Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson

At the end of 2025, Cat Cirino kept telling everyone it was an insane time to start a business. Consumers were getting squeezed, SNAP was being cut, and a retail build-out cost about twice what it did a few years earlier. A few months later she was spending close to $45,000 on custom millwork and signing a lease on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. She calls herself personally fiscally conservative. This...

Christine Alcalay opened her first boutique in 2002 in an unheated shoebox space on Berkeley Place in Brooklyn, and the entire clothing rack fell down on opening day. Twenty-four years later she runs three stores in Park Slope: a women's multi-brand boutique, a men's multi-brand shop, and a boutique for her own label, made in small batches in New York City. She got there by making the move...

In March 2020, Todd Barancik watched close to 90% of his company's revenue disappear in three business days. His business delivered healthy snacks to offices, and the offices had just emptied out. A year later he was a regular at a tiny zero-waste pop-up in Chicago run by two Broadway actors. When they announced they were closing, he asked his wife what she thought about taking it over. Today...

Chaya Cohen Tamir spent 20 years as a teacher and school administrator before she opened a stationery store on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn with $12 in the bank and furniture from Facebook Marketplace. The space is about 170 square feet and seven feet wide, roughly the footprint of a parking space. She gave herself one calendar year to make it work before going back to teaching. Not even two year...

In 2018 Lior Donskoy walked past an empty burger shop in Brooklyn, found the owner, and talked him into handing over the keys. She cleared out the old signage, put up posters, and ran a pop-up with a group of designers days before leaving for Burning Man. There was no name on it and no plan for what it would become. That was not luck. For years her method was the same: photograph the license numbe...

Beth Rich was a customer at Mix It Up when the associates started asking why she didn't just buy the place. She told them she hadn't moved to Coeur d'Alene to work retail on the weekends. Six weeks after she finally texted the owner to ask what the store cost, she owned it. She was in her late 50s and had never run a cash register. This week Keenan sits down with Beth, owner of Mix It...

Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland met at a beer e-commerce startup in 2018, filed an LLC three months later after three bottles of wine and a session on Rocket Lawyer, and signed the lease on their Williamsburg brewery in November 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and everything else did too. 5 years later: TALEA Beer Co. runs five taprooms across Brooklyn and Manhattan with a sixth opening on the Upper...

Sarah Maher spent a year selling crystals off picnic tables in her garage with no business plan, then signed a lease before she'd figured out how to run a store. Three years later, she owns Village and Vessel, a crystal and tarot shop in Oak Park, and she's still building through chaos: this year, the village tore up the entire street outside her door for construction that won't wrap u...

Christina Rosso-Schneider and her husband Alex got married six weeks before opening A Novel Idea in Philadelphia's East Passyunk neighborhood. Almost eight years later, the store still runs on just the two of them and a rotating pair of part-timers, and that's mostly by design. When your name and your face are the reason customers walk in, Christina says, hiring around that doesn't lig...

Early May 2020. Edy Massih's catering business had gone to zero: weddings canceled, events gone, income at nothing. So he called the woman who'd run the Polish deli around the corner for 43 years and asked to take over her shop. She said no. Three weeks later, on Memorial Day, she called back: she'd talked to her family, and she was ready. That corner store became Edy's Grocer, Nor...

Liz Sperman had the idea for a gluten-free donut company in 2013 and didn't sell her first donut until 2022. In between, she worked nearly every job in the kitchen: barista, cake decorator, production supervisor at a gluten-free startup, and supervisor on a donut food truck. A mentor told her you don't earn the right to run a kitchen you've never worked in, so she did the work first. Then she buil...

Half of America walks into a convenience store every day, and almost nobody remembers doing it. Jeff Lenard has spent his career explaining why that matters. As VP at NACS and the most-quoted voice on convenience stores anywhere (6,700+ interviews across CNN, Fox, and the BBC), he has watched the industry evolve from mini marts and gas station sushi jokes into destinations people drive 40 minutes...

Randall Isherwood spent his career running nurseries with hundreds of acres of inventory. So when he finally decided to open his own garden center, his instinct was to go big. His wife and business partner, Carol, said no: start small. They opened Gardener's Outpost in 1,200 square feet, built around a concept nobody else in Columbia, South Carolina was running: organic, sustainable, no chemic...

