Jaime Izurieta: Reviving Main Street - Designing Authentic Experiences with “The Storefront Guy”

Austin Tunnell

Jamie, it's really good to have you on the podcast today.

Jaime J. Izurieta

Fantastic to be here Austin, thank

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, I'm excited about our conversation. I want to get into design and Main Street and really the experience economy. But before we dive into any of that stuff, could you just give everyone listening a little bit about your background and your experience and what you're up to today?

Jaime J. Izurieta

Okay, a little background. I am originally from Ecuador. I studied architecture here in Savannah, Georgia. So I went to college for way too long. I went to college for historic preservation and then architecture. And then I also went in the Netherlands to university for urban economic planning. So it's been an interesting. very eclectic kind of academic life. And then when I went home back to Ecuador and I was practicing architecture, I was doing some retail designing. My family owns a small independent bookstore. So they chose me to go to Argentina to study and learn with this international guru of how to design bookstores. So I've been gravitating on these different areas. And then we moved to the US with my family seven years ago. And I was asking myself, what can I do? And I had some experience in place making. I have been in local government back home in Quito. And that experience with place making led me to talk to the people in the place making X network, namely, Ethan Kent. who we were talking one day and I was telling him this amazing idea I have. I wanted to make this great coffee table book, beautiful book. had some photographers lined up to photograph the contributions of local businesses to place making. And I called it the Storefront Place Makers. It was a whole idea that I had in my head and I had a Kickstarter set up and that couldn't happen for various reasons. So I just put it in a drawer and then we moved to New Jersey. This is where I live right now. I live in Montclair, New Jersey, which is a suburb about, it's one of the first ring suburbs of New York City. So eventually was served by trains. We have six train stations in town. When I moved here, I turned everything into a business proposition. And this was around the time of COVID. So every business was closed in Main Street.

Jaime J. Izurieta

And I came in with a proposal of, hey, what if we try to look at your business and have this, since you are at home, not being able to attend your business, why don't we sit down and think about what moved you in the first place to create your business? What solution were you trying to implement? What problem were you trying to solve when you first started your business? And We look at that and we try to reframe your relationship with your business. So when you are allowed back to open, you essentially have a different business. You have a different attitude towards what's happening outside. You have a different attitude towards your community, your neighborhood, your street, and of course, your neighbors, the other businesses in town. And it worked wonderfully. We set up a program here in the local bid here in Montclair. It worked wonderfully. And the businesses that I worked with were like, this is very interesting. I am essentially transforming the way that I see my business. And so I had a few clients like that after, even after the lockdowns were over, I started to have clients that were not seeking so much design of their storefront, which was the initial offering. And they were seeking more of this kind of therapy that I was offering so they could look at their business in a different way. So this is what Storefront Mastery does right now. It's a creative agency. help local organizations with marketing. I help local organizations with experience creation. And to do that, we leverage the contributions of their local businesses. And the way we do that is we go into the businesses, we talk to the owners, and we transform the way they see their business so they have a renewed perspective, their contribution to the sidewalk is much better, it's much stronger. So the job of the local DMOs, the district management, destination management organizations and the BITs, the Business Improvement Districts, and of course, Main Streets, Downtown, et cetera, whatever district organization is managing the downtown. They have, their burden is lightened basically because they have so many great contributions from their local businesses that

Jaime J. Izurieta

aligned with the vision, aligned with the brand of Downtown. So it makes everyone's job easier and it changes entirely the attitudes of the people in Downtown. It changes the attitudes also of the users. So it fixes the interaction between the system, which is the Downtown, the built environment and the users. So all that to tell you this is what I do now. I have a creative agency that tries to improve the quality of the interaction between users and the built

Austin Tunnell

That's really wonderful. And it seems like you're really focused on, you know, small local businesses and to kind of set the stage for that a little bit about why that's important. Why I think it's important and what kind of attracted me to you, you know, cause I found you on Twitter on X and then, and then I've, I'm about two thirds the way through. got kind of distracted this past week through your book, Main Street Mavericks, you start right off the back, the bat in that book. talking about how we live in a financialized world and in that financialized world, everything is measured in numbers and metrics. you know, it needs to be able to be put in a spreadsheet and you immediately to set the stage for your book, you're, you're, talk about how successful like local businesses, they measure, they have different measurements, one of them being economic. Can you, can you talk about

Jaime J. Izurieta

Sure, essentially we live in a world of convenience. So now we can just get my phone and if I need toilet paper or if I need my son's school supplies, one click and the school supplies will be here tomorrow. So this is very convenient. I don't need to leave my house to get something that is a nuisance, basically. Man, I have to go buy the school supplies. So you have to make a trip, even if it's a trip to the local business right around the corner, it's a trip. It's something you have to do. It's not fun. And there's many things that are like that. And we have convenience. We have the big boxes where we just go one single trip and we have everything there and everything is easy and everything is discounted. And if I don't like something or I need to return something for whatever reason, can just go and return it. Same with the online shopping. I just go to the nearest supermarket and drop whatever there and they take care of everything. So it's super convenient. And there's other economic reasons why these organizations have been able to grow so much and occupy so much space that are squeezing the local businesses out. So if I go to my local business and try to find the perfect, I don't know, lunch box for my kid, it's likely that they will have four or five different options. Whereas I go online and I have a thousand options to choose from. And so the role of the local business stops being the convenience. It's not the convenience anymore because I find that somewhere else. They become these sort of, they need to become these sort of tourist organizations that what they're doing is contributing to the allure of the entire downtown. Because foot traffic, if we don't do that, will go somewhere else. Foot traffic will go to the big box or will stay at home and click. So these local businesses, when they turn into hosts of their downtown,

Jaime J. Izurieta

when they realize that they are first and foremost, hospitality businesses, are first and foremost, entertainment businesses and experience businesses, that they need to attract people as parts of a larger compound, let's say, almost like an amusement park has rides and these rides, they may be the next awesome thing. So you want to go to the park just because of that ride, but you are in the park and you will go to the other rides. We have this geographical proximity in downtowns and main streets that one store becoming amazing and becoming the host of the downtown and becoming all these things that I said, what they're doing is they are attracting foot traffic. And one business's foot traffic is the downtown's foot traffic because there's no way to just materialize in that business and then materialize out. You need to come. If you walk, awesome. If you drive, you have to park somewhere. You have to walk. So the entire downtown starts to be this experience as opposed to something convenient. It's something you want to see. It's something you want to be immersed in. so their measurements are not just how much I am selling. Their measurement is how much I am contributing to build up the community, how much I am contributing to build up the local economy, how much am I contributing to the resilience of the local economy, and how much am I contributing, yes, to make this downtown an amazing thing. Does that make

