mornin' merrymakers 🧼🫧🛁🧽🧴🌿

we spend every week here pulling apart how the smartest retailers actually scale. starting today, that work has a much bigger home too.

i'm partnering with square on a new series for the bottom line, their business publication that’s extremely helpful for business owners.

the series is called real-world retail.

each piece traces how a brand built their stores into something worth scaling. the sharp early choices, the loud customer signals, the operational fixes, the years of learning before anything looked obvious.

& i get to help tell the stor(i)es.

as a new mom, magen bynum couldn't find a baby wash she trusted on her daughter's sensitive skin. the labels said "clean" & "gentle" but the ingredient lists proved otherwise.

so she started making her own in her kitchen.

then in 2018, she started selling this soap in her own store in new albany, mississippi.

population: 6,400.

this is about as many people who walk through a flagship manhattan retailer on a single busy saturday.

that first year, the 1,200 sq ft store pulled in $700k+.

she didn't rush to open store two. she moved strategically as she learned what was really working in stores and for customers. eight years later, magnolia has 50+ stores across 17 states & a 92.6 NPS (anything over 70 is world-class).

we talked to bynum about how she did it.

inside are 5 strategies that helped the first store become a blueprint for the next 50.

p.s. work at a retail brand that runs on square? hit reply to tell us what you’re building!