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Leaving Corporate Life To Help Retail Brands Scale w/ Rebecca Fitts · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

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  This is a job that I'd never want.
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  if anybody follows
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  astrology the year of the snake,
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  I shed my skin. I don't need to go back to corporate.
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  I can build a nice side hustle as an entrepreneur.
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  it's hard. I like an office, I like to be around people.
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  I'm missing some of those things.
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  I think you have to find partners,
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  who are in your realm but outside your realm,
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  it's also hard to put yourself out there to go and get clients
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  if somebody, cracks that code,
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  they're gonna have a really good business.
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  as much as it's changing things rapidly for people in retail,
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  the human is still king right now
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  All right, Dave Gulas back here at Shop Talk and I am with the founder of Double O3,
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  Rebecca Fitts Hi Rebecca. How are you?
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  Hi.
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  Fantastic.
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  we're gonna get into what Double O3 does.
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  You've been around about two years and it's got you doing some very exciting stuff
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  in the retail world. But just to set the stage for an audience,
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  can you talk about how and why you became an entrepreneur?
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  Absolutely. I've had lots of corporate career experience and anyone knows
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  in this day and age you can be there one minute and you can be gone the other.
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  and it really started as consulting and to be very honest,
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  I did not want to be a consultant and I kept on saying,
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  I'm just gonna get that corporate job again,
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  I'm gonna go do my thing. and I soon realized if anybody follows
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  astrology the year of the snake,
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  I shed my skin. I decided I don't need to go back to corporate.
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  I can build a nice either hustle or side hustle as an entrepreneur.
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  doing Double O3 retail.
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  Okay. All right. a lot to get to just even in that intro.
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  First of all, why did you not want to be a consultant?
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  I think that I went to be a consultant in between jobs and I was too young.
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  I didn't really know what I was doing and not to be so deep but internally it's like
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  people could feel my fear. So they'd be like,
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  Well, you know, she worked in the mall industry and she had some big jobs
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  but she wasn't the V P or she wasn't you know and so why should I trust
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  her with my business? I was lucky enough I worked for two big mall companies
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  and when I left one of them
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  a lot of the retailers that I had helped including saying you can't really afford
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  to be here but you should go over there hired me and so that gave me a little
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  bit of muscle and this time when I left the corporate world I was like I
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  I have a voice, I have served,
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  I know I have the experience, and I'm here to help.
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  All right. Love that. And so the year of the snake,
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  you sh you shed your skin and it was very
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  Like what does that mean?
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  So I'm but when this is happening,
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  was that on your mind too,
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  Yeah, absolutely, 'cause I think I was still fighting it.
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  What I did during the year of the snake is I interviewed with lots and lots
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  and lots of companies for, you know,
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  director of real estate, head of real estate,
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  fractional head of real estate,
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  I jumped the shark and went to Warby Parker and so kind of all the Warby Parkers
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  of the world. and none of them stuck.
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  So you know Okay. I think the universe told me so
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  Yeah, that you followed the breadcrumbs that was leaving and it led you here.
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  Total sidebars. So you were in the real estate world helping find locations
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  for shopping malls, right?
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  no no, I worked at Shopping Malls Leasing and then I jumped the shark
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  and went over and was the retailer and helped retailers find spaces,
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  which is what I do now.
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  ~ okay, okay. And like what's that like in terms of making the right decision
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  for where they're gonna go?
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  It's interesting. It's art and science,
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  which I know people have said forever.
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  There's a lot of data and you can have fun with the data and I think with
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  AI you can vibe code your own tools,
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  you can do all sorts of great stuff.
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  and so it's come a long way. But you also have to have some experience
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  and a really good broker to find the right spaces.
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  Retail real estate is at an all-time high,
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  so there are very few vacancies.
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  So you have to be you have to be creative,
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  you have to bring the art in.
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  Mm.
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  Okay. All right. So now let's get into Double O3.
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  So you went through all these different experiences leading up to this
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  and you finally decided to bet on yourself and start this company.
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  what exactly does the company do?
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  So it does a couple of things.
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  One is retail real estate advisory.
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  I'm working with a great company called DIFF Eyewear,
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  which a lot of people seem to know,
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  and they're opening up retail stores.
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  so helping out new brands or brands that are beginning to grow.
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  Mainly companies with stores like one through five,
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  and then on the other side of it,
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  I'm creating content. ~ Shocking.
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  so I write a substack called The Wild West of Retail,
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  which is really
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  about a thesis that I've created called the discovery economy,
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  which is that retailers, brands want to be discovered,
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  but how are they being discovered in this world,
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  which is a little nutty with AI,
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  influencers, creators, etc. And how do you get discovered in the real world
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  and what is the economy of scale for you.
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  Okay. Now that's fascinating, right?
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  Because not only retailers, but anyone in business wants to be discovered,
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  right, by their their ideal customers.
