We’re launching the 1REC Community: the first AI-powered community for brick-and-mortar retail professionals
This week marks a big week for 1REC: we announced the 1REC Community. Think Fishbowl (anonymous and professional forums) meets ICSC (retail and real estate networking) meets NRF (retail resources, networking, and events).
Our mission is to make operators’ lives easier by providing a place to expand their networks and knowledge — anonymously and privately, and in an operator-only community. Learn more and apply below — free spots are limited for the closed beta launch!
Read on to learn how this community can help you grow your business and career!
WHO you know is just as important as WHAT you know
This mantra can be applied to most industries, but it’s particularly true for retail, and even more so for store development operators (real estate, store design, and construction). Finding, building, and operating stores successfully requires access to information and people. You can be the smartest person in the room, but if you’re a:
…store development leader and don’t have access to brokers, landlords, counterparts at other brands, or vendors…
OR a…field or operations leader and don’t have access to great talent, counterparts at other brands, or vendors…
…then the “what you know” isn’t enough alone to succeed in this industry. In fact, much of the “what you know” comes from the “who you know.”
Unfortunately, both the “who” and the “what” that you need to know tend to be:
radically different depending on where you and your brand are in your retail lifecycle: an up-and-coming DTC brand and a legacy retailer have different levels and types of needs.
challenging to access: many of the most popular associations and conferences are expensive. Dues, tickets, flights, and hotels can add up to thousands, and days-long events and crippling hangovers ruin any expected productivity for the week.
offered with limited relevance: conferences and associations tend to be incredibly narrow (ICSC) or overly broad (NRF).
Growing and managing a physical retail footprint is complex, and there really aren’t that many well-run organizations or associations that can offer relevant and accessible networking and resources for brick-and-mortar operators — a group that is broader than who the likes of ICSC caters to, but narrower than NRF’s target audience. The combination of (a) the obsession with e-commerce over the last 10 years, and (b) the lack of rich academia has made the offline subset of the retail industry tougher to thrive in than it should be.
Furthermore, it’s contributed to a growing polarization between operators in terms of their backgrounds and resulting POVs on retail. Generally speaking, I’ve found that:
Experienced brick-and-mortar operators (decades of experience) know and understand the process and players well, but they lack a comprehensive understanding of omnichannel frameworks (eg how to use e-commerce data to drive real estate decisions) — the fact that some conferences are still discussing “what omnichannel means” is a testament to the years behind some of these companies and operators are.
New brick-and-mortar operators (<10 years experience) lack an understanding of the processes and players (including the importance of each), but they’re sitting on a gold mine of e-commerce data and knowledge — they just don’t know how to use it in the context of offline retail. This group generally also believes they can “figure it out” on their own for the first 10 stores, only to realize it’s a lot harder than they originally thought, and have made huge mistakes in the process.
Brands and operators on both ends of the spectrum have much to learn from each other, but unfortunately there currently isn’t a great platform to facilitate that knowledge transfer or networking across both sides of the spectrum — conferences, for example, tend to cater to one group or the other.
Which brings me to my next point:
Existing events, services, and platforms don’t fully solve the problem
If you’re an established retailer/operator, you might think your existing network is good enough and you don’t need to augment it (a common response to the 1REC Community when I’ve pitched it to this group of individuals). When I hear this, I can’t help but think of this quote I found on Medium:
“Complacency eventually breeds contempt for our surroundings and ourselves as we've settled instead of strived.”
Especially if you’re an industry veteran, then I’d argue that now is the time you should be the most plugged in — as digital growth is finally asymptoting and offline is making a comeback, much of the talent that innovated and grew e-commerce over the last decade will likely soon shift their talents into energizing and innovating brick-and-mortar. Strategies, data, and frameworks will undoubtedly evolve at an accelerated rate.
