Retail Relates
Welcome to Retail Relates — where commerce gets personal.
Each episode brings you inside the world of global commerce — across retail, consumer services, hospitality, and brand marketing — through powerful human stories and the ever-evolving forces shaping what we buy, why we buy, and how we connect.
From entrepreneurs and icons to industry veterans and rising changemakers, we spotlight those redefining how people lead, create, and connect in a fast-moving world.
Hosted by our roundtable of industry experts, we offer a 360° view of the marketplace through honest conversations, lived experience, and practical insights that resonate.
Let’s get started — this is where the story of modern commerce comes to life.
Retail Relates
From Steakhouses to Smart Cities: Kevin Kelley on Rethinking Space and Human Behavior
What makes a place unforgettable? For Kevin Kelley, it’s not about style or awards—it’s about how spaces shape human behavior and bring people together.
Kevin Ervin Kelley, AIA, is a behavioral design architect, co-founder of Shook Kelley, and author of Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together. For more than three decades, he has worked with brands like Harley-Davidson, Whole Foods, Kraft, and USAA, as well as cultural institutions like MoMA and global cities from Charlotte to Manila.
In this episode, Kevin shares how childhood lessons, design school debates, and client challenges shaped his mission to “fix the everyday.” From food courts and steakhouses to smart cities and global marketplaces, his work proves that space still matters—and that environment is never neutral.
We explore why malls aren’t dead, how sensory design influences behavior, and why leaders must deliver not just convenience but social bliss. Along the way, Kevin reveals insights every leader can use to avoid sameness and create authentic, human-centered experiences.
Kevin Kelley Bio:
Kevin Ervin Kelley, AIA, is an award-winning behavioral design architect and co-founder of Shook Kelley, a strategic design firm with offices in Charlotte and Los Angeles. For more than three decades, he has worked with leadership teams from global brands—including Harley-Davidson, Whole Foods, Kraft, JM Smucker, USAA, and MoMA—as well as professional sports teams, universities, and urban districts. His expertise lies in understanding how the design of space shapes human behavior, perception, and decision-making, translating these insights into strategies that help organizations, communities, and cultural institutions thrive in an increasingly digital world.
Beyond his client work, Kevin co-founded and led the revitalization of South End in Charlotte, a once-blighted district that has since generated over $1.5 billion in economic development. Today, he continues to advise districts like Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade and international hubs like Makati in the Philippines. A frequent speaker and educator, Kevin has presented at global conferences, taught at Harvard University and UNC Charlotte, and authored Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together, recognized by The Financial Times and The Next Big Idea Club as a must-read on the future of place and culture.
What makes a space unforgettable? For Kevin Kelly, it's not about how it looks in a rendering. Rather how it shapes the way people feel, behave and connect. A lifelong student of human behavior, kevin has built a career helping brands, cities and cultural institutions rethink the role of place in an increasingly digital age. In this environment, we unpack the architecture of experience why environment is never neutral, how sensory design influences decisions, why marketplaces still matter and what leaders can do to create spaces that deliver more than efficiency they deliver belonging. I'm Rich Honeyball and I'm co-hosting today with Paula Jean, our digital marketing and global community expert, as we explore the intersection of design, behavior and commerce.
Rich:Kevin Irwin Kelly is a behavioral design architect and co-founder of Shook Kelly, with offices in Charlotte and Los Angeles. For the last three decades, he's worked with leadership teams from Arlie Davidson, whole Foods, kraft, usaa and MoMA, as well as professional sports franchises, universities and cities across the globe. He also co-founded South End in Charlotte, a formerly blighted district which has since generated more than $1.5 billion in development activity. His debut book, irreplaceable how to Create extraordinary places that bring people together, has been recognized by the Financial Times and the Next Big Idea Club as a must-read on the future of place.
Rich:Kevin's career is a study in contrast. From steakhouses to smart cities, food courts to cultural icons, his work demonstrates that space is not background, it's foreground. In this conversation, we'll hear how his early experiences shaped his behavioral approach to design, why fixing the everyday matters more than chasing flashy projects, and how leaders can define problems more clearly before rushing to solutions. You'll also hear practical lessons on how to move beyond convenience and towards social bliss, why sameness is the enemy of great design, and how to make spaces that people choose to return to again and again. So welcome back to another episode of Retail Relates. I am one of your hosts for Rich Honiball, and I'm here with Paula Gean Hi, Paula.
Paula:Hello, thank you for having me.
Rich:And we are excited to be joined today by Kevin Kelly, who is the co-founder of Shook Kelly and the author of, irreplaceable, how to Create Extraordinary Places that Bring People Together. Kevin, how are you doing today?
Kevin:I'm doing great, very excited to be here. I'm a big fan of your podcasts and think you have really relevant topics that are of great interest to me and the audiences I serve.
Rich:Well, I definitely, we definitely appreciate that we work hard at it, don't we Paula?
Paula:Well, one of us does, and that's Rich, so he works very hard.
Rich:That's great, and I enjoyed the book very much, so I look forward to getting into it. We have read your bio and of course, I'm going to post the extended bio in the show notes. It's impressive. But we'd like to start with a question that limits the amount of space you have to tell us about yourself. So, if you can, what are the three pivotal moments? Personal, professional? A combination that happened in your life that brought you to where you are today?
