PODCAST: Leap Co-CEO Amish Tolia On Digital Brands' Growing Physical Retail Demands

Bisnow's audio series, Bisnow Reports, examines every facet of the international commercial real estate industry — from the murky future of retail and office to real estate’s reckoning with diversity to the effects of climate change on the built world, and so much more. You can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music, or scroll down to listen in your browser.

On this episode of Bisnow Reports, we sit down in SoHo with Amish Tolia, the co-founder of Leap. The 4-year-old company leases retail stores on long-term deals with landlords and then subleases them to retailers on flexible terms.

Many of Leap’s brands are online outfits that haven't had a physical location before, and the firm amalgamates shopping patterns, like e-commerce sales, foot traffic and local demographics, and uses that data to inform which brands go where.

On the podcast, Tolia discusses why physical locations are of increasing importance to retailers, working with the real estate community and changes Apple has made that rendered a company like Leap even more necessary.

“Last year, Apple came out with a pretty big update to their tracking, so now if you go on your iPhone, you open any application, you'll probably notice that they'll ask you upfront, ‘Do you want to share your location data?’" Tolia said. "… That's obviously impacted a lot of the ad targeting capabilities for Facebook, because Facebook was reliant on that data for a long time. So what that has really done is that [now], people are really running back into [brick-and-mortar] retail pretty darn quick.”