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, that's really true stakeholders in the community and not just providing, you know, a service. think you used economic value, place value, social value and civic value, know, which contributors rather than takers. And it's not that commodity businesses are per se bad. It's just that one, local businesses can't compete with that on a pure commodity convenience basis, Nor should they like, we don't want to, because in my opinion, like local businesses is so much literally, it is a reflection of our culture and their culture creating and community creating. And, I do think about that, as we get more and more, commoditization of services, you know, I noticed the fast foot chains, right? Like the fast foot chain buildings are getting smaller. because even the McDonald's that used to have, You know, the play, the playhouse and people would go there and hang out inside. They're empty inside now. The Dutch brothers drive through coffee is this new Starbucks. The new Starbucks is not a third place anymore, completely detached from the original vision. Like there are just these tiny boxes where you can fit the kitchen and service enough cars. And I get it from a financial perspective. It's the fastest way to turn, you know, people sell them as coffee, but it's really not, serving the purpose of bringing people together. And as we lose those places, I think Really important. One of the reasons I love what you're focusing on is, you know, I think some people think of downtowns as something really big. think how we both mean it is probably any concentration of businesses, you know, at the local level, a small main street, a small district, Oklahoma city, for example, has multiple little districts that could learn, from, from this, of having localized places.

Jaime J. Izurieta

Exactly. And you're mentioning Starbucks, which... So there's a connection to all of this. So there's lots of businesses that still want to compete in the same terms that online and big box giants are presenting the game. And that's very hard on them. It is almost impossible to compete with them. So they... do need to realize that times have changed and there is a need for an entirely different business model that sees the downtown in a very different way. And so the state of the economy has a lot to do with this. And there is an amazing book called The Experience Economy. And this is incidentally one of the main inspirations for Main Street Mavericks, the book that I just wrote. So the authors of this book, Jean Gilmore and Joe Pine, what they say is there's different stages of the economy. In the first stage, we are just gathering. I go and I get my carrots and I eat my carrots. The second stage is when I process these carrots. I go and I get the carrots and I make carrot juice. So I can sell you the carrot juice for an added charge. Then the next one is when I become a service economy. Service economy is I go and I purchase all the carrots from everyone. I make the juice for everyone and I sell and distribute the juice. This is a service that I am providing for people. And then we move up and then we move to the experience part in which the way that I provide the service becomes the product. So if I provide you this carrot juice service in an amazing way, I get you into my store and I keep you in my store for a longer time. I sell you a good time. I sell you time well spent, right? This is the experience part. And then we move, and this is where most main streets are right now. And then we move on to the transformation part. The transformation is where I guide you into something that changes your life, that changes your life in a positive way and changes your life for the better. So these

Jaime J. Izurieta

the stages of the economy that Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore explain. we are in most downtowns and main streets, we are in the experiential parts. We are about to, we are offering an experience, whether we design it or not, whether we plan it or not, we are offering an experience to the people who come to downtown. And this is when local businesses need to realize that times have changed, we are in a different stage of the economy. And what we need to do is we need contribute to that experience. We need to make a positive contribution to that experience that actually brings people downtown. And like I said before, my foot traffic is the downtown's foot traffic. There's no way to separate that. So the best businesses are going to bring the most sales and the most foot traffic. And that happens in every single area of the economy that you look at. There's going to be a top 20 % that gathers 80 % of the business. There's going to be 20 % that causes 80 % of the problems. It's going to be a 20 % that makes the most, 80 % of the sales. This is what's called the Pareto principle. So when we look at these businesses that they need to see themselves as experiential businesses, as hospitality businesses, we look at Starbucks. And what Starbucks has done is amazing. They started being this third place. They started being a place where you could come and you could plug in your computer and stay for the whole day. Just have a one coffee and just be there and work or play or do whatever in there, meet your friends, whatever. As times progress, their business model has changed and it's very hard to find an electrical outlet in a Starbucks. So you, and then the tables have changed and the configuration of the store has changed. So it's not a place that receives you and keeps you there they have devolved, we may say, their brand has devolved. And they have noticed this and they have created an additional brand, which is the Starbucks Reserve Roastery. We have a reserve roastery here in New York City. There's reserve roasteries in Milan, in Chicago, in Los Angeles. In difference, I don't know if they have one in Oklahoma City, but they have a few roasteries that have...

Jaime J. Izurieta

improved the business model of Starbucks to again create a third place where people can meet, where people can just stay for as long as they want. And they have entertainment because the baristas, they are doing the whole flair thing and they're roasting coffee there. So it's almost like a museum that you go and you have a journey through and you learn about coffee and you learn about different origins and they teach you these things. And then you can sit and the furniture is again comfortable so you can stay for longer. And of course, that comes with a higher price ticket, but they have realized that their original Starbucks brand was devaluing and they have changed it and created this new brand that again, tries to do what they tried in the beginning. that all that to say that businesses in downtowns, this is maybe what they need to do. They need to realize that they can become a number of other things. They can showrooms for their own businesses, can become sort of museums of their trade, they can become these experiential and hospitality places that they receive, are the hosts, they receive the guests of downtown. And note these words that I am using, they are not arbitrary, becoming the host, receiving the guest. This comes from the hospitality industry, right? This is the industry that has worked the hardest to create amazing experiences for people. to create immersive places where people feel well treated, where people feel special, where people feel like they belong. And all these things, all these words also, they're not just buzzwords. They are the pillars in which the experience economy is being set up. And these are the opportunities that local businesses have. And this is the focus of what I do. It's trying to help local businesses see that there are these changes in the economy. and helping local district managers also see that there's these changes in the economy that they need to look into so that they reframe and reposition both businesses and downtowns and offer something that big boxes and the online giants cannot.

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, I really love the direction of moving away from pure, just let me drive into the store, consume something, leave. And that idea of you really are selling the experience of being there. And it's not just good business. And obviously it is good business. And I think people make money doing that. But what I also think I really like about it is to do it well. I think there has to be a real authenticity there of wanting

Jaime J. Izurieta

Yes.