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  and the Substack stuff is fascinating,
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  right? Because that's not easy to do.
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  We're talking about that off camera.
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  It's not easy to write and post and publish.
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  ~ we're in this world to where AI has come on the scene the last couple of years,
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  it's evolving and growing and improving so rapidly.
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  all these new tools are available for retailers to help grow their brand
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  and engage with customers. Like how do you see the discovery economy today?
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  So the discovery economy today and some of this I've learned through Shop Talk
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  conferences, but one is this little bit of a shift one from influencer to creator,
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  and it used to be like I need the person who has the most followers,
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  and now there's almost this niche where it's this person has
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  not that many followers, but they have a ton of engagement.
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  On the physical retail side, and this sounds just exhausting to me,
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  you think writing on
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  Substack two times a week is exhausting.
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  Changing everything that you're writing so that the large language model picks
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  you up, including try to infiltrate Reddit.
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  This is a job that I'd never want.
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  Hire someone else for that. But if you want to be discovered and you think that your
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  product should be in the physical world and not just online,
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  how are you going to break into the physical world?
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  Even if it's just for a short amount of time
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  to introduce your product, get people to touch and feel it,
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  how do you get the right audience?
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  I've created a tool so even if you are selling widgets,
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  you can put in what your e comm is,
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  where you know everything is coming from and the model will help you say,
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  you know what, you should probably start at a green market or a market for makers.
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  You're not quite to the level of are you a hundred and twenty million dollar
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  business? Maybe you should start actually doing physical stores because you're
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  costs for getting people online is now,
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  going to impede you from the rest of your growth.
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  Mm. Okay. All right. So you've had this company about two years
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  and particularly the last two years,
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  right? AI has evolved so rapidly.
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  How's that change kind of how you're operating and what you're doing?
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  Well, I have to confess this, and it's an i interesting thing,
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  again back to Substack. I'm using AI personally all the time.
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  it is a thought partner for me.
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  I'm using it in writing, I'm getting better and better at it,
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  I think. I read a ton of articles and kind of how I take that information
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  and put it out into the world,
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  my opinion, etc. So I'm certainly not saying that AI,
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  should go away in any way. So it's really
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  helping me. and I also think it's changed the retail industry and there's still this
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  push to say want to talk to a real human being even if it's customer service
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  or I want to go out and be in the store and really talk to someone who wanna
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  be in the physical space. So as much as it's changing things rapidly
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  for retailers and people in retail,
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  you know the human is still still king right now
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  Yeah, I I agree. I was just talking with someone out on the floor about that too,
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  where they had a voice AI agent they serve a lot of enterprise companies,
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  but we're talking about different companies that have this voice AI
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  in place of customer service and it's the most annoying thing when it's messing
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  up and you just want to talk to a real human being and it refuses to transfer you.
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  And it's just like
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  And you see how crazy people get.
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  I actually know a lot of people in customer experience and they're like it's hard
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  to figure out because it's not like,
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  you know, I have a blood pressure machine on you.
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  When the fulcrum point is the the bot has helped you to the point and
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  now you need the human. And that really if somebody,
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  cracks that code, they're gonna have a really good business.
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  so a lot of years in corporate,
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  you tried out some different side things and now you've been building this company
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  two years. What's that been like for you as far as what you expected?
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  it's hard. I like an office, I like to be around people.
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  I'm missing some of those things.
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  I think you have to find partners,
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  who are in your realm but outside your realm,
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  even if it's just sitting and working.
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  And then, it's also hard to put yourself out there to go and get clients
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  to really figure out what your value proposition is and what your platform is.
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  So I'm delighted
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  with the discovery economy. I think it's certainly a talk,
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  that kind of comes first for me.
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  I think it's a book and that helps you really build a platform where people say,
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  okay this is interesting. I want to get involved.
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  I want to try it out. I want what you've created to help me propel
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  my business forward.
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  now on this journey too, was there ever a point in time you thought about giving up?
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  And I'm only laughing because off camera I was like it might be during this podcast.
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  And I'm just like ~
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  Done.
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  ~ no, I think I've gotten to a point like in my business maturity,
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  if that's such a thing, where I'm like,
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  keep this going. Even if a dream corporate job came to me tomorrow,
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  the value of having this, knowing what the corporate world is like,
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  and I'm not making the corporate world,
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  big and bad. They go through huge moments of growth.
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  And then they don't need that many people for their bottom line or whatever it is.
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  If you
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  know that that's what the wave is,
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  then keep whatever you're creating.
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  and keep running it. Keep growing it.
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  I
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  agree.
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  Okay. All right. And if people want to find out more about Double O3 where
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  can they find you?
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  Best place is probably LinkedIn under Rebecca Fitts,
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  F-I-T-T-S, not F-I-T-Z, and all my information is there.
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  Okay. And we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone.
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  All right, Rebecca, thanks so much.
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  Thank you.