Lauren Thomas @LAURENTHOMAS

Sometimes success can be found in hanging out with the right crowd.

In the retail industry, a company known as Neighborhood Goods is finding success by creating spaces for brands, old and new, to sell in. In many ways, Neighborhood Goods is following the basic department store model: opening larger-format locations where brands can carve out dedicated shelf space to sell merchandise, acting as a wholesale partner. But the Texas-based business bills itself as “a new type of department store.” And it’s expanding as the likes of Macy’s, J.C. Penney and Kohl’s are struggling to keep their doors open. (READ MORE)

Connie Loizos @cookie / 5:57 pm EDT • September 10, 2019 Ross Lipson comes from an entrepreneurial family, so perhaps it’s no wonder that as a college student, he dropped out of school to jump into the online food space, including co-founding, then selling, one of Canada’s first online food ordering service startups.

It’s even less surprising that having gone through that experience, Lipson would use what he learned in the service of another startup: Dutchie, a two-year-old, 36-person, Bend, Ore.-based startup whose software is used by a growing number of cannabis dispensaries that pay the startup a monthly subscription fee to create and maintain their websites, as well as to accept orders and track what needs to be ready for pickup.

The decision is looking like a smart one right now. Dutchie  says it’s now being used by 450 dispensaries across 18 states and that it’s seeing $140 million in gross merchandise volume. The company also just locked down $15 million in Series A funding led by Gron Ventures, a new cannabis-focused venture fund with at least $117 million to invest. Other participants in the round include earlier backers Casa Verde Capital, Thirty Five Ventures (founded by NBA star Kevin Durant and sports agent Rich Kleiman), Sinai Ventures and individual investors, including Shutterstock founder and CEO Jon Oringer.

Altogether, Dutchie (named after the song), has now raised $18 million. We talked earlier today with Lipson about the company, its challenges and working with his big brother Zach, himself a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Dutchie and today serves as its chief product officer while Ross serves as CEO. (READ MORE)

Kelly Tyko, USA TODAYPublished 10:56 p.m. ET Sept. 10, 2019 | Updated 10:56 p.m. ET Sept. 10, 2019

On the same day Apple unveiled the launch date of its subscription service Arcade, brick-and-mortar video game hub GameStop announced store closures.

During Tuesday's quarterly earnings call with analysts, GameStop chief financial officer Jim Bell said the company was "on track to close between 180 and 200 underperforming stores globally by the end of this fiscal year."

Bell also said there have been 195 store closures since last year.

How many stores could close in the U.S. was not disclosed. GameStop did not immediately respond to USA TODAY's request for comment Tuesday.

GameStop CEO George Sherman spoke of right-sizing the company and said there were “recent efforts” across the corporate infrastructure and U.S. store leadership organization.

More store closings coming: An estimated 12,000 shops could close by the end of 2019

Fred's store closings: All locations to shutter in Chapter 11 bankruptcy liquidation

According to The Hollywood Reporter, in August, the company laid off 120 employees.

“Over the last couple of months, we implemented changes that require us to make tough, but necessary decisions for the benefit of our organization moving forward,” Sherman said.

GameStop isn't alone in closing stores.

More than 8,200 stores are slated to shutter this year with thousands of locations already gone, based on figures from global marketing research firm Coresight Research, retailers' earnings reports, bankruptcy filings and other records. (READ MORE)

Jeremy Bowman, The Motley Fool Motley Fool September 10, 2019 Shares of retail stocks were soaring across the board Monday. The unloved sector seemed to benefit from a massive rotation in the market as investors moved out of high-priced tech and cloud stocks like Okta, Shopify, and Fastly and into low-priced value plays in the retail and energy sectors. Though the retail sector has been sensitive to trade-related news in recent days, there did not seem to be any specific news driving industry stocks higher. Instead, the market seemed to think that the gap between expensive and cheap stocks had simply gotten too big, and sold high-growth stocks that have generated big returns for struggling value plays that have struggled in retail and elsewhere. The industry-tracking fund SPDR S&P Retail ETF (NYSEMKT: XRT) finished the day up 3.5%. Among the individual winners in the sector were Michaels Companies (NASDAQ: MIK), up 16.5%; GameStop (NYSE: GME), which gained 10.7%; J.C. Penney (NYSE: JCP), up 11.8%; Signet Jewelers , which finished up 11%; and Tailored Brands. A number of big-name retailers, including department-store chains Macy's, Nordstrom, and Kohl's finished up more than 5%. (READ MORE)

BY SUZANNE LABARRE 09.09.19 7:00 AM INNOVATION BY DESIGN

Check out all of our 2019 Innovation by Design winners and honorees here, and read more coverage of the winning designs here. (READ MORE)

Yahoo Finance Video September 6, 2019

The influencer industry is thriving thanks to platforms like YouTube and Instagram, and it's changing consumer shopping behaviors rapidly. Co-founder and President of LIKEtoKNOW.it, Amber Venz Box, joins The Final Round to discuss. (READ MORE)

Anna Escher@annaescher / 5:42 pm EDT • September 5, 2019 Flat has raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande.

