Brick & Data

Lila and Jeremy Stuart are the founders of Hari Mari. When shopping for flip-flops and discovering bland inventory, they found an idea — creating a new and improved flip-flop. You might call them flip-flop fanatics?

Drew Green is the CEO of Indochino - Drew has built one of the world's fastest growing apparel brands. Under his leadership since 2015, the company has grown at a compound annual growth rate of 48%.

As always at National Retail Federation's yearly bonanza, we get to meet with some of the most interesting new technologists, thought leaders, and retail pros. This year was no different. Sara Whiffen from Rohvi took a little time out of her crazy schedule to sit with us and talk retail. Specifically, we talked about a new-ish term, called "re-commerce".

Like every show, José and Todd end up roaming the halls like a couple decently dressed zombies. With coffees. And bags. Anyway…

This time we ran into a really interesting company that found a VERY underserved space for brands. IRL, meaning exactly that - In Real Life - is helping brands of all types find new customers in that gap between retail stores and online. Using emerging channels such as Airbnb, WeWork and Health Clubs, IRL not only makes it possible but super easy for brands to cut through the noise and make their products the centre of attention.

So, next time you stay at an Airbnb, open the fridge, and find a six pack of beer with some promotional materials, it might just be from IRL. Oh, and don't forget to drink the beer. 

Listen to the episode for more on how they are doing this.

In this special Shop.org 2018 episode we have someone we found really charismatic and interesting during her Shop.org mainstage session with Guy Raz. Her name is Miki Berardelli, CEO of KIDBOX, and she sat down with José and I to talk about just that - her time at KIDBOX and why it's been such an impactful few years for her and the retailer. We will hear more about KIDBOX, but essentially KIDBOX is the first kids' personalized style box that provides parents with a convenient way to dress kids in cool brands at significant savings. We also learned about her background in retail, what the early days at KIDBOX were like, and one thing that no other retailer is doing.

Casper the friendly store | Old Brands & New Brands | Google’s Double Decker in Chicago | Weird News of the Week

The hype is real. Even after hours of downtime, countless cute dogs served on broken pages, and frustrated shoppers; Amazon still rakes in $4B+ in revenues on Prime Day 2018. In this episode, we have a little fun in our post-mortem of the only Black Friday in Summer.

José gets some time with retail and consumer trends business reporter Barbara Thau to talk about the one thing people really want with their in-store experience, the impact of out-of-stock situations on the bottom line, the tech that is cool but maybe not as useful as we thought, and the domination of Amazon's retail and marketplace models.

In this Golden Jubilee of an episode: Subscription disruptors disrupted | Luxury finally caves | Children's Place wins the toy | Weird News of the Week