PODCAST · business
Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson
by Beyond The Register
I’m Keenan Kok-Carlson, a lifelong retail operator turned Senior Product Manager at Global Payments. I’ve lived every part of running a store, from opening the doors to fixing the systems that keep it alive.Beyond the Register shares the real stories behind small retail: inventory chaos, hiring struggles, vendor issues, burnout, and the wins that keep owners going. No fluff, just the truth about what it takes to run a shop today.This is Beyond the Register.
Episodes
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This Is How Boutiques Outlast Big Market Stores
Christine Alcalay opened her first boutique in 2002 in an unheated shoebox space on Berkeley Place in Brooklyn, and the entire clothing rack fell down on opening day. Twenty-four years later she runs three stores in Park Slope: a women's multi-brand boutique, a men's multi-brand shop, and a...
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How to Beat Big Box Stores (Without Being Cheaper) | Todd Barancik
In March 2020, Todd Barancik watched close to 90% of his company's revenue disappear in three business days. His business delivered healthy snacks to offices, and the offices had just emptied out. A year later he was a regular at a tiny zero-waste pop-up in Chicago run by two Broadway actors.…
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The Former Teacher Who Built a Profitable Store the Size of a Parking Space | Chaya Cohen Tamir
Chaya Cohen Tamir spent 20 years as a teacher and school administrator before she opened a stationery store on Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn with $12 in the bank and furniture from Facebook Marketplace. The space is about 170 square feet and seven feet wide, roughly the footprint of a parking...
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How She Got a Brooklyn Storefront With No Capital | Lior Donskoy
In 2018 Lior Donskoy walked past an empty burger shop in Brooklyn, found the owner, and talked him into handing over the keys. She cleared out the old signage, put up posters, and ran a pop-up with a group of designers days before leaving for Burning Man. There was no name on it and no plan for...
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→ She Bought the Store She Shopped At and Tripled Its Sales | Beth Rich
Beth Rich was a customer at Mix It Up when the associates started asking why she didn't just buy the place. She told them she hadn't moved to Coeur d'Alene to work retail on the weekends. Six weeks after she finally texted the owner to ask what the store cost, she owned it. She was in her late…
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A Masterclass in Scaling a Brewery to Multiple Locations in NYC | Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland @ TALEA
Tara Hankinson and LeAnn Darland met at a beer e-commerce startup in 2018, filed an LLC three months later after three bottles of wine and a session on Rocket Lawyer, and signed the lease on their Williamsburg brewery in November 2019. Then the pandemic hit, and everything else did too. 5 years...
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How to Build a Shop Where the Product Sells Itself | Sarah Maher @ Village & Vessel
Sarah Maher spent a year selling crystals off picnic tables in her garage with no business plan, then signed a lease before she'd figured out how to run a store. Three years later, she owns Village and Vessel, a crystal and tarot shop in Oak Park, and she's still building through chaos: this…
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8 Years In, She's Still Behind the Counter. On Purpose. With Bookstore Owner Christina Rosso-Schneider
Christina Rosso-Schneider and her husband Alex got married six weeks before opening A Novel Idea in Philadelphia's East Passyunk neighborhood. Almost eight years later, the store still runs on just the two of them and a rotating pair of part-timers, and that's mostly by design. When your name and...
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The Chef Who Turned a Dying Polish Deli Into Brooklyn's Zestiest Lebanese Grocery | Edy Massih
Early May 2020. Edy Massih's catering business had gone to zero: weddings canceled, events gone, income at nothing. So he called the woman who'd run the Polish deli around the corner for 43 years and asked to take over her shop. She said no. Three weeks later, on Memorial Day, she called back:...
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The $300K Hood Hurdle: Why Scaling a Donut Business Is So Hard
Liz Sperman had the idea for a gluten-free donut company in 2013 and didn't sell her first donut until 2022. In between, she worked nearly every job in the kitchen: barista, cake decorator, production supervisor at a gluten-free startup, and supervisor on a donut food truck. A mentor told her you...
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Why 1 in 3 Customers Leave Your Convenience Store and Buy From Your Competitor | Jeff Lenard
Half of America walks into a convenience store every day, and almost nobody remembers doing it. Jeff Lenard has spent his career explaining why that matters. As VP at NACS and the most-quoted voice on convenience stores anywhere (6,700+ interviews across CNN, Fox, and the BBC), he has watched the...
