A few days after I graduated from high school, my mother delivered a loving but non-negotiable directive:

“Go get a job and don’t come back until you have one. You are not spending the entire summer doing nothing.”

At that point, my life experience consisted of school and the barn, where I happily spent six years hanging out with my horse and competing in hunter/jumper shows. Other than one magical summer as an elf at Santa’s Village, I had never held a real job and had absolutely no idea where to start.

But I did remember long, glamorous afternoons shopping with my Mom at places like Bergdorf’s and Lord & Taylor, so I knew one thing for sure: I liked stores.

So, I headed into the nearest mall and applied at exactly one store: T.A. Chapman & Company. I had zero interest in working anywhere else and proceeded to drive the store manager crazy with daily calls until he hired me.

Chapman’s had three jewel-box junior department stores in mall locations, and a four-story Romanesque Revival, absolute palace of a flagship store, on the main drag in downtown Milwaukee. To this day, I still love a great department store. There’s nothing like it.

That job was the beginning of my retail career and self-appointed retail geek.

Since then, I’ve been an apparel buyer, managed chain stores (The Gap was my favorite), and led visual merchandising and marketing for a franchise company with nearly 1,000 stores. I’ve been a corporate executive, co-founded KIZER & BENDER Speaking with Rich, partnered with Nicole Leinbach Hoffman on the Independent Retailer Conference – a pop-up event hosted inside some of the nation’s biggest trade shows – and served on several boards, most recently STIMULATE, Nicole’s latest venture that has taken the B2B sexual wellness community by storm.

When I am not working with indie retailers, I spend the majority of my time speaking at meetings, markets, and conferences, teaching all things retail. It’s been almost 50 years since I first walked into T.A. Chapman’s, and I’m still a retailer at heart. I may only work the sales floor during store makeovers, or when I beg a client to let me jump in during the Christmas rush, but I still love it like crazy.