Kevin:Great, I'd start this with. It's the weird, awkward moments in your life when your hair rises on your back of your head or your arms that you start to realize there's something there, there's some material there. When I was a young kid, I grew up in a home that wasn't always safe, and so I had to kind of worry about certain situations, and I could tell by the way a key was put in the door or ice cubes in a glass, whether it be a good day or a bad day. And at 60 pounds I didn't know really what to do, how to manage those kind of situations, and for some reason the only instinct that came to mind was to adjust the environment, to turn the lights down or move the furniture around, put some music on, and I could turn a difficult situation into a great situation. Most people would think of that as a kind of neurosis, but I took that neurosis and turned it into my career, really studying how environment affects behavior. That's my first observation. My second everybody obsess about style and architecture and aesthetics and kind of what we call talkitecture, the intellectualization of design, and I often thought it was just too much focus on those aspects and I couldn't understand why we weren't studying behavior? Why aren't we looking at how people behave as opposed to looking at these objects that we're making? And one of my professors said to me. He said, you know, maybe you should consider being a sociologist, and I took a long pause and I thought or maybe architecture should be more sociological, and that was the birth of an idea that really led me down a path.
Kevin:My third observation happens in my career. In the middle of my internship, I was working on a variety of different types of projects and a lot of my peers dreamed of doing skyscrapers or civic centers or fancy, you know, resort hotels overlooking cliffs of Malibu, and what I couldn't understand is why we weren't looking at the everyday places of our lives. The dry cleaners, understand, is why we weren't looking at the everyday places of our lives, the dry cleaners, the grocery stores, the gas stations. Why weren't we looking at all of those types of things that we all have contact with weekly and why weren't we empathetic to that situation? And why are we focusing so much in making the wealthy and the cultural elite hipper and cooler? Why aren't we working on what a struggling, you know person on a limited income is trying to do? And so early in my career of my own firm, starting with my business partner Terry Shook, I got a commission to do a steak buffet chain, which doesn't sound that exciting, you know, it certainly wasn't a skyscraper. Most of the people at this steak buffet chain, which was a 538 unit steak buffet chain, live off fixed incomes. So you're looking at mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese and biscuits.
Kevin:And I remember sitting down with a gentleman and I wrote about this in the book. Percy was his name, and I learned so much from Percy about the world and I realized I could use my talents to make his life and his time with his family and his week out on his fixed budget so special, so memorable. And that, to me, is what we should be doing as designers is fixing, addressing and enhancing the everyday places of our lives. Because Percy told me he'd only been to one museum in his life and that was a stock car racing museum. So he has no awareness of what's going on at MoMA, but he has a lot of awareness of what's going on in his daily environment and we need to fix these things.
Kevin:And what's happened to us as a society is that we focus and design so much on downtowns and so much on suburbia that we forget all the corridors in between, which in almost every city you'll see a hub and spoke system, and we just leave that to other people, the utilitarian people, which is nothing wrong with that either. But we can fix these places. There's latent assets, latent capitalism, latent opportunities waiting to be developed.
Rich:So I have to ask, because I do read the book and I'm trying to remember the stake place. Well, it was Golden Corral, golden Corral, okay. So I was trying to remember the story, because I was trying to. I grew up with Ponderosa, so I was trying to remember and I'm like, okay, now you know, paul and I both lived in Dallas, so we know Pappas Brothers and I'm like I'm not aligning it, I'm not remembering it. So yeah, Golden Claw.
Kevin:They're amazing, by the way, pappas Brothers. They do something amazing and you know, ironically, for a brief period there, which was initially, I got poked by my peers about this but I was the steak buffet king, so I went around and did lots of steak buffet joints. They all started culturally around Western themes and so fascinated, and the show Bonanza began. All of these concepts, there's many others that all come out of that era and it speaks to how kind of television entertainment affects culture, which affects food and fashion and everything.
Rich:So you mentioned architectural. Is this what you imagined you'd be doing, or did you have a different path in life? I did not imagine.
Kevin:I'd be doing this. I thought I would be, you know, an architect, thinking about all those cultural elite items. You know, and I didn't really know that I would almost take a adversarial position with my own profession to say, listen, we can do more and we need to represent all of society. We need to go out and reach out to the masses. And it's kind of as if all the doctors want to be plastic surgeons, you know, and I found myself embracing capitalism, which I didn't expect, and I work every day in capitalism and you know there's this assumption that architects would be professionals like accountants or lawyers, but really we're artists, we're trained as artists.
Kevin:And capitalism my professor again I go back to this my professor said that he described that capitalism as the enemy of architecture and I couldn't understand that. I thought, well, we should study it like a force, like we study termites or earthquakes or wind, and it's a force on society and we need to understand it. And you know, our presidents, our leaders of our world, are always talking about GDP and revenue and income and gross domestic product. These are the things that we focus on and design and our built environment has to relate to that.
Rich:So I'm going to turn it over to Paul in a second. But I have to ask from a reward perspective. You know you mentioned ROI and we are driven by capitalism, and if you don't pay the bills, we can't pay salaries, and so that's extraordinarily important. And if you don't pay the bills, we can't pay salaries, and so that's extraordinarily important. And when you look at your experience with Pappas Brothers, but then with Golden Corral, was there a moment where you went into a Golden Corral and just felt proud?
Kevin:Absolutely yeah. When the owner of well, he wasn't the owner, he was the president of the chain and he was also president of National Restaurant Association. At the end of the job he brought me in and I thought he'd be blown away that we had doubled the income of their average unit. We built many of these things and we were doubling it. Normal Golden Corral would do $38,000 to $42,000 a week. Ours were doing $89,000 to $92,000 a week. I thought that's what he'd talk about and he didn't. He said just hang on a second and don't talk. And so I didn't say anything and I was like I don't hear anything and he goes. That's what I want you to notice. He said the customer is treating us better. He said before it sounded like, you know, a rambunctious cafeteria, but now it sounds like a place where people are really bonding, having a good time and I felt that difference that we could make.
Paula:Number one. Thank you for your vulnerability, because it's not often that you see leaders that are willing to talk about how their upbringing shaped them, so it really does mean a lot. So thank you first and foremost.
