Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson

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...

Most restaurant stories start the same way: long nights in a hot kitchen, missed family time, and a hope that “one day” it will all be worth it. Carrie Morey chose a different path. In 2005, as a new mom who hated her corporate job, she took her mother’s biscuit recipe and started shipping frozen biscuits from her basement. She made one clear decision from the start: the business would be built ar...

Everyone is telling small retailers the same thing right now: Get on Amazon. Add AI to everything. Copy what the “winners” did. Sucharita Kodali thinks that’s a dangerous way to run a business. She’s a VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, a former operator at Disney, Toys“R”Us, and Saks, an early e-commerce insider, and one of the sharpest, most candid voices in retail. When the industry gets dr...

Most people hear “Oprah’s Favorite Things” and think overnight success. Bobby Djavaheri hears it and remembers packing thousands of bread makers himself during COVID, loading them into his truck, and racing to FedEx. Bobby is the president of Yedi Houseware Appliances, a 40 year old family business that went from fine china and teacups to air fryers, pressure cookers, and bread makers that Oprah l...

Most reality TV contestants come home and sign brand deals. Dan Cox came home and signed leases. After The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, Dan didn’t sell detox teas with his face on the label. He opened five Total Nutrition stores in Las Vegas and California, stood behind the counter, and talked to thousands of customers about what actually worked. Those conversations turned into MetCon (f...

What’s the biggest mistake Jeramey made in retail? How do you stop running your store into the ground without stepping away completely? Is drop shipping worth it? And how do you actually make your tiny boutique feel like a destination? This week on Beyond the Register , Jeramey flips the format and answers the questions that flood his DMs, inbox, and conversations with retailers across the country...

Melissa Austria didn’t launch Gotstyle because she loved fashion. She did it because she was sick of men dressing like crap. Two decades later, she’s built one of Toronto’s most original, enduring retail brands, and she’s still doing things her way. In this episode, Melissa joins Jeramey to talk about the real work of building a high-touch retail experience in a world obsessed with convenience. Sh...

Most stores are built for transactions. The great ones are built for connection. In this episode, Jeramey sits down with Amanda Stierwalt-Green , Product Manager at Global Payments and former shop owner, to unpack how independent retailers can create memorable, profitable, and deeply human experiences (without needing massive budgets or big-box scale). Amanda doesn’t just advise small businesses....

Most stores are designed to sell. Very few are designed to connect. In this episode of Beyond the Register, Jeramey sits down with Sandy Hernandez, founder of The Retail Muse + A Store Is Born and a 15-year veteran of retail innovation, to unpack what actually makes a store stick in someone’s memory (and keep them coming back). Sandy has helped global brands like Adidas, H&M, Unilever, and Nes...

Retail doesn’t break at the register. It breaks upstream. In this episode of Beyond the Register , I sit down with Rohan Shah, Co-Founder & CEO of Conduit Commerce, and former Co-Founder of the unicorn startup Extend, to unpack the biggest blind spot in modern retail: your supply chain. Rohan has built companies at the intersection of retail and infrastructure. His new venture, Conduit, is fix...

Most retailers think a loyalty program will fix their business. But here’s the truth: loyalty only works when your business already has a strong foundation. In this episode, Jeramey sits down with Richard Schenker (the architect of Canada’s iconic Shoppers Optimum program) to unpack what loyalty is really about. And why most programs fail. Richard has led loyalty and customer engagement at Hudson’...