Good morning, everyone. Im scott mcgrew. We pay a lot of attention to very young people these days, the head of snapchat is 25, John Collison who created the Company Stripe with his brother, 25, though i think 24 when last on press here. Theyre smart people making the world a better place and we love talking to them. But every once in a while its nice to get a little perspective from someone who is not in fifth grade when pets. Com ran those dog puppet commercials. Somebody like longtime valley investor michael kwatinetz, 25 once, just not as recently. Mike earneds the title number one stock picker on wall street until he turned venture capitalist, his blog sound bites are read by smart investors and a general partner and has a ph. D. From cal berkeley, one of the most authoritative voices on Education Technology today joined by mike cia of investors business daily and [ inaudible ] graham of fortune. Let me ask you the way i set that up, i want to look back at some of the things youve
business you aren t able to do that as much unless you have this like group of retail stores. the company s most expensive and possibly riskiest test-and-learn project involved real estate. the goal was to figure out what store locations could make the most money. the idea of testing different retail locations was because we want to have a good plan for growth. and you could quickly say the first store was a downtown location. let s get in all downtowns around the country and let s expand that way. that s not very it s not a big thought. what we wanted to do was test a suburban mall, a suburban main street. and that s what we did in the first year. and it s sfof do that. it s expensive to do that. while the idea isn t necessarily cost effective, gaskins says the long-term goal is to save cash and better position marbles for expansion. we ve made the decision to open 15 downtown locations and really we should have been a suburban mall concept.
our philosophy is to try to test and learn quickly. lindsay gaskins says everything about her business is an education. the founder and ceo of chicago-based marbles the brain store is running her business based on a very flexible philosophy. people maybe don t think about all the opportunity that you might have. gaskins approach is best described as test and learn. the concept is to test out ideas and learn from the results. my thought i hope my team s thought is like let s test it out. we try to be really efficient and try things really quickly. and move off of them quickly. part of the plan involves testing products. all of which are designed to promote brain health. gaskins and scott brown, the director of product development, have a very clear mandate. first off, it has to be something that will be engaging and fun for people.
corporate world. you re a small business owner. you have the opportunity to test a million things because you have control over it, and you can easily get in touch with your store manager and have them try something. gaskins admits that she and other marbles leaders try to keep their test-and-learn philosophy in check. we have to kind of hold ourselves back sometimes so we don t create operational anxiety across the whole company. but we do want to test new things. we want to try new bundles of products. we want to try different display ideas. the team would rather make the necessary missteps now in order to avoid problems in the future. you can t learn anything if you re doing it right you learn from your mistakes. so you have to set yourself up to go through those mistakes. and if you are so naive to think that you are brilliant and never make mistakes, you re doomed.
we got into short-term leases. so that s how we are doing it, everything s short term. we re now starting to get into longer term leases in order to secure that position as we grow. after figuring out which locations are the best for business, the idea is now being applied to stores in illinois and minnesota. the main street location, both suburban and downtown, could be great stores for us. and we hope they re successful. they re not as repeatable. but a suburban mall, there are a lot of those. that s what we did in 2010. they re all mall locations. gaskins says opening in malls automatically means more foot traffic, which is what marbles needs to get customers in the door. we don t have a huge marketing budget. we re not a huge company, we re small. we re paying for that real estate so that when someone walks by there intrigued, they see the name, they re like, what is this place, i want to go into the brain store. she s grateful to be able to test and learn with her busine