Kevin:Thank you.
Paula:I love how Rich left me to the expertise questions, because usually I do the first part, but I do want to ask something which is serving these underserved populations. You talk about how all of your colleagues, all your peers, were going for these. Of course, these beautiful landscapes, these beautiful backgrounds, these skyscrapers in these major cities, but you decided to focus on underserved areas, so places that we visit. How difficult was that for you to explain to people? Because when you're the first one to do something, not a lot of people understand your vision.
Kevin:Yeah, what was even harder? Great question, I mean. And what was even harder was now it's kind of obvious, but in 1989, 88, moving up to 92 when we started our firm what was much harder was to think about. Maybe social science has a lot of ideas and I say psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology. Maybe they have a lot of ideas that real estate developers and retail tenants could benefit from. Real estate developers and retail tenants could benefit from.
Kevin:Also combining branding which is much more common now but wasn't at the time with design, and starting to think about breaking down the silos, because all of those disciplines have very strict language, and creating a whole new language and getting out of that language that architects have or sociologists have or brand strategists have, and really thinking about two critical things that I'll jump to, and that is the senses first is one of the most misunderstood, under educated aspects of retail leaders, business leaders and designers. So that's shocking is how our senses help us shape our world. In fact, there's no idea that's in your head that doesn't first come through your senses. When we describe people as slick, hard-headed, rough on the edges, it's our senses that define that. A baby learns through their senses first. Our smell is our most powerful sense. A third of our brain is dedicated to our visual sense. We don't control our eyes, they're involuntary.
Kevin:So starting with the senses and then going into perceptions, which are shaped a lot by sociological and psychological aspects, and eventually getting to the design, that was a hard sell in the beginning. And so what did I have to do? And my team and I went to do some case studies and in fact that informed. Our whole approach was doing case studies proving that environment affects behavior. That was my thesis in college. I should have started with that and that.
Paula:Well, that's helpful.
Kevin:How does environment affect behavior? I hope that that was a hard sell and it's hard to build a business around that, but we just kept doing and building this case study around it and eventually the clients started recognizing hey, this is a new way to compete. This gives us a competitive advantage over just straightforward design. Too much of the retail and real estate world focuses on the literal. They look at a building and they all debate aesthetically do you like that, do you not like that? Instead of really looking at what's happening underneath us. And so one of the questions you might ask is why aren't we more aware of our behaviors? And the reason we're not more aware of our behavior is it takes too much energy. We're running off about a 60-watt light bulb all day to power us through all the things we have to do Get the kids ready, run out the door, drive our car, go through a parking lot, deal with weather, get in the office All of those things wear us down. They take energy and caloric energy, and so our brains delegates, our body delegates. It says, hey, I don't want to deal with this, and it delegates that to our senses, and the senses have a just like your dreams have a different way of thinking.
Kevin:Your senses do, and the senses are looking for two primary things enhancements and impediments to life. It's looking for things that are dangerous and things that will help us. The second you could. You could be walking down a street with thousands of people and a ball flies out of the air off of a high rise building. Your brain will detect it and you'll either stand to catch it or move out of the way. It's a fascinating process. We can't teach computers to recognize it as well as a human body can, because the body has thousands of years of getting ready. So that ability is not understood anywhere near enough in real estate. So when I go meet with a mall developer, it says we don't understand why it's not working. We go into let's start with the senses. Let's get that right. Then let's go to behaviors and perceptions and decision-making.
Paula:I love that because the more sophisticated we get, the more we realize that it really is. It comes down to those primal feelings and primal, just the basics of life. I hate to simplify it that much. It sounds simple but it's not easy.
Kevin:Yeah, understanding what motivates people is very hard and you know it's ironic the places you can learn from.
Kevin:But but a boxer understands behavior better than anyone and I've met with boxers that say who can just tear you apart in the ring. They say, in the ring they go, I'm going to turn you into my assistant and what they mean is they're going to get you. So they hit you on the left. A kickboxer is even faster. They hit you on the left. What do you do? You move to the right, but they already know you're going to move to the right. And then they hit you that way and they know you're going to move back to the left estate world we're just trying to survive against big retail giants and tech disruptors. So if we can understand behavior, it gives us a huge advantage on how to create places that convene and create the kinds of behaviors we want. Standard kind of assignments over the last 33 years is fixing projects that aren't working. I'll go to these entities who've spent you know I'm not kidding 300 million, 600 million, over a billion dollars to build a large structure, say a big mall.
Kevin:And they'll say you know, we don't understand it. We hired the best design firms, we built this award-winning project, but it's not performing the way we want. Oftentimes, what is not clear is what is the behavior you wanted? And when I ask leaders and designers what type of behaviors you want, they go. What do you mean? We want people to come here and I'm like what time, what day? How long do you want them to stay? What do you want them to look at? Do you want them to talk to people? Not talk to people? And the more specific you get as an organization on the types of behaviors you want, the more you can design to those behaviors. And that sounds, as you said earlier, awfully simplistic. But a lot of times what happens is we build it, we watch people come and we go. Huh, did that work? It's like well, of course it doesn't work. What do I want to see out of my audience that I'm trying to attract, convene and get to engage in my environment?
Rich:Well, and this is parallel, but I was interviewing someone, the head of design for an organization I was working with, and he talked about killing a project that or restarting I should say a project, because it was done very elegantly, award-winning, but it didn't achieve what the goal was from a customer perspective. And I remember him saying it wasn't about winning an award, it was about winning the heart of the customer. And I hired him because it mattered. And I almost hate to jump to this question so soon because I want to delve further into the physical, but we're living in an age where digital convenience is on the rise. How is that going to impact and what role will it play in our physical gathering places, stores, markets, town centers, et cetera?
