Director of Retail, StreetSense

>> My name is James McCandless. I'm the director of retail at Streetsense. We are a company fully integrated to help retailers and developers open retail projects and facilities all over the United States. We're based here in Bethesda, Maryland and I live here in Washington, DC. My particular area is retail, so we literally incubate retail brands inside of our company, everything from their brand, to their logo, all the way through to what their store design looks like and then where I really step in is at the store rollout. My background is I've taken retailers from-- literally from DC to Honolulu. So there's no city over 500,000 people that I haven't been to or toured or have a working knowledge of how the retails are raid. It's kind of a unique niche, only in my industry. We've done in this market, Washington, DC. My colleague has done 475 Starbucks. We've executed Chipotle 75 times in this market and we've done the interior design and architecture for over 200 in Mid-Atlantic. So we work with national brands, all the way down to a startup who's somebody went out of a food truck and is looking for their first location in a market. There was a woman who came to us. She was an attorney for 20 years, said, "I'm quitting being an attorney. I want to open a juice bar." She had no idea what she wanted to call it, no idea where she wanted to place it in the marketplace, how was it going to be designed or raid. We start that process with what's your name going to be. So we have a branding and marketing team. It's about 40 people. We go through and come with 10 or 15 name opportunities. She then evaluated the names, picked one. We then figure out what the logo is going to be. So we then designed a logo for her. What it's going to look like, what's on top of the T-shirt, what's on every jar, what's on every napkin, and the logo gets designed. From there, we start to design what we call the physical environment. So what's it look like inside. And then we find a space which is where we step in and then once we get the space, we help her execute the deal and she's now open. Our concept is called Puree. She has two stores now. So she went from being an attorney into our office with no idea how she wanted to call it and now she's got two stores and trying to get into the grocery store business as well. My role as director of retail is I sit on top of all of the various services. So when she came in, she interfaces with me and then I helped her through the entire process, literally to help her launch her brand. And sometimes, we're not doing it here in Washington. Sometimes, there's a group coming, we have a group out of Richmond, Virginia who's looking to go from DC up to Philadelphia to New York and that's what we're helping them with that strategic rollout. And in that case, I'll interface with my network of over300 brokers around the country and then we help her roll out a strategy and open whatever the number of stores might be.