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How to Build a Garden Center that the Big Box Stores Could NEVER Copy | Randall and Carol Isherwood
Randall Isherwood spent his career running nurseries with hundreds of acres of inventory. So when he finally decided to open his own garden center, his instinct was to go big. His wife and business partner, Carol, said no: start small. They opened Gardener's Outpost in 1,200 square feet, built...
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How to Out-Sell Amazon Without Ever Dropping Your Price with The Retail Doctor | Bob Phibbs
A second Starbucks was about to open 75 feet from a dying Long Beach coffee shop. The staff were robbing the owner through the tip jar, the lights were half burnt out, and the place was losing money every month. A year later, sales were up 50%, and Bob Phibbs had a New York Times headline and a…
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How This Brewery CEO Scaled from a Garage to a $67M Brand and 6 Locations
In 2006, three guys met at a church Bible study in Atlanta, discovered they all loved homebrewing, and started getting together every Monday night after work to make beer. They called it Monday Night Brewing. Twenty years later, it's a $67 million operation across six locations and four states…
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How to Turn an Accidental Hire Into a Team Member Who Never Leaves with Ron Thurston
For 30 years, Ron Thurston sat in the strategy meetings at some of the most iconic names in retail (Apple, Gap, West Elm, Tory Burch, Saint Laurent) and noticed the same thing every time: the conversation started with the customer, the product, or the technology. The people on the floor, the ones...
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How to Build a Profitable Retail Store in Less than 4 Months (and Thrive for 20+ Years) | Mary Liz Curtin
Mary Liz Curtin spent 35 years advising manufacturers, speaking at trade shows around the world, and writing a manual for independent retailers. Then she mortgaged her house, rehabbed a 1941 roller rink in Downtown Clawson, Michigan, named the store after her cat and her dog, and had the whole...
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The Hangover Effect: How to Be the Best Part of Your Customer's Entire Day | John DiJulius III
John DiJulius III started with three nos: no customers, no money, no employees. He and his wife Stacy opened a hair salon in Cleveland in 1993 surrounded by competitors in every direction. They couldn't out-advertise them. Couldn't out-build them. So they out-loved them and turned that obsession...
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How This Bookstore Owner Competes With Amazon Without Touching Price | Ally Kirkpatrick
When Ally Kirkpatrick opened Old Town Books in 2018, every sign pointed the wrong way: the last indie bookstore in Old Town Alexandria had already been killed by Amazon, she had a newborn at home, $7,000 in savings, and zero retail experience. Her own dad refused to help her look at leases. What...
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Most Makers Don't Know the Difference Between a Hobby and a Business | Katrina Parris @ NiLu
Katrina Parris, founder of Nilu Goods in Harlem, joined Keenan Kok-Carlson on Beyond the Register to share how she built an 11-year retail institution out of a simple belief: when you support a maker, you support a community. Nilu is a gift shop on Lenox Avenue in Harlem that has quietly…
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What a 20-year Retail Exec Would Tell Every Retail Owner About AI in 2026 (with Sabrina Valdez)
Most retail and CPG leaders are still asking whether they should use AI. Sabrina Valdez answered that question three years ago, before Super Bowl commercials, before the hype cycle, before most people knew what ChatGPT even was. Today, she helps retail and CPG organizations move from aimless...
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How a Black-Owned Beauty Brand Got Into Ulta, Nordstrom & JCPenney With No VC (with Kim Roxie)
Kim Roxie, Founder and CEO of LAMIK Beauty, joined Keenan Kok-Carlson on Beyond the Register this week to share how she built a national clean beauty brand from a $500 loan, zero investor money, and a willingness to do the work most founders won't. LAMIK Beauty (which stands for Love And Makeup…
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How a Retail Tech Founder Cloned Himself with AI and Got 50x More Done, with Greg Buzek
What if you could put a million-dollar consultant on your team for $20 a month? For 30 years, Greg Buzek has been the person retail calls when it needs the unvarnished truth about technology. As founder of IHL Group, he's watched every tech wave hit the industry: barcodes, POS, self-checkout…
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From DTC to Multi-City Retail: The Exact Playbook HART Jewelry Used (with Curry Hagerty)
What does it actually take to scale an experience that can't be replicated online? Curry Hagerty, Partner & CEO of HART Jewelry, joins Jeramey Watts on Beyond the Register to answer that question and a whole lot more. HART is a custom charm jewelry brand built around a deceptively simple idea…
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"Your Inventory Is Killing Your Business" | Dan Holman on Why Most Retailers Have It Backwards
Why do profitable stores still go broke? Dan Holman has the answer, and it's not what you think. After 35+ years in retail and hundreds of store turnarounds, Dan Holman (CEO of Canadian Retail Solutions and founder of The Wealthy Retailer) has seen it all: boutiques drowning in unsold stock,...
