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Retail Real Estate / Chain Store Age: More than 30 million people visit the 2.9 million-sq.-ft. complex. It offers 50-plus food and beverage options. Operator Steiner + Associates signed leases with 10 new tenants during the pandemic and opened the 16-acre, $500 million New District in early 2021.
Short Analysis: Outdoor malls and stand alone stores are showing signs of progress. Take it from Ben Kaufman, the founder and CEO of CAMP. The BuzzFeed alum recently tweeted, "Retail. Is. Not. Dead." And well, he is right. Experiential retail is far from dead. That’s the resounding message relayed by Columbus, Ohio’s Easton Town Center, which was named the No. 1 best retail experience in the country by Chain Store Age.
The retail complex managed by Steiner & Associates sees 30 million visitors a year and made pandemic progress, signing on 10 new tenants and opening a new $500 million development in 2021. March and April sales this year were up 5 and 8 per cent over the same time in 2019. Columbus is also the home to 2PM Inc. so I spend quite a bit of time studying the facility. Steiner + Associates does a marvelous job of replacing failing retailers and redeveloping land into an engaging environment. 
What makes a good retail experience today, anyway? As evidenced by the Ohio retail development, it’s a mix of properties that draws people in and keeps them there. As we wrote in 2019, Easton Town Center is “less a shopping mall and more a self-contained town with living, dining, grocery, hotels, and an ease of mobility.” It’s a far cry from the suburban closed-in malls that are dying out across the country. The best retail spaces attract the best tenants, which draws in shoppers from miles away. And the cycle continues. The founding idea for Easton holds true: developers have to give customers a reason to come to their centers beyond shopping.
That’s always been the basis of experiential retail, and the malls that survive will be the ones that follow Victor Gruen's lead, the inspiration behind the open-air model that Easton uses. That doesn’t change the fact that America is over-retailed and that the next decade will see a change in use for many shared retail spaces, with offices already moving into many. Designed around DTC concepts, the Connected Mall is the outline for the future and Easton served as the blueprint. The flywheel for the best malls will continue to work because experience is at the center. For brands looking for a great omnichannel experience, start with this list.
Hilary Milnes and Web Smith, 2PM
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Fashion / Vogue Business: Daily Paper started as a personal blog in 2008, covering the fashion, music, style and African influences of three young friends in Amsterdam — Abderrahmane Trabsini, Jefferson Osei and Hussein Suleiman. It got traction, so they launched merch, with five branded T-shirts.
By 2PM: I was fascinated by this brand when first introduced at a Shopify event in 2019. Here's what I wrote then:
In a conference area with over 200 DTC brands and some of the brightest minds in the industry, the chatter always seemed to highlight the issue of exit optionality. In a stark contrast to the typical DTC growth story, Cofounder Hussein Suileman took the stage to discuss the ten year arc of his streetwear brand Daily Paper, an internationally-known label. In 2008, he and his two friends launched a blog and sold branded t-shirts, monetizing the site’s demand. In 2010, the group officially founded Daily Paper. By 2012, the brand was established and growing. In a conversation with 2PM, Suileman explained:
We never [raised money]. We started with $8,000 seven years ago and then we reinvested everything that we made back into the business ever since.
A retail brand founded by three African immigrants launched in Amsterdam after two years of selling branded t-shirts on an eponymous blog may be the quintessential linear commerce story. They’ve since expanded into physical retail in Amsterdam, London, and New York City. Daily Paper, a Shopify Plus customer, is on the path to the optionality that alludes many of America’s DTC counterparts.
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DTC Brands / Fortune: I love a comeback story. We know that someone who brings a solution to a personal challenge and simultaneously finds a way to solve a problem for the masses is someone we can get behind. My team and I were just enamored with Amanda. Her small town, rural upbringing, postdivorce plight as a stressed-out single mother of three, and expertise in physical, digital, and partnership marketing, which gives her great direct-to-consumer chops—her story is just inspiring.
Editor's Note: The NBA Star-turned-investor is right, Goetz's story is a retail entrepreneur's playbook in the making.
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Private Label / Fast Company: Target now has more than 45 owned labels across fashion, home, beauty, and more. Ten of them generate upwards of $1 billion annually, and four earn more than $2 billion, including kids’ label Cat & Jack and home-decor brand Threshold. “We have been building our design, sourcing, and brand-management capability for years, and now I would describe it as industry leading,” says Jill Sando, Target’s chief merchandising officer, who oversaw the launch of All in Motion. “It’s a critical piece of our strategy.”
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Updated August 16: Shein remains No. 1 for the fifth week in a row. NOBULL and Depop make major leaps into the top 25.
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Data / MIT Sloan Review: The so-called frictionless store has become the new gold standard in the retail world. However, the term is a bit of a misnomer. The goal is to use digital technology to meet consumer expectations of flexibility, instant gratification, convenience, immersive shopping, safety, and speed. But early adopters aren’t removing all points of friction. Rather, their strategies vary substantially depending on which friction points they want to remove.
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Brands / New York Times: Red Ventures, which started as a digital marketing company, has attracted serious investments from private equity firms. Its location has helped obscure what is perhaps the biggest digital publisher in America, a 4,500-employee juggernaut that says it has roughly $2 billion in annual revenues, a conservative valuation earlier this year of more than $11 billion, and more readers, as measured by Comscore, than any media brand you’ve ever heard of — an average of 751 million visits a month.
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Brands / Packy McCormick: Every day, thousands (millions?) of companies and VC firms launch in-house essays into the abyss. They want to “own the conversation” around X, and so they write about X, and … crickets. They were told content is important, and they made content! Why didn’t it work? Corporate essays are kind of like sales, and according to Alex Danco, we’re past sales and on to something better: world building.
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Brands / GQ: Palace's expansion into new markets and different scenes seems almost outlandish compared to other skate or fashion brands, most of which cater to niche audiences and rarely reach customers outside them. And the company's expansive ethos is only growing stronger.
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Sociology / Quartz: It’s the free market at work: Give shoppers options and they will vote with their dollars, the logic goes. Ultimately the good will rise and the bad will fall. Consumers bear a similar responsibility for recycling, or avoiding single-use plastics such as bags and straws. The paradigm ostensibly puts the power in the hands of ordinary citizens.
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eCommerce / AdWeek: Kellogg’s debuted a website dedicated to century-old cracker brand Cheez-It. Visitors can purchase merchandise, such as a Cheez-It fanny pack and socks, along with an exclusive variety pack containing four flavors of its Extra Toasty crackers. Although Kellogg’s has experimented with DTC in the past, this marks the first time the company has created an online destination to sell one of its more mature brands, according to Jordan Narducci, director of global direct-to-consumer eCommerce at Kellogg’s.
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DeFi / Open Democracy: Web3 envisions a world in which not only information but value flows freely. With greater accessibility, however, we run the risk of over-financialization, with finance both enhancing and restricting more of our actions online. y.
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When author David Perell published the brilliant short essay Beer Mode, Coffee Mode, I began to research the history of the dynamic between the two beverages. Perell’s work was a figurative look at the creative impulses around fun and focus, not the consumption of the products themselves. Once upon a time, caffeine overtook alcohol as the drink of choice. This is a memo on coffee’s first period of great European influence. The adoption of coffee culture and non-alcoholic beer consumption could mean something similar for today.
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