Reading rooms since I was ten
Before sunrise on school mornings, I ran a Hoover across the living room rug so the floor would be clean when my mother got home from a night shift. Then I stood where I could see her face at the door.Notice, test, repeat, watch what comes back. I have been running that loop for forty-six years: in a classroom in Matsuyama, in a DJ booth, in a boardroom with a $60 million ad budget, and now with a tape measure around my neck at a Men's Wearhouse.Same loop. Different rooms.
Now
Store Lead at a Men's Wearhouse in Jacksonville. Mornings start with a pile of dress shirts that need refolding and end with a man who needs a suit by Saturday and first thought about it on Thursday.The rest of the week goes to The Goldilocks Journey, which is in revision, and to essays on Substack, Medium, and LinkedIn.Home is Ponte Vedra with Caro and our three kids, who have heard every story in the book and disagree with me about the details.Open to remote and flexible work in ecommerce, digital, and marketing operations. I lean toward leadership roles and I do good work without the title. What I want at this point is to be good at the work and to see it make a difference.Also open to speaking and collaborations. What I offer there is what the book offers: something I lived, told as a story, from an angle you have probably not heard it from.
Work
I have been putting men in suits since 1997 and running e-commerce since before it had its own budget line. Those have never been two careers.The first job was a Bachrach store in Chicago. I sold menswear on the floor for eight years, and then the company handed me its website, which was two percent of the business and treated like a rounding error. I grew it seventy percent and stopped going back to the floor.Fifteen years of building digital functions followed. Comparison-shopping feeds and marketplaces at Dreams Retail. Post-merger marketing integration at Fanatics. A team of eighteen and $60 million in annual online ad spend at Venus Fashion, where online spend passed the catalog in 2018. A digital strategy practice I helped build and staff at Something Digital and Rightpoint. A nine-site SEO portfolio at HC Brands.The through line is unglamorous and it still pays: product data, structured markup, and clean measurement. The catalog layer I spent years automating for shopping feeds is the same layer that now decides whether an AI assistant can see a product at all.Then the fitting room again. I took a seasonal job at Men's Wearhouse in December 2024 and was made Store Lead the following August. Twenty-eight years after Bachrach, I am measuring shoulders and reading buyers face to face. The reading is better than it was.
Scope
- Teams to 18, through six direct reports
- Online ad spend to $60M a year
- Nine-site and 20+ client portfolios
- Shopify Plus and Adobe Commerce, 10+ platform migrations
- Amazon, eBay, and Walmart marketplaces
- GA4, Looker Studio, Search Console, SQL
Recently certified
AI fluency and strategy through Anthropic, Google, and the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, where I also finished specializations in Business Analytics and in Strategic Leadership and Management. I use these tools daily on the book and on the job, which is a different thing from having read about them.
The Goldilocks Journey
How I Stopped Looking for the "Just Right" · September 2027
Goldilocks does not find the right chair and settle in. The chair breaks under her and she runs out of the house. The fable everyone remembers as a story about finding what fits ends in disruption.Mine broke five times between 2014 and 2023. The first time, it took most of a year to understand what had happened. By the fifth, I was working the problem before I reached the parking lot. That compression is what I wanted to write down.The book moves through four tensions: confidence and humility, freedom and stability, work and rest, self and others. It reads them across a dance floor, a Matsuyama classroom, a gym, a boardroom, and a dinner table, because the same tension shows up in all of them wearing different clothes.There are no prescriptions here. I am in the middle of it. What I can offer is the shape of the territory and an honest account of where the ground gave way.Fourteen chapters, five interludes built out of records, and about 44,000 words.
For family and friends
You are the reason there is a manuscript. Here it is in whatever format is easiest for you. These are working drafts and they change. The links stay the same.
Read it in a browser. No download, no app. About three hours and forty minutes. Read online)PDF. Typeset like a paperback. Refreshed whenever a revision goes in. Download the PDFEPUB. For Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, or your phone. Download the EPUBAudiobook draft. Unofficial and machine-narrated. A synthetic voice still trips over a few of the Japanese and Filipino words. Listen
Tell me where it drags. That is more useful to me than being told it is good.
Writing
The Goldilocks Experiment has run on LinkedIn since October 2024: fifteen-plus issues on career disruption, pattern recognition, and the parts of work that never make it into a job description. Essays also go up on Substack and Medium, including chapters of the book once they clear revision.Two to start with: "More Than Words: A Career Start in Japan and What I Brought Home with Me," and "Respecting the Yin and Yang of Productivity."
Off the clock
I taped songs off the radio as a kid and always hit the record key half a second late, so every song on my cassettes opened a beat in. The DJs talked over the endings, or shoved one song into the next, and my tapes carried these bruised seams where one track crashed into the body of another. The seams bothered me more than the missing intros did. Whether you could get from this song to that one without the bruise turned into a thirty-year question.
The booth
DJ ReCreator. It started on a turntable I bought with McDonald's money and a resident slot at a Chicago club called Skylight in 1990. Ten years later it became Sound ReCreation, a DJ business I ran for fifteen years, mostly weddings, plus the wedding-services company I built alongside it. In Matsuyama I ran Latin dance nights. At Rightpoint, the consulting firm where I was running digital strategy, I DJed the staff talent show, which is its own kind of full circle.The mixes are old and the transitions hold up. Mellow Mix 1996 is the one people play.
Dashing
Seven hundred and eighty-seven pins of menswear, and a Store Lead badge. Those are related. Tailoring, shoes, and the long argument between a structured shoulder and a soft one.
The kitchen
Filipino food I grew up on, Japanese food I learned to miss, and an unresolved position on fried rice. Ten sections of recipes and counting. On Instagram this lives under oishii.
Moving
Weights, walks, and the thing I keep relearning: the body decides before I do. Check out the fitness highlights. Read the story.
Familia and natsukashii
Two of my Instagram highlights are named in two different languages, which is the most accurate thing about me on the internet. Family on one side. On the other, natsukashii, the Japanese word for the fondness that arrives with knowing a thing is behind you.Caro and I met in Matsuyama and have been married twenty-eight years. León, Luna, and Sofia are the reason the book exists and most of the reason it took this long.
Contact
If you're in the middle of a transition, career or otherwise, or want to talk about speaking, media and other opportunities, reach out.I read every message and respond when I have something useful to say.
Thank you
Thanks for your note.