As he sought a moderator, friends pointed him to Richie Siegel, a young analyst and host of a popular retail podcast, who was making waves with his insights into the next-generation retail consumer economy.

Early this year Richter and Siegel launched a consulting service called FaceLift by Loose Threads, which assists online brands to formulate retail strategies and develop physical stores.

Siegel is a graduate of the New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he concentrated in business, fashion and law. In 2014 he co-founded the Gioventu New York menswear line with a friend, at which time he also began writing about his startup retail experiences on a blog he titled Loose Threads. Gioventu shut down at the end of 2015, but Siegel’s interest in the successes and failures of the next-generation economy remains avid — and he also continues to blog. Moreover, he has launched a podcast under the Loose Threads name, on which he interviews some of the entrepreneurs now navigating the new consumer economy.

All this has given Siegel a lot to think about with regard to the burgeoning world of online retail. In 2016 he anticipated that the rising costs of social-media ads, scaling and fulfillment, along with the consumer’s natural desire to see and physically touch the merchandise they want to buy, would make physical stores a vital aspect of any digitally native brand’s success. He has also been talking a lot about the idea of retail as a service.

Richter was impressed with Siegel’s insights. “In speaking to him about the newer brands coming to market, it was clear that there was a transition occurring in the space,” Richter said.

Though, perhaps somewhat contrapuntally, Richter began his own career as a software developer helping physical retailers develop an online presence, he has spent much of the past 17 years focusing on the physical side. In past years he headed real estate for American Apparel, and he was vice president of real estate, construction and facilities at Perfumania. Then he founded Capricorn Asset Management, which advises retailers on their real estate strategies and investments. Richter has worked with such brands as Apple, J.Crew and Starbucks, and with such landlords as Simon, Taubman Centers and Westfield. He figures he has probably completed about 2,000 deals over the course of his career.

Richter’s specialty was legacy brands, but his company was increasingly getting calls from growing online apparel brands such as Timbuk2 and Outdoor Voices for help with their physical store launches and location strategies. “It was evident that there was a new breed of brands coming to the market that were aggressive and entrepreneurial and ‘disruptive,’ ” said Richter. By working with Capricorn, these newcomers could reap the benefits of Richter’s experience and of his national and international connection. There were some areas, however, with which Richter saw he could not help adequately — such as customer service, store layout and marketing. For these concentrations, he needed someone like Siegel.

Meanwhile, Siegel was eager to get involved with the very retail revolution he was learning so much about through his podcasts and his research firm. And he needed someone on board like Richter, who had all those thousands of real estate deals under his belt.

The New York conference came and went, but Richter and Siegel continued to meet regularly to discuss how they might best start working together. They eventually brought in Rebekah Kondrat, an experienced retail adviser, as a partner. Kondrat brings roughly a decade of experience in her own right, assisting startups with their store and brand rollouts. She was director of retail stores at Joybird, a digitally native furniture concept that was recently sold to La-Z-Boy; a store leader for online eyeglasses retailer Warby Parker; and a member of the retail team at Apple’s flagship on New York City’s Upper West Side, where she oversaw the training and scheduling of roughly 300 employees. 

“Think of FaceLift as your on-ramp,” says the FaceLift by Loose Threads website. “We’ll help you build the engine and then let you take over the wheel when you’re ready.”

To be sure, these services are in demand. “Today all retailers need to be multichannel,” said retail analyst Rich Johnson, a partner at consultant firm Odyssey Retail Advisors. “The number-one goal of retailers should be servicing your customer and making things easy for them. Everything is about convenience and the ability to be front and center.” In this new economy consumer perspective, Johnson likens FaceLift’s role to that of a local partner for retailers expanding overseas. “What they’re doing is not dissimilar to a franchise model if you enter another country,” said Johnson.

With an international franchising model, a company entering a foreign market for the first time will seek to form a partnership with a native company, until it can itself gain sufficient understanding of the region. That same theory holds here for online clients entering the physical retail space for the first time, observes Johnson.

To hear Richter describe it, the company is more than ready for action. “We have walked the walk,” he said. “There’s no replacement for experience.”