Austin Tunnell

delight people and give people like literally a great and enriching experience. And then kind of like the today world of, like you said, just click a button and order something. And I really, and it's on your doorstep, whatever you want, you know. And I think for me at least COVID and the lockdowns were actually a, it almost accelerated my thinking here because guess what? We postmated a lot, you know, doing the Uber eats. And we would order foot from a good local restaurant and eat at home. And it was always so unfulfilling and disappointing. Like I don't even know. And yeah, it's a little bit soggy, right? So it's not as good, but like you just completely lose all the things that made it special to eat that thing. And it made me realize like, my gosh, like, yes, the foot is important. Don't get me wrong. But like, that is just a small piece of the experience. And, I think it's very, humanizing, you know, especially once again, in the age of the internet and the age of social media where we really don't have interactions. It's not just like good business and the way to like make more money. Although once again, it is, it's a way to, think, be more human. and once again, serve and delight people. And I think those are all positive

Jaime J. Izurieta

and it's funny you should mention the Uber Eats during COVID. I have a client here in Montclair. She has an Ethiopian restaurant. She is an Ethiopian immigrant and she has this amazing Ethiopian restaurant. Ethiopian foot is very hard to make. It takes time. Making the injera, which is the Ethiopian bread, takes at least two weeks of fermenting and it's crazy. So they need to have an inventory. two weeks in advance so that they have enough bread to offer people. This is, as you can imagine, this is not a cheap service. so she had her restaurant, which was amazing, which is amazing. She didn't close during COVID, this is great. So it is amazing still. so during the lockdowns, her activity was pretty much zero. Most places here in town, they pivoted and they were started selling, I don't know, chicken or pizza or just making something super easy to continue selling. But her pivoting power was probably not what it should have been because much of it was the service. When you came in, she would personally come to the table and talk to you about the paintings that you would see on the wall that she had brought from Ethiopia, talking to you about the tables that she has, that she actually had built with Ethiopian craftsmen. And everything was super authentic. She taught you about Ethiopian culture. When the foot comes, she comes and says, this is how you eat it. And she teaches how to eat with your hands because you have hold the bread and get the foot and eat in a certain way so your hand is not completely drenched in sauce and everything. So she teaches all these things. And there's wonderful music that's in the background. And she is very authentic and very warm. So of course, you can imagine that when people have the choice of getting a hamburger for 10 bucks or getting an Ethiopian meal for maybe 50 or 60 bucks in their home during lockdowns, they...

Jaime J. Izurieta

would go for the hamburger or for the pizza because it's easier, faster, and it's cheaper. So we devised an idea for her to bring the experience home. So this is why it's very relevant what you just said. We created this Ethiopian restaurant to go. So what you would get in your home was a traditional Ethiopian basket, which inside had this, again, little basket with a traditional Ethiopian foot that people would eat in travels. So they would make this foot and put it in their their their ha, the saddles of their horses or their whatever animals that they use and they go on trips and they keep this foot there that they can easily put their hand in, grab a little and eat as they are traveling. So you would get that and you would get the tablecloth and the napkins and the coffee for later and tea and the little mugs and the little cups for the coffee and tea. And then we created these cards and the cards were her explaining about the Ethiopian culture, her explaining about the Ethiopian foot, her explaining about the Ethiopian customs, this is how you eat, her explaining about everything. And then the last one was a QR code where you would scan and go and get the playlist that she had created so you could eat in your home. with pretty much everything that you would have at the restaurant. And she sold these packages for Mother's Day, and I think it might have been 2020. And it was incredible, 2021 probably. It was incredible because people were very eager to buy these things, which would bring the restaurant to their home. And she had trouble because her foot was expensive before. And this package, of course, it had a premium that she was charging. And it didn't matter. People were very happy to pay the premium because the product was so awesome, because the experience was so great. So we created this bring at home experience. And it was not easy. And the implementation was not easy. But it was a definite win for her. So it's more or less what you said. That kind of economy can be offset if you offer a great experience.

Austin Tunnell

That's really interesting. And diving a little bit more into great hospitality and experience. I think people often associate it just with foot, you know, which don't get me wrong. I think there's so many things there and I think we can talk about that. But I'm curious, kind of going back to your day starting a bookstore and you were studying, you you went and visited, what did you say? Argentina with like the top book. Can you talk about that? What was that like and what did you learn from that experience and how did you go about setting up your bookstore?

Jaime J. Izurieta

So the main thing is that this guy, this guy, he sadly passed a few years back, but he was the guru of bookstore design. He was Argentinian, but he was living, I think, in London or Milan or somewhere, and he was in charge of setting up the Feltrinelli's and the Waterstones, which are these huge chains that they have in Italy and in the UK. and he was working in Singapore and airports everywhere making these amazing... And airport retail is not about the retail, it's about the showroom. And so it has to be spectacular. So this guy had this experience, right? And he was teaching people, this is how you do it. And he was not teaching us how to build bookstores. He was teaching us how people feel when they are in the bookstore. I'm like, this is weird. I'm not seeing any design lessons that he's teaching. And he's talking about how if we tilt the bookshelves, people will be able to look at the names of the books without kneeling. And this changes how they feel in the bookstore. It's like, OK, this is interesting. And everything was about that. So he was talking about experiential design even before experiential design was a thing, which is amazing. Futuristic guy. And so. What I learned is that design is not about design. Design is about the users and the interaction of the users and the system. This is how, if you are a coder, this is what you need to create, something that allows your user to easily interact with whatever the system is offering. And in the end, that's what we do. That's what you do, right? When you build a wonderful building, house, What you're doing is you're solving the interaction of the people who live in that house and the system, which is how they live, the house. And this is what pretty much everyone does. And this is what I learned, that our design, how our design looks is almost secondary after how our design makes people feel and how our design makes people act, because they feel it in a certain way and they will act in a certain way when they are interacting with this design. So I came back.

