Sales & Marketing

Rent the Runway, the popular online retailer specializing in rentals of pricey designer dresses and accessories, has opened a brick-and-mortar outpost on the second floor of The Cosmopolitan hotel’s retail complex in Las Vegas.

By Jeff Weidauer, VP of marketing and strategy, Vestcom International

Healthy is hip. That’s the message coming from most media outlets, as well as consumers in general. Overall interest among Americans in healthful meal options is at an all-time high. Yet, at the same time, some healthy-focused retailers are struggling. Whole Foods Market has seen its growth slowing and has issued lower target guidance to shareholders. Smaller companies like Fresh Market are even resorting to closing stores. What’s going on?

New York -- Instacart, the same-day grocery delivery service, has raised $44 million in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The San Francisco startup currently operates in San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles and seven other U.S. cities. With its new funding, it Instacart expects to expand into 17 cities by the end of 2014.

Quill Ideas is the name of a new crowdsourcing platform the online division of Staples launched for customers and employees to share ideas in new and interesting ways.

Quill.com, acquired by Staples in 1998, is calling Quill Ideas an online-innovation community that is designed to solicit and implement ideas, review and rank them based on various protocols and then implement those that score the highest. A soft launch that began two weeks ago has already garnered more than 13,000 interactions made up of ideas, votes and comments, according to the company.

Duck brand duct tape has partnered with Fiskars to introduce Fiskars Duck Edition scissors. To mark the launch, Fiskars is hosting a sweepstakes starting today called Imagination on a Roll on its Facebook page.

Sweepstakes participants are encouraged to share their Duck Tape crafting project ideas on Fiskars’ Facebook page for a chance to win 21 rolls of Duck Tape and the new Fiskars Duck Edition scissors, a prize valued at more than $90. The sweepstakes runs through July 14.

Montreal – Raymark is releasing a new mobile retail store operations solution called Mosaic Inventory Management. The new solution complements the suite of Raymark Mosaic retail enterprise applications with tools for end-to-end management and optimization of inventory from a handheld device, including support for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Pitney Bowes has launched Mailstream On Demand — a tool designed to give small and midsize businesses an outsourced solution to better manage their transactional document design, production and delivery across physical and digital channels.

New Delhi, India – Wal-Mart Stores In. has reportedly opened an e-commerce site to serve the small retailers that shop at its members-only cash-and-carry stores in India. According to Bloomberg, Wal-Mart is piloting the site for small retailers located in the cities of Hyderabad and Lucknow, with full rollout across India planned in January 2015.