Lifestyle, Inc. (2004)(plope.com) |
Lifestyle, Inc. (2004)(plope.com) |
Regardless, I recoil and avoid like the plague any product or service targeted at my "lifestyle" (typically with the word "luxury" thrown in for good measure). It's a sure tell of a company looking to separate fools from their money.
And therein lies the problem with the author's attempt to extract huge meaning from a two-word term. Or perhaps he truly understood what the CEO meant, but just utterly failed at articulating what he meant.
I think you might have gotten caught up on the phrase and extrapolated quite a bit of meaning from that which isn't there. It's a pretty common phrase, and it has nothing to do with luxury goods or providing "lifestyle" products to people.
I'd love to hear/read about other such companies and founders. I imagine Buffer might be a real-world modern example.
Put another way, a lifestyle business can be looked at as simply a good business patiently looking for its opportunity to go big. Or, a lifestyle business can be avowedly lifestyle. Businesses can change a lot over time.
It's also odd that you'd mention Buffer as being a candidate for a lifestyle company. They've taken about $4m in funding, which implies that they convinced all of their investors that they'd see a significant return on their money. That's not to say that they can't operate like a lifestyle business, but they are almost certainly looking to generate a very large return.