Kevin:Yeah, and I'll respond to something you said. Just to tee that up is that as a young intern and I keep wanting to reiterate here, for your audience particularly, that I didn't have anything figured out in my life I was just an obsessive observer, neurotic observer, and would just decode and look at all kinds of patterns. And when I was working as an intern I'd watch people go to a meeting and try to get a client to do something really exciting. Run back to their desk after the meeting and start drawing Doodling is what designers do. So they draw all these little sketches.
Kevin:And what drove me crazy was I was like you're developing a solution which you haven't defined the problem. So a classic symptom that we see is you said it earlier the elegant solution in search of a problem to solve. But I think the more profound the problem is, the more profound your answer will be, and all of us have had that experience. We've gone to a doctor who diagnosed a problem that we're having, didn't give us a solution, but we felt better just because they did such a good job diagnosing the problem. There's a lot of value in being exceedingly clear. So we have a test in our offices Can we give our client a big aha just in defining the problem. Can we do that now? And that we are living in this very linear, concrete way all the way around on so many things right regarding money and income, and we're getting what we want.
Kevin:As humans, we have one core driver that is to acquire things at the least amount of effort expense possible. That is a core driver. But once we get those needs met, then we have other needs, which is to bond, to mate, to get the respect of our peers, to learn to find spirituality, and so what I'm recommending, and have been recommending for the last 33 years with my clients, is we cannot get into the commodity aspects. We're not going to win that battle. We weren't going to win it way back with Walmart. The commodity aspects we're not going to win that battle. We weren't going to win it way back with Walmart. But we can win the social bliss part, the surprise, the delight, the joy. Amazon may have a monopoly on price, but they don't have a monopoly on joy, and social bliss is a quality that we really need in society and it's something people are willing to pay for.
Kevin:We see it all the time right. It's inefficient. We live in this era where we think friction is the enemy. Some friction is good, some friction, some challenges of going to a party or going to an event and go well. This is not the most efficient way, yet there's something really powerful about it. Dating online is trying to get as frictionless and transactional as it can get, but it's not near as profound as going to an event you didn't want to go to and bumping into somebody who ends up becoming your wife or husband. I met my wife in baggage claim, so think of that a very inefficient way to meet a human being on a flight that I missed and was irritated, and met the love of my life in baggage claim.
Paula:That's very sweet. I actually did leave. I met my husband through Bumble, but it was the physical encounter, so the first time we met, that was it.
Kevin:I saw him in the conversation and yeah, well, it ultimately had to go to a place.
Paula:Exactly, you have to have. Yeah.
Kevin:It ultimately has to go to a place because we are wired that way.
Paula:Yeah.
Kevin:And while we can do all kinds of things online, the way we actually get to know people is very universal and it's very profound. We don't talk to people from the back of our head or side of our head. We walk a certain way. These are the things that are very interesting, and if you watch couples which we do a lot I'm a professional voyeur. We should have said that up front and that we watch people on dates Very common exercise for us to go. What happens to people and how do they meet? One of the things we study in all the environments we look at with our clients is where in your venue are people most likely to talk to a stranger and where are they least likely to talk to a stranger? Because we're trying to figure out how the environment either encourages or facilitates social interaction versus places that don't. And so, just as a quick, easy answer, you know it's fascinating how many people will talk to each other at the butcher department or at the seafood department, how they won't talk to each other in the aisles, and they definitely don't like to talk to each other at checkout, except to complain about the cashier who's just left.
Kevin:And though you know the tendency, of course the knee-jerk reaction is just make checkout faster. But it's not really about making it faster, it's about reducing the anxiety of checkout. Checkout is a malfunction zone where we have aisles dead-ending to a checkout where people line up with 250 cart that you get very upset if that cart touches your butt or if there's too big of a gap, and then, on top of everything else, we create a road cutting across checkout. So think about the standard Model T grocery store that we won't change All the aisles dead-end to a crossroad. That is, of course, going to fail. That would be like having a toll highway with a residential road cutting across it. This social anxiety creates a lot of high tension in people and they don't feel good about talking to other people except to complain or to say close the gap. And so we're trying, if we change that experience, to make the environment less stressful, people behave better and enjoy their time you know it's interesting.
Rich:One of the things that I enjoy most is to go into one of our stores, sit in the common area and just work, because I do well, with a lot of noise but not a lot of people bothering me. It's one of those sensory things and I like hearing the conversations, I like seeing what people stop at and what they see. One of the learnings from COVID was, as we were getting back to normal, we obviously had to take our food courts and decompress the space and offer more social distancing, and, because you still had capacity issues and we have some larger stores, we would put seating areas in the hallways, in the main foyer area. In observing it, what we found was that we had people that now wanted to come in and sit and didn't feel rushed like they would in a crammed food court, and when they did that, they had a tendency to meet with other people and grab something and spend more time in the store, and so we kind of defaulted our way into a more human experience instead of that crammed food court.
Kevin:Which happens often, by the way, and I think this post-pandemic period, the immediate part, if you studied what was happening to people, they didn't remember their birthdays, they didn't remember special days, and that's because every single day was the same day. And as humans we need variety and we actually need sensory stimulation, no different than a dog needs to go out, and a lot of time. A dog doesn't need to go out necessarily to exercise. All that it needs to go out to activate its senses, to smell. It's a very important part of dogs is smelling, smelling their neighborhood. We as humans need the same thing and if every day is the same day, our memories become undifferentiated and we don't remember what happens, what happens to older people. So a lot of older people have undifferentiated memories. But the danger that we've had it's kind of like death by a thousand cuts with nobody, nobody trying to do anything evil. But if we're spending seven, eight hours in front of a screen and teens are approaching a higher level, that is generally seven, eight hours of a limited number of wake hours, that we're not interacting with other people, that we're not socializing with other people, and this has a big impact on us and so it is so rewarding. When you go to a food court or you go to anywhere, really, like I said, baggage claim and you have a relationship with somebody, you connect with them. It's very therapeutic, it's an important quality and so you know, I want to keep relating this back to the real world and getting down to the ROI, what I show my clients. I start when I when I mentioned my internship years, my internship years were working for a mall design firm. Okay, so I was designing malls and designing a lot of food courts for all the you know big developers, and back then we used to develop the anchor tenants and the socialization that happened there was a by-product of developing the deliberate anchors. Now it's the other way around.
