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Zappos: The Wizard of Oz MVP That Revolutionized Online Retail
How Nick Swinmurn manually fulfilled shoe orders from local stores to validate a billion-dollar e-commerce concept—without building a single warehouse or inventory system.
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Founded: 1999
Acquired: $1.2B (2009)
15M+ Customers
The Challenge: Would Anyone Buy Shoes Online?
In 1999, Nick Swinmurn had a simple but risky hypothesis: people would buy shoes online despite not being able to try them on first. At the time, this seemed absurd—footwear was considered something you had to experience physically. The dominant wisdom was that e-commerce worked for books and CDs, but never for shoes.
Rather than investing hundreds of thousands in inventory, warehousing, and logistics infrastructure to test this theory, Swinmurn took an ingenious lean approach that would become a legendary example of MVP validation.
The Wizard of Oz MVP
How It Worked:
- 1. Swinmurn photographed shoes at local shoe stores
- 2. Posted photos on a basic website with prices
- 3. When a customer ordered, he'd personally go back to the store
- 4. Buy the shoes at full retail price
- 5. Ship them to the customer
This process was completely unsustainable—Zappos often lost money on each sale. But that wasn't the point. The goal was to validate whether people would actually buy shoes online, and boy did they validate it.
Ready to Validate Your E-Commerce Idea?
Apply Zappos' Wizard of Oz approach: validate demand before building infrastructure.