Last weekend I went to Charlottesville for a 30th birthday party. This party, for which I gladly drove two and half hours each way, wasn’t for a dear friend or family member — it was for a business. Not just any business…one of my most favorite retail businesses, Scarpa, a truly one-of-a-kind women’s boutique.

I worked at Scarpa during my last years in college and for a couple years after. I’ve told you many times before that I grew up in a retailing family, so if I was born with the kindling, it was my time at Scarpa that struck the match that lit my bonfire of love for retail.

Scarpa came into being in 1994 when a burgeoning architect in her early twenties, Amy Gardner, recognize...

I’m endlessly amused by the list of symptoms at the end of prescription drug commercials. Watching gracefully aging actors skipping blithely through a meadow with a 🦋 butterfly net, or 🎨 oil painting in a sun-streaked garage studio juxtaposed with the voiceover listing (as quickly as physics and the law allow) the list of dire and bizarre side effects always makes me chuckle. I’m not alone - Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader memorably spoofed these commercials on SNL in 2014… which was four lifetimes ago, yet the joke still works.

I’ve wondered why these commercials exist at all when, most of the time, the side effects get more airtime than the benefits of the drug. You’d think that ⚠️ warning...

If you're interested in the top ten most critically acclaimed films of all time, then surely you’ve seen Troop Beverly Hills. Okay, so maybe it’s only in my top ten, but it’s a masterpiece, and I’m standing by that claim.

This 1989 cinematic gem provides content for multiple newsletters (yes, Abby and I can relate everything to retail real estate), but we’ll start with a simple one today.

ICYMI: Troop Beverly Hills is about a very fabulous and kind shopaholic, Phyllis Neffler, who becomes the leader of her preteen daughter’s troop of “Wilderness Girls,” which is basically knock-off Girl Scouts. They are all underestimated. They earn patches. They persevere. They learn to believe in t...

📞“Alexis, guess what?! We got the space! It’s yours!” 

That phone call was one of the highlights of my time at Pedal. It’s not often that we’re in suspense over whether we’ll “win” a deal definitively, but that’s how it went for Fedwell, Alexis Starkey’s neighborhood farm-to-table comfort food concept.

The experience was all the more amazing because of how close it came to not happening at all. Alexis’ road to finding her dream space was long, winding, and quite literally tragic at times. Nothing ever felt certain.

And yet, here I was, letting Alexis know that she’d 🥇 beaten out two established restaurant concepts for a rare second-generation space right in her own neighborhood, ...

Mindset is everything, right? And without a doubt, your mindset when it comes to finding and negotiating your brick-and-mortar lease is key.

Over the last few years, we’ve observed two different approaches that remind us of two deeply unpleasant bureaucratic experiences. What are these experiences? They’re going to the DMV, and going to court.

We know it sounds a little ridiculous, but go with us here, because you know we love a leasing metaphor, and we think this one works even if you’ve only been to court on TV.

So as we were saying…

In some ways, visits to court and the DMV are very similar:

They both have vending machines
The both require a lot of boring paperwork
The...

A few months ago I started rewatching one of my favorite TV shows of all time, Dallas. The original one. Now obviously I didn’t watch this show when it first aired since I wasn’t born until season four, but I binged the first five seasons about twenty years ago, and it was due time for a visit to Southfork Ranch.

If you haven’t (yet) seen the show, it’s basically a family drama about the fabulously rich Ewing Oil dynasty where the women all have amazing hair, the men wear tight, tight pants, and the legal system is optional.

Despite the complete absence of curse words, nudity, or any graphic sex or violence per Reagan-era FCC rules, the show still manages to cover all the normal famil...

Midway through my last year in college, I bought a six-pack of Dinty Moore Beef Stew. I remember how it happened. I was at Sam’s Club with my roommates, and I must have been hungry, because I was seduced by the free sample. So salty. So warm. Of course I’ll buy the entire pack.

Then that same six-pack sat on my shelf of the shared pantry staring at me until I graduated. Every time I looked back at it, I was ashamed of how I’d been seduced by a product that is barely distinguishable from pet food. Occasionally, more motivated by guilt than desire, I’d pick up a can, read the sodium content, then promptly put it down, my face puffing from the number alone.

I freaking love beef stew. The...

Some of the most successful Pedal Retailers are called to open their businesses because they can’t find what they’re looking for anywhere else. District Champagne, Pirouette Cafe and Wine Shop, Merry Pin, and Jurisdiction Clothing all spring to mind. They knew there was demand for their business because they felt it themselves, and when they couldn’t take it anymore, they took action to create what was missing.

Jill Adams’ Pink Moon is one of these businesses that simply had to be born. As a Bethesda mother of three young children, Jill was painfully aware of her (and her friends’) struggle to find time and space to prioritize mental and physical health with a community of other mother...