A second Starbucks was about to open 75 feet from a dying Long Beach coffee shop. The staff were robbing the owner through the tip jar, the lights were half burnt out, and the place was losing money every month. A year later, sales were up 50%, and Bob Phibbs had a New York Times headline and a new name: The Retail Doctor. Bob has spent 30 years proving the thing most shop owners refuse to believe...

In 2006, three guys met at a church Bible study in Atlanta, discovered they all loved homebrewing, and started getting together every Monday night after work to make beer. They called it Monday Night Brewing. Twenty years later, it's a $67 million operation across six locations and four states, and Joel Iverson, the operations brain who built the original pilot system by hand, recently took ov...

For 30 years, Ron Thurston sat in the strategy meetings at some of the most iconic names in retail (Apple, Gap, West Elm, Tory Burch, Saint Laurent) and noticed the same thing every time: the conversation started with the customer, the product, or the technology. The people on the floor, the ones who actually determined whether any of it landed, were the last agenda item. If they made it on at all...

Mary Liz Curtin spent 35 years advising manufacturers, speaking at trade shows around the world, and writing a manual for independent retailers. Then she mortgaged her house, rehabbed a 1941 roller rink in Downtown Clawson, Michigan, named the store after her cat and her dog, and had the whole thing profitable in four months. That store is Leon & Lulu, now one of the most celebrated independen...

John DiJulius III started with three nos: no customers, no money, no employees. He and his wife Stacy opened a hair salon in Cleveland in 1993 surrounded by competitors in every direction. They couldn't out-advertise them. Couldn't out-build them. So they out-loved them and turned that obsession into a customer experience framework now used by Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, and Marr...

When Ally Kirkpatrick opened Old Town Books in 2018, every sign pointed the wrong way: the last indie bookstore in Old Town Alexandria had already been killed by Amazon, she had a newborn at home, $7,000 in savings, and zero retail experience. Her own dad refused to help her look at leases. What she had instead was a decade behind the counter of coffee shops and a conviction that what people were...

Katrina Parris, founder of Nilu Goods in Harlem, joined Keenan Kok-Carlson on Beyond the Register to share how she built an 11-year retail institution out of a simple belief: when you support a maker, you support a community. Nilu is a gift shop on Lenox Avenue in Harlem that has quietly functioned as something closer to a startup incubator. Over the past decade, Katrina has taken makers from kitc...

Most retail and CPG leaders are still asking whether they should use AI. Sabrina Valdez answered that question three years ago, before Super Bowl commercials, before the hype cycle, before most people knew what ChatGPT even was. Today, she helps retail and CPG organizations move from aimless experimentation into scalable, repeatable AI systems, as the Founder of The Next Move Consulting. Her backg...

Kim Roxie, Founder and CEO of LAMIK Beauty, joined Keenan Kok-Carlson on Beyond the Register this week to share how she built a national clean beauty brand from a $500 loan, zero investor money, and a willingness to do the work most founders won't. LAMIK Beauty (which stands for Love And Makeup In Kindness) is a clean, vegan cosmetics line made in America for women of color. Kim started with a bri...

What if you could put a million-dollar consultant on your team for $20 a month? For 30 years, Greg Buzek has been the person retail calls when it needs the unvarnished truth about technology. As founder of IHL Group, he's watched every tech wave hit the industry: barcodes, POS, self-checkout, RFID, e-commerce. He's been cited in the Wall Street Journal. He's appeared on NBC, CBS, and C...

What does it actually take to scale an experience that can't be replicated online? Curry Hagerty, Partner & CEO of HART Jewelry, joins Jeramey Watts on Beyond the Register to answer that question and a whole lot more. HART is a custom charm jewelry brand built around a deceptively simple idea: help a woman choose the symbols that tell her story, then assemble her piece on the spot. It soun...

Why do profitable stores still go broke? Dan Holman has the answer, and it's not what you think. After 35+ years in retail and hundreds of store turnarounds, Dan Holman (CEO of Canadian Retail Solutions and founder of The Wealthy Retailer) has seen it all: boutiques drowning in unsold stock, retailers making million-dollar buying decisions on gut feel alone, and stores with strong sales but ze...