Jaime J. Izurieta

And I teamed with a wonderful interior designer and we created this place that was based in the journey. So it was not a place that you would come and buy a book. It was not a transactional bookstore. It was an experiential bookstore. You would come and we designed the journey of the people around it. We designed all the elements. It was based on like a double helix kind of thing. So was a, essentially we designed the journey and then we designed the bookstore. So everything, all the details came later after we figured out how the interaction was going to be. And that is probably the biggest lesson. First, you design the interaction and then you design whatever details. I think that has served me very well in my, in my recent years as I progress with, with Storefront Mastery. It's a, it's, it's a way for me to tell people. What you're offering your customers is number one before we even go into the design. So what are you offering your customers? What kind of experience do you offer your customers? What is the feeling that your customers will have when they leave your store? As they leave your store, is the exact feeling you want them to feel? Write it down and give me that. And I will know you may want to keep them expecting. You want to build up expectation for something that will come later. Maybe you want to build up loyalty, but loyalty is not a feeling. So how do you build up that loyalty? So making questions and questions and questions trying to dig deeper into how do you want people to feel when they are in your place. That is probably the the useful thing and the aspect of my work with the most incredible impact on the users at the end, because it works, it really works. When we try to do that and we implement these things, the customers of my clients, when they come into their stores, they behave exactly as we predict because it's easy when you are designing it for the interaction.

Jaime J. Izurieta

before you are designing it for the aesthetics.

Austin Tunnell

It's really, that's really interesting. I like that. Like how, do you want people to feel? Because even as building culture, you know, we've largely how we, the thing that we sell is houses, you know, in, in, terms of specifically, and that's how we make money by selling a house to someone. and there's multiple other things we do to architecture and all that. But one of the things we've been thinking about and talking about as we've been thinking about hospitality more in our business, And one of them, for example, is a simple one is the closing process is so terrible. Like you, you, you're buying this amazing thing. You're buying probably the most expensive thing that you've ever paid for, or, you know, a house and you go to this like title company and some suburban office and you like go through a bunch of papers. And then it's like, yay, you know, and, so we haven't done it yet,

Jaime J. Izurieta

Ha! It's horrible.

Austin Tunnell

Before we kind of embark on our next big project, we'll be selling multiple houses. We really want to literally just sit down and think about how can we create an exceptional closing experience? And I really actually liked that I wrote it down. Like how do we want people to feel? Cause that way we can start there and then back into the experience. And the other thing you're talking about really reminds me, I mean, it's worked so many times because Steve Jobs was talking about this in the eighties during, you know, the revolutionizing the computer industry and saying,

Jaime J. Izurieta

Yes.

Austin Tunnell

You can't start with the hardware. It's not about the hardware. Start with the end user, start with the user experience and back into the hardware. And of course, obviously everything we have today, all of our computers, windows, all of it is, because of the work that Apple did early on. and it's amazing how much, how often I forget this, in, you know, I can get really obsessed with the architecture and the details and all that. And, But it's been over time that I've been increasingly thinking about more the people, you know, at the end. That's really helpful.

Jaime J. Izurieta

So you're not selling houses. You're selling craftsmanship. You're selling commitment. You're selling respect to tradition and respect for materials and respect for locality. So I'm guessing that you are not going to, if you are building in Canada, you're not going to bring, I don't know, wood from Norway or from Argentina. You're going to use the wood from Canada. So you're honoring the local. You're honoring traditions if you are going to cut the wood and if and then you bring this amazing tool that you bought in Switzerland but no the locals have this whatever tool that they are but they have been using for 500 years and it's been perfected for that type of tree if you use it the end result will be much better so you're not selling a house you're selling understanding of local processes you're selling you're selling the the pride of the craftsmanship when you do that and people notice that, this is how you make them feel in a certain way. And what you're designing is what it's called the customer journey, right? When I start to buy a house, when I express my interest to say, this is a nice house, I will make an offer on this house. That is when the customer journey begins. And there's different touch points. I need to call my realtor and my realtor needs to call you and say, Hey, Mr. Austin, I have a client who wants to put an offer on your house. And you said, yes, this is how much that. So there's touch points for you and for me and for the realtor and for the title company and then interactions between me and you, me and the title company, me and the realtor. So you basically design all this as a journey, as a story. There's a hero in that story that needs to go through hell sometimes and then needs to go, needs to climb up and feel like everything He's winning at everything and then he needs to find out that there was a huge problem that he needs to solve. then after he solves that final problem, he will find Ithaca. And this is the journey. This is what you design when you want to solve this problem of, this is a horrible process. I need to change the process. And we do this for retail stores. We design the customer's journey in the same way. We look at

Jaime J. Izurieta

who are the actors, where are the interactions, what are the touch points? And we try to smooth everything so that when people are interacting with the different areas of the store, they behave predictably as we would want that because we are able to place furniture in a particular way or place a mirror in a specific place that I want them to look in the mirror. and see this amazing lamp that's on the other side. they turn around and it happens. People look at the mirror, they see the lamp, they turn around and they are walking past exactly the place that I want them to walk through. So you design the customer journey in the same way when you are selling the house. So that may change the way in which this horrible process of closing the house, closing in a house works.

Austin Tunnell

That's, I love that. even just the, the, the thoughtfulness of the mirror with the light. mean, to guide someone to where you want the mirror. That's really cool. Yeah, I actually, I'm not even kidding. think I'll probably be giving you a call at some point to, hire you to help, help me help us think through this. that's pretty cool and nuanced. when we, when we chatted on the phone, you know, a couple of weeks ago, I think you had brought up the book, unreasonable hospitality. You had read that one, right?

Jaime J. Izurieta

Wow.

Jaime J. Izurieta

Yes.

Austin Tunnell

What did you think of that book? Did you take away anything from that book in addition to the stuff you'd already been going down, the experience economy and all

Jaime J. Izurieta

It's amazing how, so if people have not read this book, this book was written by Will Widara. Will Widara was one of the two owners of 11 Madison Park, which was the number one restaurant in the world. And he and his partner took the restaurant from the creator of the restaurant. forgetting the name Danny, it's a super famous restaurateur. And they took over the restaurant and it was a great restaurant, a very, very, very prestigious and good restaurant, but it wasn't the number one restaurant in the world. And they took it to number one by, and this is the book, by being unreasonable, by treating people in unreasonable ways that made people feel absolutely special, like they the most special person in the world that nobody would do that for them. So he tells stories about families that are eating in the restaurant. And this is the last meal before they leave New York. They have been there visiting for a week and they've never seen snow and it's snowing outside. So after the meal, he brings a car and brings them all snowboards or whatever, sleds. and take them to this little hill in Central Park so that they can go sledding and see and taste the snow for the first time in their lives. And basic things, another couple who was, again, having their last meal in New York City, they hadn't had a hot dog. He went outside to the hot dog cart, bought hot dogs, brought back the hot dogs and served them in 11 miles from Park style. And so these people could have hot dogs, New York City hot dogs before they left. these unreasonable things that they do for people that are incidentally what great businesses do to accommodate their customers. So Disney does it. Of course, restaurateurs and hoteliers, they do it all the time. If you go to your hotel and you find a little chocolate with a note on the pillow, that is, you feel special. That is not unreasonable because everyone is doing that now.

