Clicks to Bricks 101 Course 👨🏻🏫
Access 1REC's new course offering!
1REC has officially launched Clicks to Bricks 101: How to build and scale your offline channel!
Yes, another digital course — but on a very “analog” topic: physical stores!
Last year I discovered a new passion that I piloted at The Lead’s Innovation Forum: I love to teach!
I cohosted a workshop with Ron Thurston where we shared our retail experiences with dozens of DTC brands who were curious about brick and mortar:
🕓 When’s the right time to jump in? How do you measure success?
💰 How much does it cost? What’s the risk?
🙋🏻 Who should the first hire be? What's a good staffing model?
So I made a beefy course to help answer a lot of these questions.
Here’s what you’ll learn
🧐 How to define the purpose of stores and measure success: it can mean very different things for different brands
📍 How to define a trade area: if you’re still using a radius, then you should keep reading
🎯 How to forecast new store sales: I love touting my 95% overall accuracy from my Bonobos days; this was my framework
🕴🏻 The real estate process from site selection to lease: it’s probably a lot longer than you think
🛠️ The design & construction process from test fits to construction drawings: I’m honestly still learning this world, but this is what I’ve picked up over ~10 yrs
📋 The New Store Opening (NSO) process, including the 60+ things you need to do before opening: yes, most of it is copy-paste
✅ How a Real Estate Committee presentation should look: what your exec team should want to know before signing a deal
🤖 All accompanied by a custom GPT built on OpenAI, and trained on the course itself: because nothing can be without AI these days
Who the course is for
😃 Digital and emerging brands who are looking to build a basic understanding of the retail channel, the risks required, and the resulting growth you can achieve
📇 Retail real estate brokers and technology vendors who want to better understand their clients’ needs across teams
👨🏻🏫 Frontline and corporate employees who want to expand their knowledge of this particular function
🧑💻 Students who are wondering what kinds of careers are possible in the intersection of retail and real estate
🛍️ Experienced retailers or real estate professionals interested in a different perspective or an edge
🙋🏽♀️ Anyone else with a Learning & Development budget to burn :)
What’s in it
8️⃣ video modules covering 100+ slides of content over 73 minutes, narrated with AI and covering the core functional areas of retail: strategy & finance, real estate, design & construction, operations & leadership
📚 Relevant and guided links to the Resource Hub’s downloadable templates and guides
😅 Attempts to upsell you on some things :)
Thank you to the numerous DTC brands and friends…
…who let me pilot it with you, and to the friends who spent time to actually take the course and provide valuable feedback.
Interested in helping me with the 102-105 and 201-401? Drop me a line!
With the course offering, 1REC is now the Retail Expansion Collaboratory
What’s a collaboratory?
Collaboratory can mean a couple things, but here are the definitions that inspired me:
“A center without walls, in which the nation’s researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location, interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, [and] accessing information in digital libraries” (Wulf, 1989).
“it is a new networked organizational form that also includes social processes; collaboration techniques; formal and informal communication; and agreement on norms, principles, values, and rules” (Cogburn, 2003)
The word “collaboratory” is also used to describe an open space, creative process where a group of people work together to generate solutions to complex problems.
In other words, “collaboratory” perfectly captures the spirit of what 1REC finally is: a platform where those interested in offline retail can come together to access and discuss strategies and tactics related to expansion.
And this course creates the needed common experience from which professionals can collaborate towards a common goal: offline retail expansion.