1REC’s Retail Expansion Collaboratory is a collection of resources providing opportunities to expand retail and real estate professionals’ knowledge and networks.
Whether you’re an aspiring, new, or seasoned retail operator, our content and tools will undoubtedly create value for you and your business.
Our content, tools, and community span across four major functional areas
Real Estate
Strategy & Finance
Design & Construction
Operations & Management
Our community is comprised of professionals across the entire store development value chain
🛍️ Brands
🕴🏻 Brokers
📇 Vendors
🏢 Landlords
🤑 Investors
Our story
1REC was founded by Andrew Neelon, a finance-turned-retail real estate professional in NYC. After spending nearly a decade in retail real estate for digitally native brands, he learned that:
- There are virtually no resources available for brands to learn “how to do stores”
- Options are limited to hiring expensive consultants or talent, or relying on “free” real estate brokers whose incentives are rarely aligned
- Brands eventually need stores to scale profitably; it’s not a question of if, but when
- Mistakes in real estate are expensive
- While retail strategy, finance, and operations are just as crucial to opening stores as store development, the intersection of these worlds in vendors or resources is rare
When Andrew first started 1REC, the offerings were limited to consulting, but with the vision of slowly adding content, community, and various other tools. 1REC’s name was chosen with the intention of slowly evolving it over time:
The final transition to Retail Expansion Collaboratory marks the exciting moment when the collection of all the above offerings finally came together into one platform: 1REC.