Cushman’s David Gorelick knows retail and real estate

“I love retail, I love real estate, and the passion that comes through what I’m doing cascades down and transcends up,” Gorelick said. “You can tell when you sit in the room with somebody if their emotional connection with what they are doing really resonates. When you meet me, you will notice.”

Gorelick graduated from DePaul University, in Chicago, in 2001, with a bachelor’s in business management and corporate communications. He landed his first job out of school at Buz Jones, a Chicago-based denim label. Working at this small startup offered him exposure to the fundamentals of running a fashion company, which in turn gave him an appetite to go further into the retail business. “I was basically working as an office administrator, handling accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory management,” he said. “It sort of led me through an evolution into a retail real estate career.”

Gorelick next came to Diesel USA, where he was sales director for Diesel StyleLab, a shop-in-shop concept housed in a handful of the denim brand’s stores. When that division was folded, he landed at Liz Claiborne, where he headed up men’s sales for the company’s newly acquired C&C California apparel line. (Claiborne no longer owns C&C.)

His next job, with New York City–based menswear designer Andrew Buckler, gave Gorelick his introduction to real estate. “When I joined him [Buckler], he was a wholesale-driven account,” said Gorelick. “However, he had one retail store and licensed his brand to a Turkish firm, who provided a cash infusion that allowed him to open additional stores. My job became to create a retail strategy, identifying where he would need to be in order to be successful. I started procuring sites and worked on my first transaction here in New York.” After that first deal, Gorelick was hooked — procuring real estate for stores was more appealing to him than merchandising those same shops. “I found it to be more dynamic and interesting,” he said.

He next joined Ralph Lauren as a real estate manager, helping to direct the growth of its Club Monaco and Rugby chains. He worked his way up the ranks at the iconic menswear company, becoming its director of real estate, first for the U.S. and Canada, and later for Europe, working out of the Lauren London office. After nearly three years there, he jumped at the chance to join Simon and work on the other side of the negotiating table. “An opportunity presented itself where I could make that pivot from retailer to the landlord-investor side,” Gorelick said. “Ralph was going through a transition. I felt I had the domestic experience and international experience, and it was time to make that leap.”

At Simon, Gorelick was vice president of leasing for premium outlets, overseeing this function at 75 properties. Though he held the job for less than two years, the knowledge he gleaned working for the country’s largest mall operator was immense. “I got to understand how to reposition and merchandise an asset, how to figure out its strength in a market, how to identify which retailers are going to be the most successful in those malls,” he said.

Thus Gorelick brings to Cushman & Wakefield insight into the needs of both retailers and landlords. And he arrives at a heady time for the 100-year-old firm. In 2015 Cushman & Wakefield merged with DTZ (into which Cassidy Turley had merged earlier). The resulting entity forms the world’s third-largest commercial real estate advisory firm. In this latest position Gorelick is tasked with expanding the retail practice, particularly in the area of tenant representation. He will also be working with the logistics and industrial practice group to align what the firm calls its “new commerce” strategy: the synthesizing of retailers’ back-end supply-chain functions with their e-commerce and brick-and-mortar operations. This, says Gorelick, is the most exciting facet of the job.

“Since 2012, 30 percent of all industrial leasing has been driven by e-commerce,” Gorelick said. “That is a staggering figure. Look at the examples out there today: Walmart and Bonobos and Whole Foods and Amazon and Casper and West Elm; those are Internet companies merging with true brick-and-mortar retailers. It’s an interesting evolution, and that was one of the reasons to join Cushman & Wakefield. With the various platforms we have for our clients, we can offer it from soup to nuts.”