Kevin:Now, to create a place that has the power to convene, you have to actually make socialization the product. You have to say, hey, I will create a physically, socially and emotionally safe for you to come around and wander around, like you've seen in those old films where people just wandered around, be around other human beings and feel like you can connect with them or not connect with them. What you described is a perfect thing that we see all the time of people saying I don't want to talk to anyone, but I want to be around people and some people saying, no, I want to talk to people and it's okay to approach them. Those types of behaviors are very powerful. And so with my clients, we're saying you have to develop a social value proposition, can't just be a literal value proposition, because you're going to get beat on the commoditizing aspects. The second you have a place. You're already inefficient because now we have to deal with parking, we got to deal with escalators and elevators, so you have to create a bigger payoff.
Kevin:You might remember from the book, we use a statement called the work payoff ratio and so, no matter what venue we're going to, we try to evaluate where the moments that a human feels like they have to work I mentioned self-checkout or a regular checkout, either one. Those are moments where humans have to work. They're not enjoying their time, but they may go to a walk station or a pizza station where there's activity and that is enjoyment. We're generally trying to break down where do people have work and where do they have joy. The ideal goal is to create a much higher payoff than the amount of work it takes, and so when a customer is going well, I can buy it online without getting out of my pajamas and staying on the couch, or I can drive down to that place. So what do I get? And the customer is very smart going how do I win? How do I win by going to your place? It cannot be price, variety or convenience. It's not enough. You generally have to deliver some type of emotional, social payoff.
Paula:I've got two questions. One's about your book, but the more pressing question is so what is going on with mall? What is your solution to the mall? Is going on with malls?
Kevin:What is your solution to the mall? Well, you know it's interesting. When I first started working at this mall design firm, my Dutch uncle came to me and said you know, he was in the real estate industry and he said you should get out of this. Malls are dying. That was in 1987. I'm still here in 2025 and they're still telling me malls are dying and they have thinned down. There's no doubt they've thinned down, but we're still working on malls and we're still doing them and, in fact, the younger generation is the one that is resurrecting malls. That's what's surprising. They're the ones coming back.
Kevin:I think the terminology mall is what gets us really tripped up, because we think of Fast Town towns, of Ridgemont High, we think of this thing which really we call a form and shape. Human beings know what a convenience store looks like, we know what a department store looks like, we know what a coffee shop looks like. We're really good at that, and so we've kind of got stuck in this idea of what a mall looks like, which was generally big, giant walls, department, no windows, no being seen, you know, from the outside, and that is a turnoff to people right now. We got too much of that. But a better way to think about it is as a central marketplace and the idea of a central marketplace where strangers to each other can come together and meander around. Come together and meander around, learn about what's going on, talk about the fashion of the times, enjoy some food, maybe bump into their neighbors or somebody they've never met before to see the other. This central market idea is thousands of years old. Whether you call it a bazaar, ancient Agora or a mall, that is universal.
Kevin:Now, I think the thing that developers need to do is be aware of the signals that dated malls send out. You know, without getting too deep in this, there's been eras in my life my short life where we had buildings that didn't have many windows. You've seen those buildings, that little what we call gun turret windows. That was an era where we wanted dark buildings and old steakhouses and stuff, because we liked that. Now we've gone to this transparent look. We want to see what a building, what's going on in a building, from the outside.
Kevin:Malls aren't great at that. There's many other reasons they're not working. They're trying to be too stylistically, aesthetically hip, as opposed to being more like a village or a town. Authentically hip as opposed to being more like a village or a town. When I go to most communities I don't see in the surveys that consumers saying we need a mall, but the one thing we see over and over is they go. We wish we had a village or a town. And what's the difference between a village and a town and a mall? It really has to do with how the forms and shapes work and how people interact.
Paula:Community centers. People still need and want community centers.
Kevin:Yes.
Paula:In your book Irreplaceable. It makes the case that great places can't be replicated by formula. In a world where so many brands try to copy what's working elsewhere, what core ingredients actually make a place irreplaceable, and how can brands or leaders avoid falling into the trap of sameness?
Kevin:Let's start with the sameness part. I think one of the things we do and I'm guilty of it I speak at a lot of conferences and I go to a lot of conferences we end up learning all the best practices of what everybody else is doing and we share those things. And the next thing you know everybody's doing that we're all doing the same thing and in fact, we're over delivering to the customer. We're giving the customer all these benefits without always getting a premium for those benefits, and so I think, just like humans, I think an entity has to dig into themselves and say what makes me unique, what makes me a proprietary? The more awkward you started out we talked about this before the show the more eccentric the better.
