85: Jeremy Cai, Founder & CEO of Italic

Square One: Conversations with the Best in Business

This week we went deep into e-commerce. E-comm has been all the rage throughout COVID and it makes sense why: we’re all at home now and brands are able to get to us in more and more ways.

A company I’ve been keeping an eye on in the e-comm space is Italic, a marketplace for luxury goods; in this episode I chatted with Italic’s Founder/CEO Jeremy Cai.

Lux goods are interesting - they’re desired but super expensive. What I didn’t know originally was how much of that money is kept by the brand vs. the actual manufacturer. Italic has flipped the model and unlocked manufacturers ability to sell directly to consumers. So now you can buy products from the factories that make Prada, Gucci, Tumi, etc. at factory price. A win for the manufacturer and a win for the consumer.

Jeremy walked me through the way he thinks about e-comm, what the US can learn from China, where the value is trapped in this space and how to build a world class consumer experience.