway sees as a move to further build a direct pipeline to households’ daily and weekly needs.



Apple, however, might reach the trillion-dollar mark first if it is able to transition its image from a tech hardware company to a prestige product. Consumers experience prestige products brand-first, which leads to irrational margins and a need to refresh the actual product only every three to four years.



Galloway predicts that an investment in wearables might be the means to make this shift, which Apple’s hiring of YSL’s CEO Paul Deneve and Burberry’s CEO Angela Ahrendts supports.



For more, check out L2’s recent Intelligence Report®:Wearables and stay tuned for the Intelligence Report®: Amazon.

In this video, Head of Research Maureen Mullen answers a frequently asked question among multibrand enterprises: How do you organize for digital? These businesses often wonder what should be done at enterprise level vs. within brand teams, centrally vs. in headquarters, and in-house vs. handed off to agencies. Mullen says Estée Lauder has done a fantastic job at managing its brands.



In 2001, Estée Lauder launched e-commerce platform Gloss.com in partnership with other prestige beauty players Clarins and Chanel. The site shuttered in 2007 as it was an idea before its time, but Estée Lauder used the core Gloss.com team to create their future online division, which centralized e-commerce among its brands. The team is now larger than 400 people, and has launched brand.com sites that brought in more than $500 million in revenue in 2013.



Another example of Estée Lauder’s Genius is Smashbox’s success. It acquired Smashbox in 2010, and Smashbox became one of the biggest winners in L2’s 2011 Digital IQ Index®: Beauty with a 38% increase in Digital IQ.