Online business and marketing insights from what's working out there, researched and handed to you every Thursday.
📦 Your location is not your limit
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There’s a salt works in Malden, West Virginia. Population about 3,000 and surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains, sitting on top of an ancient ocean buried underground for hundreds of millions of years. A sister and brother revived their family’s salt business there in 2013. Everything is done by hand, brine pumped up from 350 feet below, dried in sun houses, raked, packaged, shipped right from the farm. A staff of fewer than a dozen people. Their salt ships to high-end restaurants in Tokyo and Copenhagen. A small-town operation in one of the least talked-about states in America, selling to chefs on the other side of the planet. It’s not like they had investors or a huge marketing budget. It’s that the setup to reach those buyers exists everywhere now, even in Malden, West Virginia. This isn’t just luck, by the way. Shopify’s latest data shows rural merchants generated $2.9 billion in cross-border sales in 2025, up from $655 million in 2019. That’s a 342% jump in six years. And the average order from a rural seller travels basically the same distance as one from a big-city seller. But the other side of it, the old story was: you’ve got a specific product, a niche one, maybe something your region is really good at, and you’re kind of trapped. The local market isn’t big enough. Expanding means moving, or giving up. That story isn’t true anymore. The niche is the advantage now, not the problem. Because somewhere out there, there’s a chef in Tokyo who needs exactly what you’ve got, and they can find you. The gap between “making something good” and “selling it around the world” used to be huge. I mean, shipping, payments, storefronts, language, all of it was a wall. Now it’s the kind of thing you can set up in an afternoon. So yeah, your action was the last barrier. Everything else got sorted. Talk soon, Minosh One more thing: if you’ve got a product or idea you want to put in front of buyers anywhere in the world, Shopify is what most of these sellers are using to make that happen, and you can try it free for next 3 days. |
TalkBitz Newsletter
Online business and marketing insights from what's working out there, researched and handed to you every Thursday.
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