Every Solution This Founder Created Led Her to a Bigger (More Impactful) Problem to SolvePopCom founder and CEO Dawn Dickson started out selling shoes to women, and ended up making over the vending machine industry with smart technology.
This story appears in theMarch 2021issue of雷竞技手机版.Subscribe »
Where do great business ideas come from? Sometimes, out of previous business ideas. That's what happened to Dawn Dickson, who went from selling shoes to reinventing the vending machine. It began in 2011 when she launchedFlat Out of Heels, roll-up ballet flats that women can carry as a backup to less comfortable footwear. She tried to sell them in vending machines (to help women who wanted to ditch their heels), but traditional machines didn't gather data. "I wanted to know myconversion rate, and who was shopping," she says. So she developedPopCom, software that uses facial recognition and AI so existing kiosks and vending machines can capture shopper data and analytics. Then she realized thehardwarecould be improved upon — and launched a new kind of machine called aPopShopin 2020, just as demand for socially distant shopping was soaring. Here's how she did it.
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