Jaime J. Izurieta

But maybe you mentioned that you like this particular brand of chocolate and you find that specific brand of chocolate in your pillow, on your pillow, and you say, they listen to me. They were open to the expression of desires that I had and they fulfilled some of those desires, albeit in a very, very little tiny way, but they make me feel as special as possible. And I think that's the biggest takeaway that when you have a business in a downtown, when you have a business in a main street, you are first a hospitality business. And this is what you need to do. You, maybe you are a gift shop selling funny socks. Maybe you are a pastry shop selling fantastic pastries. Maybe you are a French baker. Maybe you are a, I don't know, someone who sells eyeglasses, whatever. You are first. hospitality business because when people come to you as opposed to going to Costco to get their their glasses they are visiting downtown because of you. You are the attraction in the downtown amusement park and you need to be hospitable, you need to entertain them, you need to make them go through an amazing experience and you need to guide them through this transformation that changes their lives. Maybe little kid that's getting his first eyeglasses and this is a scary experience for the parents and this is my case, it's a scary experience for the parents because you don't know how the kid is going to do with the eyeglasses when he's seven and he's scared because he doesn't know it's the first time he's gonna have something on his face and it's not the most pleasant experience. If I come into this place and they are unreasonable and they are greeting me and hosting me, me and my family, and making us feel special and making us feel like this experience is actually a positive one, that is when I fall in love with downtown. And if every single great store in downtown does the same thing, everyone falls in love with downtown. And what happens when people fall in love with downtown? Happens what Chesterton said, that Rome is not great. People don't love Rome because it's great.

Jaime J. Izurieta

Rome is great because people love it. So it changes the perspective. You make people fall in love with downtown, immediately civic pride goes up, immediately involvement in volunteering and cleaning and treating the downtown great goes up. So what happens? It becomes this flourishing downtown that everyone wants to see. So you get your Mavericks. This is why the book is called Main Street Mavericks. You get your Mavericks, you get your attractors who are the best position, the most successful businesses, the top performing businesses in downtown and you make them amazing. What's going to happen is the entire downtown will become even more amazing because people will fall in love with it. People will take better care of it and it will look better for everyone else and then more people. So it's a virtual cycle that keeps bringing more people into downtowns. More people means not just more customers. More people means also more investors. It means also more residents. It means also more entrepreneurs. It means also new ideas. And when you bring entrepreneurs and ideas and investors and residents into a place, amazing things happen. And this is how places have grown historically. And this is how our places can keep growing now.

Austin Tunnell

You know, speaking about great downtowns and the hardware comes secondary, you know, to the great businesses and the people and all that. how can the hardware support these kinds of things? Obviously building great hardware, great architecture is not going to make these things happen, but how can it best facilitate it? Is that how you think about it? Facilitating these

Jaime J. Izurieta

Facilitating is good work. It means that architecture is there as, so I see downtown as an event. I see downtown as a moment. And when you see downtown as a moment, what happens is it's part of a story. Story happens through time. And when you see it as a moment, it is time, right? So we start to look at it in that particularly different way I guess and it achieves something that we're not used to which is people wanting to come back to downtown. And I guess that's the whole sauce of it. It's bringing everyone to downtown to interact with downtown. I don't know that answers

Austin Tunnell

Well, think, yeah, I mean, and it's interesting because this is how I think about it as well. And I remember talking, introducing a friend, the idea of, place making and, know, even some of these new urbanist principles and traditional TND stuff and, talking about it. Wasn't, it wasn't completely understanding. And I actually took into a local neighborhood Wheeler district where they've you know, they've got houses and then they've got a coffee shop and a taco shop and a beer place. And it's with the playground right there in these little shops and it's still new. So it's still coming out of the ground and stuff. But afterwards we went there on a Friday night. It was pretty crowded. His kids came, my kids came. When he left, he was describing it to someone else and it kind of clicked for me even like it was really interesting to see someone that didn't know. You know, why is this different than a strip mall, right? Like, why would we do something different than a strip mall with parking in front and all that? And he said, he was telling this guy about it he was like, we weren't going to the taco shop. We were going to Wheeler district, you know? And he's like, that's how you talk about it because you're going to a place. And you also happen to go to the taco shop and you know, whatever. And maybe the taco shop is kind of part of what attracts you there. but I think that thinking so important because I see. just my personal experience in Oklahoma city and Edmond and being respectful, you know, not trying to be mean about it, but a lot of people around these districts and main streets and city officials stuff might not really understand that. Like what downtown could be that it really needs to be a destination. actually really like how you said, it's, it's an event. And you mentioned having to walk through it is actually part of the benefit. That's an asset. You know, for example, Edmond, where we're doing a project. Has this great old main street, really pretty, all these quaint cool shops. And then it's got four lanes of traffic, like so two lanes each way and then, and then angled parking. And of course I'm all, I'm not saying we should shut down the street and have no traffic, but I'm at least saying let's go down to two lanes and make the sidewalks twice as wide. Because right now if you sit outside and the, know, where some of them take up parking spots where you've got some seating and you've got four lanes of traffic on, but you feel like you're sitting next to a highway.

