The $300B+ off-price retail sector is rapidly transforming as it sheds old associations with bargain bins, outdated styles, and low-quality / damaged goods. Once seen as the last resort for picked-through, leftover inventory and liquidation prices at the expense of quality, today’s top off-price players are ushering in a new era of premium off-price shopping aided by challenged market dynamics. As record high credit card debt and looming concerns of stagflation continue to pressure the consumer and brands and retailers continue to grapple with excess inventory, off-price is emerging as the obvious answer for brands eager to offload unwanted inventory and cash-tight consumers looking for a great deal.

The Equal Ventures Insurance Index is a quarterly summary of public equity performance in the P&C insurance industry. This post summarizes Q3 2024 performance of our insurance indices, and aims to highlight key themes and trends underlying the price action. As always, our goal is to help support observers of the insurance industry in identifying key drivers and catalysts (and not to recommend any specific investments).

Recently, we’ve seen incredible interest in AI-enabled services. We’ve long been believers in technology’s potential to unleash value in service businesses (previous investments include companies like Vettery, Block Renovations and Leap), but we think it’s essential to determine the scope and sustainability of technology’s impact on a company’s economic performance to determine if the thesis makes sense. We refer to this as “measuring the moat”.

I was with an industry colleague the other day and they asked me about my recent post “On Communication”. This is someone that I’ve known for over a decade and they had no clue about my verbal difficulties. They expanded a bit upon my openness and remarked about how different I seemed from when we first met. They asked what happened, what changed me?

For decades, Black Friday reigned as the retail event of the year: a one-day frenzy of doorbusters, long lines, and massive consumer spending. But today, its dominance as a singular shopping holiday is waning. While the holiday season remains crucial, Black Friday has morphed into a month-long stretch of discounts driven by consumers' appetite for year-round deals and brands and retailers’ excess inventory challenges.

Over the last decade, we’ve seen tremendous growth in commerce transacted online. We’ve gone from buying books to buying houses online in a very short timeframe. We’ve also experienced tremendous growth in B2B commerce, with transaction sizes sometimes even larger than houses. With that, we’ve seen incredible variance in the outcomes attached to startups pursuing e-commerce, despite the tremendous growth (and promise) of this category.