Finding nothing close, he has spent much of the past decade trying to reverse-engineer what had been his favorite — from Patsy's in East Harlem — in a home kitchen oven which, like nearly all consumer models, has a maximum cooking temperature roughly half of the 1,000 degrees pumped out by the coal-fired pizza oven at Patsy's.
But he has been looking for investment opportunities in agriculture for three years, and he says a direct-to-consumer model "has the potential to be extremely profitable, generating 25 percent net income for this type of business".
Today this direct-to-consumer model has begun to disrupt the apparel and jewelry verticals, but expect to see more online-only brands emerge in other markets over the coming years.
At Sony, 20percentt of its Vaio consumer models have gone through the Vista Velocity program so far, and the goal is to cover them all, said Mike Abary, senior vice president for marketing in Sony's Vaio PC business.
What's important to note, either way, is that consumer models have a ways to go before they can be broadly useful to most people (see "What Yoda Taught me About 3-D Printing"), and now the two companies together may be in the best position to make that happen.
Amazon (AMZN), no stranger to direct-to-consumer models, has no less than 18 subscription boxes available.
That shift to a consumer-centric model has driven a number of changes that are fueled by technology.
A well known model that measures consumer satisfaction – the SERVQUAL model – has been used to measure consumer satisfaction in many areas of health as well as the service industry [ 9- 11].
Parrot on Tuesday unveiled its Bebop Drone 2, a smaller version of its popular consumer model that has a 25-minute battery life — twice that of its predecessor. .