If you attend conferences or are already part of a professional association to boost your network and knowledge, then you’ve probably noticed that they cater more so to everyone other than the operators: landlords, brokers, and vendors in particular — after all, these are how these events generate their revenue (quite literally the Facebook model: they sell your attendance/membership to others who want your attention)! Consequently, and in my experience, a lot of these don’t offer that many safe spaces for operators. Some are catching on by offering “retailer only” roundtables and events, but those are oddly still not as common as you’d think. Point being, while existing conferences and associations can solve some of those needs, their incentives are still not fully aligned to operators.
And if you’re an up-and-coming brand, you might think “I can figure out stores, how hard could it be? I don’t need any of these things!” But keep in mind, a single bad real estate decision can directly cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars or more per year — now multiply that by the number of real estate decisions you might make in one year, and multiply that by the number of years you’ve committed to across each of those leases. With physical retail locations, mistakes are expensive and compounding.
Consider physical retail’s “competition”: e-commerce
E-commerce is still often viewed as a competitor to brick-and-mortar retail: whether teams are competing for budget dollars, sales attribution, or executive attention. And much like opening new stores, performance marketing is the engine that drives the channel’s growth.
But despite performance marketing being a relatively new field (born out of the rise of e-commerce in the last ~10-15 years), and despite e-commerce only being ~20% of total retail sales, my observation is that e-commerce operators are far better educated, equipped, and empowered than their physical retail counterparts.
And I believe that one of driving forces that enabled such an “underdog” rise of this field is the abundance of digital communities that facilitate education, the exchange of information, and dialogue between brands and operators. This may sound like a silly factor, but a quick google search for “performance marketing communities” will result in numerous lists of dozens of different communities:
In contrast, results for “brick and mortar communities” leaves much to be desired:
As I’ve been building out the 1REC Community infrastructure and business plan, it’s blown my mind how far the e-commerce and digital marketing world has already advanced in the creation of community “brain trusts” or “hive minds.” In these communities, operators are exchanging benchmarks for their acquisition costs, offering strategic advice, recommending vendors and talent to hire, and sharing resources. In this way, communities can be compared to post-grad programs: they both strengthen people’s networks and knowledge, and create better operators.
Meanwhile, much like the channel itself, the world of physical retail is still lacking innovation, and instead relying on in-person conferences and limited/isolated data and information.
1REC is taking a page out of E-Commerce operators’ books: building a community
The 1REC Community is for anyone that operates brick-and-mortar retail at the Corporate level. As I’ve built out stores and observed others do the same, I’ve noticed a similar collection of skills among the most successful companies, which tend to be bucketed across four main verticals within Corporate/Headquarters (more on this structure in my organizational design newsletter):
Retail Strategy & Finance
Real Estate & Lease Administration
Store Design & Construction
Store Operations & Leadership
(The Field/Store Teams are just as, if not more, important — but they have different needs, which I’m addressing in another community 😉)
If you fall into any of the above buckets, and any of the below sounds familiar, then consider applying here to help build the first retail community of its kind.
Retail Strategy & Finance
Should I open stores? What will that cost me? How will that impact my company’s economic profile? What’s a good ROI?
What are the changes and requirements of ASC 842? How does this impact my business? Are there any consultants that help brands achieve compliance quickly?
Real Estate & Lease Administration
What are market rents in my top markets? How do I get out of my underperforming leases? Where are my competitors opening? Where are they exiting?
How many leases have early termination clauses? What are my exact expiration dates? What are the terms of renewal?
Store Design & Construction
Who are the best vendors for this kind of millwork? For lighting? For storefront murals in this market?
Who are the best GCs in this city? What should a buildout cost me? Is union labor required in this market? How long do permits typically take here?
Store Operations & Leadership
Who are the best vendors for a scrappy and inexpensive POS? Where’s the best place to get unique and affordable visual props? How does everyone manage the cleaning and plants in their store?
Is my sales performance in line with my peers in this market? Why is my traffic up/down? What promos are my neighbors running this week?
All Teams
What do other companies’ org structures look like? How did you get budget approval to hire a new role?
How many stores are my peers opening? Closing?
Is anyone hiring? Is anyone looking for a new job?