Monday, December 15, 2025
Happy Wednesday! 🤘
Fun fact:
The Hudson's Bay Company is Canada's oldest corporation.
It was founded in 1670 by the King of England to control the fur trade here…
And predates the Canadian Confederation by almost 200 years.
Pretty wild when you think about it.
Tragically though, it just went bankrupt.
(I'll save the reasons why for another day.)
Yet like any prestigious and longstanding corporation...
One of its most valuable assets was its intellectual property (IP)...
Which got scooped up at a fire sale discount by Canadian Tire, another retailer here.
And, after smartly snatching up all this juicy IP...
Canadian Tire announced they were running a limited-time sale bringing back many of the Bay's classic branded products…
Including a striped “point” blanket that looks like this:
Now here's the thing:
Up until recently, this blanket was always just a standard retail item.
You could walk into any Hudson's Bay store and buy one pretty much whenever you wanted.
But the moment the bankruptcy was announced…
It instantly became a collector's item.
So my wife and I jetted off to the nearest Canadian Tire as soon as we could...
… only to find the blankets were completely sold out after just a few days.
I couldn’t believe it.
I wanted to know which idiot failed so spectacularly to project demand for these blankets that I couldn’t get my damn hands on one.
Anyhow, my fuming aside…
I had to begrudgingly admit there was a timeless persuasion principle at play:
Scarcity.
This can supercharge demand for your product or service…
Because when something is always available in (essentially) unlimited quantities...
It feels less urgent, less valuable, less special.
Yet the moment it becomes scarce…
Everything changes.
Buyers go from “maybe later” to “I HAVE to have it”.
You can see this principle at play in every industry from sneakers to real estate to luxury handbags.
Now, this doesn't mean you have to inject scarcity into everything you sell…
But it’s worth thinking about how & when to intentionally limit quantity to increase the perceived value of your offers.
Whether it’s done through limited cohorts…
Seasonal launches…
Or simply capping enrollment at a specific number of spots.
Because scarcity isn’t just a sales tactic.
It’s also a value signal…
That activates the type of frenzied buyer behavior we all dream of as entrepreneurs.
Something to chew on as you design your own offers :)
Jim Hamilton
Learn how to build a profitable daily newsletter with Email Storyselling. Read by 4,000+ subscribers.