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How She Built A National Biscuit Brand Without Burning Out Her Life, with Carrie Morey @ Callie’s Biscuits
Most restaurant stories start the same way: long nights in a hot kitchen, missed family time, and a hope that “one day” it will all be worth it. Carrie Morey chose a different path. In 2005, as a new mom who hated her corporate job, she took her mother’s biscuit recipe and started shipping frozen...
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What Small Retailers Actually Need To Focus On, with Sucharita Kodali
Everyone is telling small retailers the same thing right now: Get on Amazon. Add AI to everything. Copy what the “winners” did. Sucharita Kodali thinks that’s a dangerous way to run a business. She’s a VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, a former operator at Disney, Toys“R”Us, and Saks, an…
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How Bobby Djavaheri Kept A 40 Year Old Housewares Brand Alive
Most people hear “Oprah’s Favorite Things” and think overnight success. Bobby Djavaheri hears it and remembers packing thousands of bread makers himself during COVID, loading them into his truck, and racing to FedEx. Bobby is the president of Yedi Houseware Appliances, a 40 year old family…
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What Most CPG Founders Get Wrong About Retail, with Dan Cox @ Wellthy
Most reality TV contestants come home and sign brand deals. Dan Cox came home and signed leases. After The Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, Dan didn’t sell detox teas with his face on the label. He opened five Total Nutrition stores in Las Vegas and California, stood behind the counter, and...
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Q&A with Jeramey: Managing Burnout, Inventory Chaos, and Building Memorable Stores
What’s the biggest mistake Jeramey made in retail? How do you stop running your store into the ground without stepping away completely? Is drop shipping worth it? And how do you actually make your tiny boutique feel like a destination? This week on Beyond the Register, Jeramey flips the format…
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The Brutally Honest Retailer Who Rebuilt Menswear in Toronto
Melissa Austria didn’t launch Gotstyle because she loved fashion. She did it because she was sick of men dressing like crap. Two decades later, she’s built one of Toronto’s most original, enduring retail brands, and she’s still doing things her way. In this episode, Melissa joins Jeramey to talk...
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How to Make Your Retail Store Experience Unforgettable in 2026, with Amanda Stierwalt-Green
Most stores are built for transactions. The great ones are built for connection. In this episode, Jeramey sits down with Amanda Stierwalt-Green, Product Manager at Global Payments and former shop owner, to unpack how independent retailers can create memorable, profitable, and deeply human...
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What Most DTC Brands Get Wrong About Physical Retail, with Sandy Hernandez
Most stores are designed to sell. Very few are designed to connect. In this episode of Beyond the Register, Jeramey sits down with Sandy Hernandez, founder of The Retail Muse + A Store Is Born and a 15-year veteran of retail innovation, to unpack what actually makes a store stick in someone’s...
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Why Drop Shipping Is Broken (and How to Fix It), with Conduit CEO Rohan Shah
Retail doesn’t break at the register. It breaks upstream. In this episode of Beyond the Register, I sit down with Rohan Shah, Co-Founder & CEO of Conduit Commerce, and former Co-Founder of the unicorn startup Extend, to unpack the biggest blind spot in modern retail: your supply chain. Rohan has...
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Why Your Loyalty Program Isn’t Working, with Richard Schenker
Most retailers think a loyalty program will fix their business. But here’s the truth: loyalty only works when your business already has a strong foundation. In this episode, Jeramey sits down with Richard Schenker (the architect of Canada’s iconic Shoppers Optimum program) to unpack what loyalty…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
I’m Keenan Kok-Carlson, a lifelong retail operator turned Senior Product Manager at Global Payments. I’ve lived every part of running a store, from opening the doors to fixing the systems that keep it alive.Beyond the Register shares the real stories behind small retail: inventory chaos, hiring struggles, vendor issues, burnout, and the wins that keep owners going. No fluff, just the truth about what it takes to run a shop today.This is Beyond the Register.
HOSTED BY
Beyond The Register
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Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson currently has 34 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson about?
I’m Keenan Kok-Carlson, a lifelong retail operator turned Senior Product Manager at Global Payments. I’ve lived every part of running a store, from opening the doors to fixing the systems that keep it alive.Beyond the Register shares the real stories behind small retail: inventory chaos, hiring...
How often does Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson release new episodes?
Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson has 34 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Beyond The Register, with Keenan Kok-Carlson is created and hosted by Beyond The Register.
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