Austin Tunnell

But the people that don't want to do that argue like we, we need the traffic going by. We need the parking right in front of our store so they can come in the store and come out. And that's how we achieve success in a great business. And for me, that's very like old ways of thinking. Maybe that did work at a time before Amazon and Uber eats and all that. I don't know, but it definitely does not work now in my opinion. And, and we're really missing out on Downtown could be in downtown. It was not the only one. I mean, there's a lot of positive things happening to be clear But I see districts all over the country like that where they think traffic and don't be wrong You have to have parking somewhere but it's like the most the busiest downtown Edmund gets and this happens for a lot of districts is when they shut down the streets and Have an event once a month the music festival and then people come and they park Blocks and blocks and blocks away to go and somehow people can't connect that this could act You shouldn't have to throw an event for downtown to be an event in a sense, the way you're saying like downtown should be an

Jaime J. Izurieta

Yes. Number one, when you go to the mall, you park maybe half a mile from the entrance of the mall and you walk that half a mile through horrible cars and pavement. And then you go inside the mall and you walk an extra half mile to whatever store you want to go to. So it's not a matter of, it's very far away. Yes, you're also parking very far away in the mall, but you're willing to go through that because the mall experience is something that you like. It happens the same way in the Main Street. When it's amazing, people will come and they will park far away and they won't mind walking through these amazing streets because these amazing streets are offering something that is, they're offering an experience, they're offering connection, they're offering engagement, they're offering just entertainment and offering just many things, right? So, and those two things I want to say, that's one. And the other one is it depends on the type of city that you want. Maybe there's a type of city that you just pass through and there's a type of city that you come to. And before, before, even before the train, because the big change that I see with cities is not in the 20th century, but when trains came, right? It's a, We were making cities for people until trains came and we started making cities for trains. Even Atlanta is the product of train depot, right? So we're making cities to benefit transportation technology. Before we were making cities for people after the train transportation technology. And then of course the automobile exacerbates everything. But... This is where the big change came. And before, we used to go to cities and naturally stop, naturally reduce the pace of our traveling when we get to the downtown. And this was a natural thing to do. You might be going as fast as you can to between cities. And then when you are arriving, you feel like you

Jaime J. Izurieta

You feel like you're belonging to this place and you slow down and you immerse yourself in the downtown and everything that the downtown has to offer. Right now, if I have these strip malls and these four or six lane roads, I go super fast. I stop at the supermarket. I don't see anything because I just park in the sea of cars and then I come back to my car and I leave. And it's a city just to pass through. And that's not good for downtown. So it depends what type of city you want, I guess. If you want the city to be efficient or if you want the city to be awesome. When the city is awesome, the economy will perform. It will be as efficient as it can be in its scale and it will be comfortable for everyone who's there. If you just want a city to pass by, it really doesn't matter how you make it. It really doesn't matter how it looks. It really doesn't matter how anything. The only thing that matters is how it performs. And it takes a lot of values away from that. If you want a city to be, to offer experience, offer transformation, offer life changing, offer opportunities and everything, that doesn't happen in one day. That doesn't happen in six months. That happens in years, a hundred years, 200 years until the city actually feels like it's a livable place and a living place on its own. The other, you can probably build that in six months and have something performing at 100 % performance in six months. But it's also a matter of your perspective. How long is your vision? And we talked about this in the previous phone call that we had, is how high is your time preference? Do you want it now, or are you willing to wait as long as you need to wait to have something that is amazing and that will be there for the next 200 or 300 years?

Austin Tunnell

Yeah, it seems like the, having a low time, low time preference, having that long -term vision is so essential. and it's interesting because it really does come all the only efficiency really is dehumanizing in so many ways. Like the statistic that comes to mind. And I've repeated this a number of times, but it was from the belonging Institute, like last year or two years ago, it was that 74 % of Americans. feel a sense of non belonging in their own communities. And you know, you could, you could say that's just their subdivision or something, but I actually think that's probably like just because you're really not part of anything, of any coherent place, any coherent identity. and, and you know, when I look at the rates of depression, and suicide and anxiety and the five hours on average of teens spend on social media. Granted, there's not a lot of things going on there, but I think such a big part of it is not actually having a coherent, I don't know, place, civic space, know, real culture, society, all of that. I don't mean like rural living is bad or something like that, but just what our cities could be and how much we're missing out on it. And it's really... hard to look at sometimes.

Jaime J. Izurieta

It is hard. I have a new initiative that's called the Storefront Renaissance League. And my partner in the Storefront Renaissance League, did a webinar with the Congress for the New Urbanism. It's called on the Park Bench. And we were talking about third places and how third places, as they were originally studied, there would be not the home and not the office, but third places where people would meet and where people share and they had a very low barrier of entry so it was just easy to go there and meet unannounced and spontaneous and these were places that pretty much allowed civilization to grow and one of the things that we were talking about is that technology has... so third places are a geographical thing, right? If I go after the office to have a drink in a third place and someone else goes after the office to have a drink in that place, it needs to be a place that's convenient for both of us. I'm not going to drive two and a half hours to go to a third place that is disqualified as a third place. It needs to be somewhere that is convenient, at least a minimal deviation from my journey, from the house to the office to the house. technology allows us to have digital third places. And there's a fantastic book by Silicon Valley philosopher. He's a venture capitalist, but he's become a philosopher. His name is Balaji Srinivasan. And his book is called The Network State. And what he's saying is that technology is now allowing us to form these communities that are entirely digital. So you said you found me on X. And there's a lot of mutuals on X share a lot of ideas, that share a lot of principles, that share... there's a ton of urbanists who are working to make their cities better and have amazing ideas that may coincide in some and disagree in others. But there's community that starts to form there and it starts to filter and bring the people who are really into the ideas of each other and that becomes a strong community as

Jaime J. Izurieta

third place may have become in the past. started to make, I don't know, beer holes where only people who had, I don't know, an affinity for dogs would come because they would bring their dog, it would be a dog place. If you don't like dogs, you don't go because it's gonna be filled with dogs, so what's the point? So in the same way, it gets filtered down and these communities are built online. And at some point, these communities will need to ground themselves. And when they have distilled their principles enough and they ground themselves, they may ground and maybe create new cities, maybe descend in places that need help and be that help and be that change in those places and just bring their ideas geographical, without geographical proximity, but then make that into a geographical proximity. thanks to the ideas, thanks to the community that's formed, thanks to technology, and then grounding that. So I think, yes, there is a very, very big downside of how technology is keeping us apart, but there is a big upside also of how technology is bringing us together. We are sitting in this place in New Jersey and in Oklahoma, very different realities, very different everything because technology that allows us to be together.

Austin Tunnell

Absolutely. I was actually, reminds me of you talking about this. reminds me, I was listening to, I don't know what podcast it was that I can't remember. Maybe Invest Like The Best or something. Dunbar, I forget his first name. He's a psychologist, but Dunbar, the 150 number that a lot of people know of Dunbar's number of like, how many people can you kind of like live in community with? I was listening to his podcast and I didn't realize it, but I always had known the 150.

