If I had a dollar for every time an aspiring retailer told me they didn’t have their startup budget solidified because “it’s impossible to know until I find the right space,” I’d probably have a downpayment on a vacation home.


Nailing down a budget for a retail space feels impossible if you’ve never rented a space before, but here’s a pro tip: 

✨ The space does not determine your budget – your budget determines the space. ✨


Imagine if I called my residential realtor and said that I was in the market for a new home. And when she asked me for my budget, I responded, “well, I really don’t know yet because it all depends on the space.” 

💸 Should she show me a $4M historic home tha...

Abby here, and as a new mom, "back-to-school" suddenly means something to me again. Since I graduated from college a "few" years ago, August has run into September with little punctuation. Our DC summer weather stretches into October, and now that we're all wearing our white jeans year-round (that's a thing, right?), I only notice the season change by the number of football jerseys at bars.

Until this year, that is. Baby Stella's class started daycare last week, and already we've been to orientation, a teacher meet-and-greet AND back-to-school shopping.

So as I'm looking forward to the day when my little one learns the alphabet, we thought there was no better time to remind you ...

We love reality television. Not so much for the colorful content that allows us to shut our brains off, but for the wealth of material it offers to help us explain how the retail real estate process works.

So in today’s episode newsletter, we’ll turn to Selling Sunset and The Bachelor* because even though Selling Sunset is the show about real estate, you actually want to approach your retail real estate deal like you’re on The Bachelor.

In Selling Sunset (and residential real estate), successful tours always end with, “if you want this house, you need to put in an offer today because tomorrow might be too late!” There is time pressure to commit NOW lest you lose the opportunity entir...

I’ll say it – everyone loves to hate lawyers. They’re right up there with telemarketers and politicians on the list of most maligned professionals, and when you’re scraping together the cash to fund your Capital Budget, legal fees get a lot of scrutiny. And we get it – every dollar counts!

You cannot forgo an attorney for your lease. This has been the subject of numerous other newsletters, and it’s a requirement in our First Location Program. (Don’t believe me? Reply to this email and we’ll happily tell you why.)

You CAN manage your legal fees, but here’s the thing - most people actually do it wrong and end up i) spending more, ii) getting a worse lease, or iii) both. In many situati...

In our last post, we told you we're firm believers that where there's a will there's a way. But, lest you think we're starry-eyed optimists, there is a part two to this philosophy. Like the yuzu to our mayo, these seemingly opposite ideas work together to create something amazing.

That part two is our Pedal promise -

Real Talk, Always
We will always tell you the truth, even when it's hard to hear and say. You deserve to know the good, the bad, and the ugly so you can make decisions with confidence. We think that honesty is the best policy, and we're sticking to it.

If you've ever worked in a service industry, you understand the temptation to keep your customers happy by telling them what t...

Let’s talk about landlords.

Often when we start considering retail spaces, Pedal Retailers express some version of this concern about large, corporate landlords: won’t they try to take advantage of us as a small business?

The image in their minds is that corporate landlords are like this:

While individual or mom-and-pop landlords are like this:

But having worked on more deals than any human should, we know that in many cases, the big corporate landlords can actually be like this:

And that mom-and-pop landlords can also be like this:

It makes total sense for small retailers (especially those navigating brick-and-mortar for the first time) to assume that corporate landlo...