BedSideHustle Launches Innovative Display-Only Retail Model In Upstate NY

BedSideHustle, a lifestyle brand empowering people to work remotely by offering a curated collection of boutique work products, has launched a physical complement to its online store at The Neighborhood Nest in Upstate NY.

Sitting on the shores of Lake Champlain, in a quaint 1800s New England style hamlet, The Neighborhood Nest is a family-owned business that’s bursting with local art, antiques, fashion, and expressive coastal, natural, and rustic design.

The Adirondacks in Upstate NY are a summer haven for families and empty nesters from relatively proximate urban hubs, such as New York City, Boston, and Montreal.

Remote work has empowered this populace to flock to the ADK for extended “workcations”, especially during the summer months, which makes it an ideal location to display a sampling of BedSideHustle’s products.

A section of the store has been carved out to showcase offerings such as BedSideHustle’s branded work-from-home collection, along with pens, candles, “Satellite HQ” prints, and succulent planters.

It’s akin to a product gallery, as everything’s on display-only with a QR code enabling shoppers to access BedSideHustle’s entire site, where they’ll see the brand's full range of products — including mid-century modern furniture and modern desk lights.

These items require more square footage to house in physical boutiques and come with higher upfront inventory costs, so BedSideHustle hopes that what is on display prompts people “browsing” in the Upstate NY boutique to interact with its shelf as though it’s a Physical Display ad — driving more web traffic and brand awareness for the company.

While all transactions and point of sale are done on a user’s own terminal, such as their smartphone, they can apply promo code “NEST” for a 10 percent discount and also receive free shipping through bedsidehustle.com.

BedSideHustle believes this innovative retail approach, which is like walking into a website, is the answer to PwC and ULI’s “Emerging Trends in Real Estate” report’s finding that “The customer wants [retail] to be a seamless experience from the store to the online.”

BedSideHustle hopes its physical “browser” taps into the same behavior tendencies of online shoppers while providing a more organic, tactile experience.

The wide adoption of QR codes and e-commerce during the pandemic stands to reduce the learning curve for this new experience, with BedSideHustle considering its display an “MVP” for a spin-off concept it calls “BoutiqueBrowser.”

If the model works for the company, it plans to see what other digitally native brands may want to subscribe to space at The Neighborhood Nest, effectively providing a “Shelf as a Service” offering.

This “showrooming” model has already been employed to some degree by once digitally native brands like Madewell, Faherty, Warby Parker, Allbirds, and Bonobos, but no platform currently exists that enables smaller digitally native brands to tap into this strategy via a more efficient, flexible approach — and on a more micro scale.

If interest exists among other online brands to test out the concept, BedSideHustle feels a two-sided platform design would work best.

The paradigm would take a page from Airbnb — where digitally native brands would “Stay” on shelves at physical locations that choose to “Host” them, allowing retail boutiques to diversify their revenue structures and subsidize their own master leases while creating an “extra draw” for their spaces.

Coffee shops, underutilized office lobbies, hotel bodegas, and transportation hubs could “embed retail” through the platform, with the display-only twist removing point-of-sale and inventory risk for the spaces, while maintaining a preferred direct-to-consumer approach for the online brands.

But that's a grander vision for another day.

For now, BedSideHustle’s BoutiqueBrowser in Upstate NY is its first foray at introducing customers to “The New Way To Window Shop.”

Scroll below to see photos of the display and follow @btqbrowser on Instagram.