Jaime J. Izurieta

number.

Austin Tunnell

But he breaks it down into increments. starts with like five people. Like on average, everyone has like five people in their life. So it's like really, really, really close with. And I was immediately knew who the people were in my love. like, huh, that yeah. And then like fifth, and he talks about those people you have to see once a week on average, you know, to be able to maintain their relationship. And then it goes to 15. You had to be able to see those people so often. And he brings up social media. Like once you start getting out of the ripples a little bit farther, when you're at the one 50 and the 500 and what those relationships mean, he was like, you When you're pretty far out, you can maintain some like loose relationships with, you know, through social media and it can kind of bring it in your orbit in your network. But he also talks about there's a, there is absolutely a limit to, to what distance and technology you can do. And you were talking about grounding. It's like ultimately to bring that to a really community level type stuff where people feel a sense of belonging, know, technology actually can't overcome, you know, that aspect once you kind of

Jaime J. Izurieta

Yes.

Austin Tunnell

narrowing in enough, but it just reminded me that it was interesting.

Jaime J. Izurieta

No, it's super interesting. of course, the next step after the 150, probably the 500, the next step is creating that geographical proximity to ground. So it may be that these communities that are forming online, they may evolve into actual communities that make actual change in places that desperately need it.

Austin Tunnell

Absolutely. I think about seeing you or this strong towns movement, I'm going to a conference this year. I'm going to, the people I met online, but now going to meet them in person, you know, and pretty cool. But, what are some of your top, down, if people were wanting to go and visit either a great downtown, of course there's different scales, right? There's big, I don't know, Chicago or something. And then there's much smaller main streets. Do you have any like favorites where you're like, Hey, if you really want to see a great downtown with some amazing businesses and go get inspired, where do you send

