I'm really happy you asked that question.
Ten years ago, if you wanted to sell a product, you had to do a couple of things. You had to raise some money to manufacture that product. You had to manufacture that product. You then had to find an agency or a distributor to distribute that product. You had to find a retailer to sell that product and then a consumer to buy that product.
One of the most interesting parts about the Internet is that it's democratizing, that someone who wants to make a new pen that is the most amazing pen ever can manufacture it. Maybe he builds a prototype using a 3-D printer. Maybe he raises money on a crowd-funding platform like Kickstarter and then he can sell it direct-to-consumer. He can remove all of the intermediaries between him and the end consumer, and do that while charging much less money and making a lot higher margin. I think that's the future of retail. It belongs to creators and curators.
The days of these hegemonic retailers taking all the profit margins away from the original manufacturers are gone. I think that in the future everyone is going to be an entrepreneur. I think if someone has an idea for a new type of anything, they can retail it themselves directly to consumers. It's democratizing.