mornin’ merrymakers 💍📍🏝️🗺️🧩

by you’re reading this, i'll be married 💙

i wrote this series before our wedding so i could enjoy our honeymoon in thailand & japan without a newsletter deadline following me around every beach and airport.

if you have tips for either country, please do share. food, shops, places worth wandering into, wellness things. any & all recommendations welcome. 

& if you'd like a detailed wedding recap, let me know that too. i never know how interested yall are in my personal life 🙃

for now, welcome to a new series called marry making.

six weeks of retail observations inspired by planning a wedding. we'll be looking at how retail is changing through some of the decisions i've been making as a very personally invested, little bit too observant customer.

starting with a planning decision that set a lot of other decisions in motion.

thanks to my mom’s real estate career, i grew up on the mantra: location, location, location. between her advice & my own decade plus  working in retail, helping make real estate lease decisions, i'd like to think i understood the importance of an address.

wedding planning made me realize another important angle to this.

while what mattered most was who i was marrying & getting the people we love to celebrate together, choosing a venue meant finding a place that could support the experience we wanted to share with them.

which turned out to be a complicated assignment.

the venue was one of the hardest decisions because so many other decisions were attached to it: who could attend, which vendors we could work with, what the experience could feel like, & which dates were even available. pick a place & suddenly several other choices have been made for you.

we wanted an outdoor, nature-forward wedding, somewhere we love that would bring our guests together & put everyone in a little more of a vacation state of mind. we wanted to create as many opportunities as possible for our friends to have the chance to become friends. the location needed to support that, alongside all the practical questions that come with getting a group of people to the same place.

there's a very useful retail (& life) lesson in that.

my profiTABLE framework looks at retail through four Ps:

they're useful categories for understanding a business, but a decision in one rarely stays there. choose the place & you've already started making decisions about the other three.

People: who can realistically become your customer here? who can work here? the people passing the window might be different from the people you imagined serving. nearby residents, commuters, & visitors can have very different reasons for walking through the same door.

your hiring pool has a geography too. a location needs people who can make it part of their working lives, including the commute before an opening shift or after closing.

Products: what makes sense for the people arriving in this particular place? someone carrying a purchase onto a subway has different practical considerations from someone loading a car. someone stopping in during a lunch break may need something different from someone spending an afternoon browsing.

the space itself has opinions too. a tiny stockroom, a narrow entrance, or the choice between another fitting room & more merchandise all influence what you carry, how much you carry, & how you sell it.

Processes: what will it take to make the business work here, every day? think about where deliveries arrive, where returns go, how a pickup customer gets in & out, & where a team member can take a break. these details become someone's job, every shift.

an address comes with a set of operating conditions.

the wedding version became very clear to me. the place influenced who could join us, which vendors could help us, & how we could bring everyone together. those practical details were taking shape while i was still trying to choose it.

this decision matters a lot after a store opens, too.

when a store struggles, it's tempting to work on the parts that feel easier to change: adjust the assortment, run a promotion, rewrite the service expectations, or ask the team to improve conversion. those might be exactly the right moves, but i'd also want to understand which conditions the location created.

are we asking the team to deliver leisurely service in a place people visit when they're rushing?

are we stocking for the customer we wanted, while serving someone with a different shopping mission?

is a recurring delivery or storage problem something the space makes difficult every day?

the address can help explain why a perfectly sensible plan becomes difficult in practice. & as we ask stores to handle more jobs, from appointments to pickups, returns, & shipping orders, we need to reconsider whether the space supports each one. every promise needs people, room, & a process behind it.

a location can be good at one job & awkward at another.

that's why i'd bring all four Ps into a location decision from the beginning. before committing to a space, ask:

then ask what happens when one of those answers changes. it's a useful exercise for a store you already operate, too. naming the constraint gives you a better chance of addressing what's actually making the work difficult.

with the wedding, we started with the people & the experience we wanted to share with them. a beautiful venue still had to work for that gathering.

the same goes for a beautiful store. it needs to support the people you're serving & the experience you want to offer.

that's the part of the real estate advice i'll carry forward. understand what matters to you, then look carefully at what a place makes possible, what it makes difficult, & what you'll need to figure out around it.

the place really does shape the plan.