Jaime J. Izurieta

Okay, I've actually thought about this. So I am extremely biased towards Savannah. I went to school in Savannah for five years and the way they have kept their original urban fabric and the way they are working to bring back some of the lost urban fabric. that is one of the best urban places probably in the entire and the architecture is fantastic, the interaction of the ground floors with people is fantastic, the way that the city is designed in repeating patterns, it allows you to ground yourself and orient yourself just amazingly. And since it's a place that has been working a lot and has an amazing university with full of creatives there, it means that all the the ground floor places that are not residential, but something else, not just commercial, could be, it could be community or could be whatever, have this great way of interacting with people. So Savannah is probably one of the best places in the entire country to go and see great urbanism. There is South Beach in Miami. Miami Beach is a, It's a very interesting community. has this old Lincoln Road Mall, which is a 50s pedestrian mall outdoors. And it has a few amenities along the mall. But the scale of it is amazing. After COVID, was, it has not been the same after COVID because many businesses have left and they have been replaced with chains and it has devolved a little bit. But it's a wonderful place to be and it's a wonderful place to see great architecture. The proportion of the width versus the height of the buildings is just perfect. They have taller buildings, they have beautiful buildings, they have lot of art deco buildings, which is something that is the style that speaks America, the art deco, and that inspires. Jaime J. Izurieta (01:01:46.682) As soon as you are in contact with an Art Deco building, you get inspired. And I don't know why that is, but you're inspired. So South Beach, there's a place I love in California, which is called Laguna Beach. And I don't know if you've been there, it's just fantastic. It has lots of little streets where you find amazing buildings and it's just a great experience. there's There's a very large difference between the height of the streets and where the beach is. So you get great views of the beach, great terminated vistas. It's just a fantastic place. As far as larger downtowns, I am a huge fan of Seattle. I have not been in Seattle for six or seven years now, so it may or may not have changed. I don't know. But when I was there, I was able to experience this amazing place with great large buildings, the way that large buildings interact with the sidewalk because we are going to be the same size whether we are in a house or in a huge building that occupies the entire block. So the way that that building that occupies the entire block, it's an urbane building, if it's a humane building, it will be the interaction will be good and Seattle has been very good with that. It has been very bad also. The Seattle Public Library is one of the worst buildings I've ever seen in my life. But many other buildings are very good. Big buildings, which is interesting for a big downtown. And of course, New York City, I'm also partial to New York City. This is where the big city that I have very close. And I like downtown. I like the financial district. because it has a lot of art deco buildings that are super inspiring. And these places have incorporated sculpture. These are very tall buildings that you don't feel like they are as tall because they have treated the ground floors in a very humane, urban way. So yeah, that's probably a list of five places that I would say, yeah, Seattle, Laguna Beach, Savannah, downtown Manhattan, and... Austin Tunnell (01:04:07.874) I haven't been to South Beach. I'm with you on all of it. I've been in Laguna was like 16 years ago, but I still remember it, you know, and Savannah really is absolutely wonderful. I need to go to South Beach. That's interesting. think Steve Mouzon was was there in South Beach, right? Did he used to live there? OK, yeah, right. You know, I'm curious, obviously you're very passionate, love. You clearly love what you do, right? Jaime J. Izurieta (01:04:24.452) He was there. He's in Tosca, Alabama now. Austin Tunnell (01:04:37.31) Do you have any thoughts about how you've fallen, not fallen in, but how you've continually pursued what you love? How did you find it? And like for people out there that are looking, you know, career wise, maybe they're not super happy with what doing there. And how have you done that? How have you gone about it, whether intentional or not? Jaime J. Izurieta (01:04:58.84) intentional. Be stubborn and be unreasonable. One of the takeaways from Will Guidera's book is no one reasonable ever created something great. So persistence, stubbornness and reasonab - and reasonability? Just be unreasonable. be stubborn. Be persistent. That's the only thing I can say. It's When I left architecture school, I went back to Ecuador and I said, okay, I am not going to pursue the typical road of finding a job in a big architectural firm and being there for eight years, drawing door frames and then leaving to fund my or found my firm. I am going to work from scratch on my own. It was a hundred times harder. I, it was very hard to get projects. did get one or two projects until I changed the focus. had to pivot. And when I pivoted to urban design and urban economic development, that was a completely different story because I could work for myself while being part of projects. And that was, that was good, but it took a lot of persistence. took a lot of stubbornness. It took a lot of looking at my, my bank account. They say that you have to work until your bank account looks like a phone number. And my bank account looked like a phone number, 911. that, yeah, so there's a lot of times when that happened. And if you are not stubborn and if you are not really unreasonable, you pick up and go and knock on doors and get a job. And then 20 years later, you find yourself that you could have done something. That is the advice, be unreasonable, be stubborn, and be Austin Tunnell (01:07:03.51) That's good. That really is. I would say I would agree with that in my own life. Yeah, mean, that's good. What small thing makes you happy? Jaime J. Izurieta (01:07:07.449) That's what everyone needs. Jaime J. Izurieta (01:07:20.698) birds chirping in the Austin Tunnell (01:07:23.212) That, yeah, I think I'm getting older because that has been a recent thing for me where I'm like, man, those birds are, well, the sound is so nice and peaceful. That's funny. Jaime J. Izurieta (01:07:32.466) It is nice and peaceful and I love to take long walks in my town and it's just a sound of... We're not doing everything wrong. If birds are still living among us, it means we're not doing everything wrong. Austin Tunnell (01:07:52.214) Hmm, that's good. Do you have a favorite trip that you've ever done that really you still remember that inspired you that stuck with Jaime J. Izurieta (01:08:03.098) Yes, to Istanbul. Istanbul is, if I would have to define it, it's discovery around every corner. And you are in the European side, and it's one of the oldest cities in the world. And it shows, and it has stones, and it has caves, and it has the Roman cistern that you go. underneath and it still keeps water and has like these huge medusa heads that they were apparently they were capitals for some huge pillars at some point and they're just there and and of course they have put some different light shows and everything there it just feels amazing and then you go to the the old churches that are now mosques the the Hagia Sophia which is probably one of the greatest buildings of the history of Christianity and you're seeing this and then you cross the bridge and you go to the Asian side and it looks like Paris. It's Paris, it's like Champs -Élysées in Paris. It's huge avenue and along the avenue you are seeing all the high fashion brands that have created these amazing modern buildings and you see your Fendi's and your Burberry's and it's like, dude, where am I? And coffee shops and it is, it really looks like Paris. And then you can go to places that are over a thousand years old and you can go to places that have been created in past year and they are as modern as anything that you find anywhere. And so the sheer contrast between the very, very old and the incredibly modern, that was an interesting thing. And of course, being architect and preservationist, looking at those buildings and being able to be inside those buildings and being able to be in little streets that you just walk. Jaime J. Izurieta (01:10:10.604) you turn a corner and you see a building, huge mosque or whatever. It's probably the best market I've ever been in my life, the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. It's just fantastic. So yeah. Austin Tunnell (01:10:26.996) Wow. I've never been, but it sounds absolutely wonderful. I would love to go. And let's end with this. Why should we be optimistic about the future? Jaime J. Izurieta (01:10:30.916) in years of Jaime J. Izurieta (01:10:44.294) Why should we be optimistic about the future? Because we have been in a process of savage centralization for the past probably 200 years since the French Revolution probably. in which larger national governments are overseeing more and more and corporations become larger and organizations become larger. Everything just becomes larger. schools used to be tiny and multi -grade schools and now we have these huge suburban buildings that have I don't know maybe one two three four classes per grade that are separated and they have these incredible infrastructures and and every building is now larger and every car is now larger and cars can be controlled centrally by someone with a switch if someone wants to i don't know turn off all the teslas in the world they just flick a switch and every tesla just powers down and stays where they are because they can control it centrally and everything is being is being centralized and now in these tumultuous years that we are living everything's starting to decentralize and we're getting social media and so news organizations are not able to just push whatever narrative they have because they're social media and people choose to choose to look for the people that they trust they choose to look for trust in social media and that can be a person -to -person thing Jaime J. Izurieta (01:12:31.202) education also education starts to grow incredibly and then we have universities that have endowments that are larger than the economies of entire countries in Latin America and so the the largest endowments of you know the Ivy Leagues and the the bigger universities here they're actually larger than economies like El Salvador or or Nicaragua or Bolivia. Huge! And at the same time, we have these horrible crisis of student loans. When those universities could easily just not charge half of their students, you can study for free and you don't need to get into this life threatening debt. so the trust in those institutions is also being crumbling down. And now you can get an education just by going into YouTube probably better education because you choose how you want to be educated and you choose what you want to learn and you choose how you want to implement your knowledge and you choose what problems you want to solve and what solutions you want to implement. so I think we have huge reason to be hopeful for the future because everything is decentralizing and everything is falling into how I can contribute to make the world better. What is my contribution? for the environment. What is my contribution to build up my community? What is my contribution to create beauty? What is my contribution for anything in the world? It all boils down to what is my individual contribution. And I think that's how communities are made. I think that's how communities are strengthened. And I think the future will see a lot of that. We'll see a lot of individual contributions. We'll see a lot of individual people who finding themselves and coming together and joining forces from the ground up, from the grassroots and saying, hey, this is a better solution. We don't need whatever solution is coming from above. We are going to implement that. So decentralization, that is why we can be incredibly hopeful for the future. Austin Tunnell (01:14:45.186) I love that answer. This could have been a whole podcast of its own. So we'll hold off for another time when I, hopefully I get to meet you at some point. Cause I would love to talk more about that. How can people find you, know, your ex profile, your website book, even hire you all Jaime J. Izurieta (01:14:52.784) you can have. Jaime J. Izurieta (01:15:02.97) Yes, please hire me. Okay, so my website is storefrontmastery .com. So that's the easiest way to just find all the information about me, storefrontmastery .com. I am on X, I am in Facebook, Facebook Storefront Mastery. I am in Instagram, also Storefront Mastery. I am LinkedIn. If you look for the Storefront guy, that's gonna be me on LinkedIn. So yeah, the easiest is just go to storefrontmastery .com and you'll find all the information there. Also all the information about what I do and how I can Austin Tunnell (01:15:43.998) Awesome. Well, Jamie, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you today and look forward to staying in touch and hopefully talking again in the not too distant Jaime J. Izurieta (01:15:52.216) Absolutely. We also need to touch the Adobe construction part. I would love to talk to you about that. It's a whole different topic. Awesome. Thank you, Austin. Austin Tunnell (01:15:57.046) I know. Austin Tunnell (01:16:00.911) We'll do this again. Bye.