The company snagged a $4.5 million pre-seed round to expand its business helping homeowners quickly sell their properties in Mexico. The round was led by ALLVP, an active early-stage fund in Mexico. California-based Liquid 2 Ventures (for which Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana is a GP), NextBillion and a few angels supported the round, as well.

At the time of writing, Flat’s raise is the largest pre-seed funding round for a Mexican startup aside from the scooter company, Grin, which was backed by Y Combinator and later went on to raise a $45 million Series A and consolidate with Brazil’s bike-sharing startup, Yellow.

While this ‘i-buying’ business model was initially pioneered by Opendoor in the U.S., the same need to efficiently sell property exists for consumers in other growing markets around the world. That’s why co-founders Victor Noguera and Bernardo Cordero founded Flat.

Bucking a trend that has seen many new Latin American founders hailing from Stanford University, Cordero and Noguera met at the University of California, Berkeley — just across the bay. (READ MORE)

By PYMNTS Posted on September 6, 2019

Legal marijuana may have a massive payments problem, but that’s not stopping retail innovation in perhaps the newest area of legitimate commerce in the U.S. and Canada.

No one would ever mistake a marijuana dispensary for a food truck, but that is what one shop in Reno, Nevada calls itself when charging customers’ credit cards.

Credit card statements will show that a purchase was made at the “Midgrun Eats LLC food truck, not at the Blüm Marijuana Dispensary,” the Reno Gazette-Journal reports.

Experts on dispensaries say such labeling is the only way to get around federal banking regulations. No matter what state laws may say about marijuana, federal law still considers the drug illegal, and that means financial institutions and payment services providers are reluctant to take part in the industry.

Back Door

“It’s not even a back door, it’s more like an upper window,” Jeremy Skaff of Colorado-based Journey Business Solutions told the newspaper. Skaff is a marijuana business financial advisor.

The label allows Blüm to take credit cards in an industry that is typically cash-only. “The more options that you give people to pay, the more business you’re going to get. No one carries cash anymore,” Skaff told the news outlet. No other dispensaries in Nevada’s Washoe County take credit cards except the six Blüm shops.

Trends in legal cannabis retail are just now emerging, and fresh numbers from Colorado are providing insight into how the industry is evolving.

According to a report from CNBC, Colorado, the first state to make recreational pot legal, has hit a milestone: It has “surpassed $1 billion in total cannabis-related revenue, the first state in the country to hit that milestone. Companies also have made more than $6.5 billion in sales over the last five years, with April and May of this year the highest-grossing months since legalization.” (READ MORE)

By Michelle Kim - Staff Writer POP/R&B JUNE 14 2019

In her latest decree as pop’s current Glinda the Good Witch, Taylor Swift has told an unnamed group of online haters to “calm down.” If that seems like an unhelpful appeal in the midst of everything fucked up about social media, it is. But since she took off her Reputation villain costume, Swift is all about spreading self-love, touting the joys of spelling and showering in rainbow sludge. In the Lover album era, she would release an anti-bullying ally anthem so positive it’s almost unnerving. (READ MORE)

Mary Ann Azevedo September 4, 2019

A software company that helps law practices run more efficiently may not be the flashiest business in town, but that’s not stopping some VCs from backing them with pretty high dollars.

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Hence, Canada-based Clio (which provides that type of software) announced this morning it has raised a massive $250 million Series D round from TCV and JMI Equity. Clio’s platform aims to serve as “an operating system” for lawyers, offering cloud-based legal practice management, client intake and legal CRM software. The company has 150,000 customers across 100 countries.

The financing is roughly ten times the amount of venture funding that Clio had previously raised since it was founded in 2008. The company’s Series B in January 2012 amounted to a comparatively small $6 million. In 2014, Clio raised $20 million in a Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners that valued the company at $110 million, according to Crunchbase data. The company raised a $1 million Series A in 2019 from friends and family and Christoph Janz, who was also an early investor in Zendesk and contacted Clio via a cold email after finding the company on the internet, according to Clio CEO and co-founder Jack Newton. (READ MORE)