Kevin:I work with a Mexican grocery store chain that is off the charts successful, 600% increase in sales, over 40 stores, what they do and this new concept is called Mercado and it's done by Northgate Market in Costa Mesa, california. When I first met with them, my team and I and we started looking at their stores, and you know, most of my clients are like patients that come to me and they know something's not right with their body, but they're not sure what it is. So when they came to me, they're like we're not sure we're heading down the right path and you know, we want to know what you think. My observation was stop professionalizing, stop doing what you're seeing at the conferences. They were becoming more like a regular grocery store team and they said well, what should we do? And this was after hearing lots of information from them. I really encouraged them to double down on being Mexican. Create an authentic Mexican mercado. That will be your difference and that that sounds obvious, but it was a big dare. This, the concept in Costa Mesa, is unbelievable. It is an experience I encourage everyone. I'll guarantee you I'll pay your money back If you go there and don't have a phenomenal time. That's where you don't.
Kevin:You know and I will say this that we designed that concept right after the pandemic, I mean while it was happening and they said click and collect is the future of grocery stores, the retail apocalypse here and there'll be no more stores and tech is the only way to go. What did we do? We tripled down on the human experience. We have a bar, we have a lot of restaurant seating and these customers this is a perfect example of looking at this issue of convenience versus socializing.
Kevin:Customers go to Mercado two and three times a week, sometimes twice a day, and they don't think of it as a chore. They think of it as a great social payoff. Chore, they think of it as a great social payoff. It's really about having the audacity to do this different, this thing that the industry isn't doing and we can all name the big national, international grocery store chains that could build 50 of these but instead, what are they doing? They're trying to merge and lower prices to get into some slugfest where there is no winner, or I should say there'll be two winners. There'll be two winners and everybody else will be a loser.
Rich:Yeah, the first to market and then the one that perfects it and maybe brings it down, and then afterwards you're going to have the laggards. And it's interesting you say that because in my classes what I will often get is the default answer when students are putting together the strategies of a brand needs to add more tech, they need to add more AI, they need to lean in. And when you ask in a different discussion board, tell me about a brand that you love, a retail store or grocery that you love going to. A significant percentage of them will mention Trader Joe's and my answer will be okay. Think a percentage of them will mention Trader Joe's and my answer will be okay.
Rich:Where are their self-checkouts? Where is their digital signage? Where is their Urban correct? No delivery, and at some point they may have to evolve that much like everything evolves. I'm going to ask a personal question and hopefully not set myself up in the process, but you mentioned Bazaars and Agoras and the shopping mall and I thought you were going to say the shopping mall is dead. Long lived the shopping mall, but in a different context, and I love the marketplace idea. Are you a historian?
Kevin:Yes, particularly in architecture, but how cities are formed and how they evolve, and you know what made them work and why does one city do better than another city?
Rich:Why do you think it's important to understand the history and the evolution of, in your case, architecture or commerce or human behavior?
Kevin:You will see how that's. The most fascinating part is the center of civilization. The common assumption, particularly among the elites, is that it was the church or the government that was the center of most civilizations. But it was actually the bazaar, the market, the trade, and trade has always been there and when you look at places that succeed, it's because of trade. Historically, geography played a big role. A port, a valley, a mountain, a crossroad, those things played a big role. But you can create geography, you can create artificial geographies. La is one giant artificial geography. That to me is fascinating, the role that trade plays in a thriving life. Now, I think the fear a lot of people have is when they assume it's the only thing. It is not the only thing. It is one aspect of a successful city in the history of cities. But we can all think of third well, cities that were once famous, that are no longer at the top of their peak because they tempered trade and tempered commerce and didn't evolve with it.
Rich:Yeah, and to a certain extent we've gone from public punishment and scorn to Easter bunnies and Santa Claus is the draw. Yes, but there's always been that center of successful cities and communities that drew people together, where you got your news. You were able to pick up whatever wares you needed, whether it was from a local vendor or from someone traveling from faraway places. You would listen to politicians and philosophers.
Kevin:As it relates to that and I think you'll connect with this and again, I'm pretty steeped in my own industry of architecture. But if you look at a lot of the most famous old buildings that they're trying to bring life to, whether they're office workers or housing people living in their institutions, the reason those places don't work is they don't have newsstands or they don't have coffee shops or they don't have cafes. And the easiest thing to do to fix a place is to bring that activity in, because you will see daily people coming and going. It can be even something as simple as a dry cleaner. That conversation you have with a dry cleaner starts to help you understand other people, other values, other cultures, and we all have these routines, right. We all have these places we go to regularly, where we talk to people, whether it is a cashier or another person, and that's what animates life is trade.
Kevin:In some ways, trade is a device Much in the way. Going to a bar or going to a restaurant to pay the amount of money we pay for a drink sometimes makes no sense, right? A beer can be eight to, sometimes twelve dollars in a bar. That is completely irrational. But one of the reasons people do. That is to say it's a device to allow me to now be next to other people. Maybe I'll have a conversation, maybe I won't. The real question to ask is what happens when we don't do that? What happens when we don't go out and meet the other, which is happening statistically? It started happening before the pandemic and started happening after. Going back to this, how many hours we're kind of distracted on a device? When we stop going out and bumping into other people, we start distrusting more. We start seeing people as enemies. It's a dangerous factor, and so retail plays a very vital role in getting people to come together around basic things lawnmowers or lemons.
Rich:But I think the danger for brand and you have indicated a couple of times in this conversation the danger is when brands and retailers, grocers et cetera, get lulled into believing that the actions that a consumer is taking for convenience is actually loyalty and they don't continue to evolve the atmosphere or involve the engagement, the experience. I won't name brands, but there are three or four that would roll off the tongue right.
Kevin:Yeah, it's a no holds barred competition out there, and so I will tell you up front I don't expect, want any handouts from any entity to make life more social. We have to prove that the power of coming together has value. Period. We have to prove the value of buildings have value. Now I do that day in and day out. The track record I have for convening people and building businesses that are not just doing well but are mega successful around physical place is unparalleled. We have to prove that every day, that this can work, and what I like about it for my clients is they don't get themselves into this horribly low margin slugfest. They're able to enjoy better premiums by giving better product.
