A Personal Note on Twenty Years of Retail Observation

I did not set out to become a retail academic. I set out to understand why certain spaces make us feel something, and why that feeling matters more than most business strategies account for.

I have been asked, more times than I can count, how I ended up spending twenty years studying retail. The honest answer is that I did not plan to. I planned to study architecture. Then design. Then, somewhere in the intersection of space, commerce, and human behaviour, I found the question that would define my career: why do some commercial spaces make us feel something, and what happens when they do?

That question led me to retail. Not to the retail of supply chains and margin analysis, though I respect the people who do that work, but to the retail of perception, experience, and meaning. The retail that happens in the space between a brand's intention and a consumer's emotion.

"I study what happens when someone walks through a door and feels, before they think."

The Beginning

My research began in Beirut, where I grew up. Beirut is a city where commerce and culture are inseparable, where the souk and the salon exist in the same conversation, where the way something is sold is as important as what is being sold. I did not know it at the time, but growing up in Beirut gave me something that no amount of academic training could have provided: an instinct for the relationship between commerce and meaning.

From Beirut, I moved to Paris, where I completed my doctoral research at a time when the pop-up store was emerging as a new format in European retail. I was fascinated by it, not as a trend, but as a phenomenon that seemed to reveal something important about how consumers were changing and what they wanted from physical spaces.

That fascination became my doctoral thesis, then my first book, then my second, third, and fourth. Along the way, I have observed retail across eight countries, advised brands ranging from independent boutiques to global luxury houses, and taught at some of the most prestigious business schools in Europe.

What I Have Learned

Twenty years of observation have taught me a few things that I hold with conviction:

Physical space matters. In an increasingly digital world, the quality of physical encounters is becoming more important, not less. The brands that understand this are investing in their physical presence with intelligence and intention. The brands that do not are losing something they may not be able to rebuild.

Experience is not decoration. It is strategy. The most common mistake I see in retail is treating experience as a layer, something added to an existing retail model to make it more attractive. Experience is not a layer. It is a logic that must inform every decision, from product development to store design to staffing.

Consumers are smarter than most brands give them credit for. They can tell the difference between a genuine experience and a performance. They can sense when a space has been designed with real care and when it has been assembled from a mood board. They reward authenticity and punish pretension, not always immediately, but always eventually.

The details are everything. In twenty years of retail observation, I have never seen a brand succeed by getting the big things right and the details wrong. It is always the reverse: the brands that obsess over the details, the quality of the light, the temperature of the greeting, the weight of the bag, are the ones that create the experiences people remember.

What Comes Next

I am more excited about retail now than I was when I started. The combination of technological capability, consumer sophistication, and format innovation means that the possibilities for creating meaningful commercial experiences are greater than they have ever been.

But I am also more concerned. The pressures of short-term performance, the temptation to automate everything, the reduction of retail strategy to data dashboards and conversion metrics, these forces work against the human, experiential, meaning-rich approach to retail that I believe in and that my research consistently shows produces better long-term results.

This is why I teach. Why I write. Why I advise. And why I am building new ways to share what I have learned with people who share the conviction that retail can be better, more human, more meaningful, more beautiful, than most of it currently is.

If you have read this far, you are probably one of those people. And I would love to hear from you.

What is the retail experience that changed how you think about retail, the one that made you realise a store could be more than a place to buy things? That is always the most interesting question, and the answers never disappoint.