Paula:I have a lot of questions.
Kevin:You sure?
Paula:I mean so many more questions than we have time for. I don't even know where to begin. I'm just going to shoot them off and then you tell me which one you want to answer. The one is about you said we want to trade, so that's what people want to do. I can see a community center where we trade stories, but what do you think about the future of retail? How are we making those trades? I see these luxury brands putting restaurants in their retail center to get people to stay longer and they're trying to create this environment and sometimes they win. You know, sometimes it's successful and sometimes it's just awkward. But what's the trade there? How do we create these spaces of trade and what is that trade now in this new digital economy?
Kevin:That's a great one and you know it is a common thing to try to say let's put a restaurant inside our space or bar or cafe. They're a lot harder to make work than you realize and they have to be a priority. They can't be this tangential thing that you're going to throw a little effort at. They have to be very successful. They have to understand the human dynamics again of why would somebody pay dollars or $14 for a cocktail to go. What are they getting for that? And so it is a. It is no different than making a film. You have to really break the space down into scenes and the scene as a beginning and a middle and an end. There has to be drama. There has to be a value. Something has to happen for that individual to have a payoff to go. This is worth paying this premium. It is a common exercise for us to go in and put a restaurant type of venue inside a retail space. But we're very clear with our clients pack your lunch. This is not easy. This is a very difficult assignment. When I go, look at the places that don't work. It's because they got secondary tertiary treatment. Places that don't work, it's because they got secondary tertiary treatment.
Kevin:I think something that might tie into some of your thoughts here as well is I think we're a society obsessed right now with what's new. That seems to be everything on our mind, and if I go to one more conference where 80% of the lectures are on AI, it's just we're all chasing the same puck again, and when, instead of asking what's new, a better question to ask is what are consumers missing? This is what we ask them. We go around regularly and want to understand, not what are they, what's the shiny new object, but what are they missing in their lives? And day in and day out, customers say I miss having neighbors, I miss socializing, I miss connecting to people, despite all the advances and the conveniences and the speed we have. This is what people are searching for, and so a restaurant or a bar venue or even a retail venue has this opportunity to bring people together. A farmer's market does it incredibly well, right? It's not really about the freshness of the products at a farmer's market. It is really about walking around and bumping into people.
Paula:Authentic connection.
Kevin:It is one of our great crisis of our era and you know, behind that and this gets awfully esoteric is we have a crisis of meaning. You know where people are trying to figure out. Religion is not playing the same role it used to. It should, but it's not. We need more places of worship of all denominations, because those were places that brought people together in safe ways and to take care of each other. They had an important role in society and still do.
Kevin:Our institutions outside of religious institutions, but educational institutions aren't able to do the things they used to do, and so a lot of things have fallen on retail, but now that's been commoditized. But when we talk to customers over and over, they're telling us we finally, you know, have got to a tipping point where customers are telling us they're bored of just pushing a button and buying from a list the same purchase order over and over. Right, how many times you go to your grocery list and it's the exact same thing. That makes life pretty boring. We're looking for a variety, and I'm actually shocked that online entities haven't figured out a better way to get people to have spontaneous purchases, but, other than bribing them to do it, they haven't had as much success with that.
Paula:They're looking for efficiency, that's it, and they forget Again. I mean, that's a fantastic reminder Don't go to where everyone else is going. Don't follow the shiny object Go to where these underserved places are. Under-asked questions. And those are the real gems.
Kevin:You know it's interesting, I have a 7-year-old daughter, just turned seven years old. I'm kind of late in my life to have another child.
Paula:It's never too late.
Kevin:When she was five and really four, about four and a half five during the pandemic. Going back a little bit, she was kind of a homebody. She liked to stay at home all day and getting her to go places she'd be like why, why do we have to do it? When we were at the restaurant, she couldn't understand why it took so long to get the food. She's like I don't understand why it takes so long.
Kevin:But I had a wild idea. I said let's take her to a movie. And she had never been to a cinema so it's hard to imagine that. Right, I took her to the movie and she dangled her feet off the chair and got a big bag of popcorn. She's somewhat shy. She had the best time and was dancing down the aisle as we went and became this different human being. I remember telling my wife I was like who is this? And we got in the car and she made me promise that I would take her to the movie more often and now we go three times a month. She just loves going to the movie theater and think, think about it. It's not efficient, it's not easy, she has to dress up, she has to do certain things, but it's just something about that primal storytelling, bonding experience, right, and these are things we cannot deny. But I thought of all people. I thought as a child she's not going to see the value in that. Say the way I do, in nostalgic ways, but she sees the value in that.
Paula:That's beautiful.
Kevin:Let's go to the best advice you've ever received. Wow, what is the best advice I've ever received? You know I was talking earlier about this steak buffet chain and I remember asking Percy about some of the marketing slogans and stuff that were on signs in the building that said things like home cooking and things like that he said the funniest thing to me.
Kevin:He said I don't even notice that sign. It means nothing to me. He said if I can't touch it, it ain't real. That stuck in my head. That was early in my career. If I can't touch it, it ain't real. Had that was early in my career. If I can't touch it, it ain't real.
Kevin:So whenever I'm working on a project and almost all projects have these inside advantages from the client that can be things like heritage or family or community. But I'm like, how do I touch community? How do I touch heritage? And so the assignment I give my highly creative staff is we have to manifest esoteric ideas and tangible experiential mediums where people can touch it, and we give ourselves about two seconds to get an idea across.
Kevin:In a store we spend a lot of time studying how the human eye works, which is one of your first senses that gets on site. And I don't have 10 minutes. I don't even have enough time to ask somebody to read something other than one big title. But really we're trying to evoke feelings. Now we have a system in our company which is seven layers. We call it signage, but it's really. It's queuing and triggering. It's seven layers of that, and so we start with the evocative and we go all the way down to the whisper which happens at about six inches from the customer. That's the best advice I've ever heard. If I can't touch it, it ain't real. So whatever you're trying to get across to somebody, make sure they can touch it.
Rich:That's a good one. So, with the job market the way it is, what is the single best piece of advice you think you can give high school students, college students, those in the early stages of their career? Give high school students, college students, those in the early stages of their career in what is an ever-changing new normal.
Kevin:Well, I, will sound very extreme in this, but I've had this belief all my life. I think we delude ourselves when we chase happiness. I think happiness is a myth. I read Brad Pitt one time said that it is an illusion for him even, and I'm thinking, my gosh, he is everything anybody could ever ask for. I think what's more important and I'm just going to speak frank to you is find out what pisses you off. Find out what makes you mad. Find out what you'd cut another man's ear off over, what you'd fight for, because that is what you'll do for free.
Kevin:I remember I don't know why I use this as a test, but if you've ever had to go to a dinner you didn't want to go to and your spouse said you got to come to this dinner, You're like, okay, and you've kind of make these blackmail kind of things. You're like, all right, I'm not going to talk, Just going to let you know. And you don't talk until somebody says that that upsets you. And then that is the territory that I recommend everybody explore, and I don't think it's an immediate answer. I don't think you see something that you'd fight for and go. That's what I should do. I think it's a clue that starts hitting down a path. So for me that hint was I know architects that will fight about schools or parking decks. They will fight about civic centers and courthouses. I don't.
Kevin:But what I would fight over early in my career was the way a restaurant was designed. It drove me crazy when somebody would design a restaurant bad. Or if a restaurant didn't care about taking care of its customers, didn't care about its silverware or its glasses or the napkins or the hostess stand. Those things mattered to me and I was surprised. I felt that come up in me. I never did anything, I didn't cut anyone's ear off over it, I didn't fight, but I realized there's something about it, and so when I did my first restaurant, it became one of the top 10 restaurant designs in the United States, won all kinds of awards, and it was natural for me me and you have to get down to what is it you're willing to fight for, and I won't get into the details.
Kevin:I, you know, I just dreamed of the enchanted evening as a kid, because all I ever saw on TV were these, these old places where people are going to cocktails. I'd never had a cocktail, but I'd saw everybody dressed up. My parents were gone and I was like, oh, I'm going to draw that place. Each of us has that kernel, that nugget inside us and it's normally in some kind of weird or odd behavior. It comes out in your kids. It's the odd things that they do that really make them something.
Rich:I think that is excellent advice and advice that everyone should eat. Okay, I'm going to start us off with the rapid. What is it? The rapid round?
Paula:Rapid fire. That's how stressed you are Okay.
Rich:So I'm actually going to put you in a place. I'm going to put you in a golden corral. Okay, you're in a golden corral. You can invite any three people to dinner. They can be living or past, they can be factual or fiction. Who would those?
Kevin:three people be Wow. Well, I'd love to bring Carl Jung. What I love about him is that he understood that psychology isn't just some linear thing, that it has mystical qualities and soulful qualities and religious dimensions, and in my book I really talk about a concept he talked about, which is participation, mystique, which means what it's like to be around other people and there's some kind of energy. I would bring John Prine, one of my favorite singers and songwriters, because he has a way of capturing life stories in such powerful mediums that they're just amazing. And it's going to sound like an odd one, but I would bring Coco Chanel. I think she's pretty amazing as an individual. I would like to have a conversation with how she pioneered her fashion approach.
Paula:All right, favorite comfort food.
Kevin:I say this over and over, but there is nothing better than cornbread and grits. I'm from the South and so when I go to South Carolina or North Carolina, cornbread and grits or shrimp and grits, I just it's everything to me. I could just live off of it.
Paula:It's a good.
Rich:Southern man yes, and so I'm going to take the last question and head to travel. You can go anywhere in the world for 24 hours. You can go there instantaneously, come back instantaneously. Only I had that power. Where in the world would you go for 24 hours?
Kevin:Istanbul and go to the markets there, and I'm going to go next month. I love learning from the merchants, I think, like a lot of things. I'll make it this simple. You know I dare a lot of architects to name one modern city that works and they struggle. You know Frank Lloyd Wright had ideas, corbu had ideas. They were miserable. But I can name hundreds of old cities like Charleston, savannah, milan, paris, that were designed under a different system, less intellectual and more merchants kind of roots, and I love when I trying to find great ideas, I like to just watch what a merchant does.
Rich:They know how to attract people, engage and keep them interested, and istanbul is just full of that well, if you need a recommendation for a great place to buy turkish towels, yes, my wife and I went, went and one of our merchants had given us a recommendation and they were dead on. So I'll send a couple.
Kevin:Please, I would love to know that. Thank you, thank you, that would be phenomenal. Well, I hope I didn't overwhelm you today with too much information. I love what I do.
Rich:No, actually Paula said it best when she said she had a hundred questions and we were going to run out of time, because this was. This was fascinating, and hopefully we can find a reason to bring you back and delve further into this, but this is greatly appreciate you spending time with us today.
Paula:This is very beautiful, thank you.
Kevin:Next time I hope I get to ask you questions.
Rich:You know what? That would be a great idea. We can we can reverse engineer the podcast. Thank you very much for being here today. This was absolutely fantastic. We will definitely figure out a way to have you come back and continue this conversation, because I think it is not only helpful for those at the entry stages of their career but, quite frankly, for the everyday consumer. So, and with that, thank you very much for joining us today and we hope to see you.
