Paco Underhill, Author of “Why We Buy”
Today, my guest is Paco Underhill, the Founder of Envirosell Inc. A consulting firm that does research, Envirosell has worked in 50 countries and with more than one-third of the Fortune 100 list. Envirosell’s largest clients include stores, restaurants, bank branches and technology companies trying to understand consumer behavior in store, in home, on the job, and on-line.
Paco is the author of popular books including Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping out in 28 languages and used in MBA programs, design schools, and retailing training programs across the world. His latest book is How We Eat: The Brave New World of Food and Drink (Simon & Schuster). He has worked in 50 countries talking to merchants, marketers, bankers, technologists, hospital groups, government agencies, cultural institutions, non-profits, trade institutions, and most importantly students. As the son of a diplomat who grew up around the world – he has a global perspective and believes in Edutainment – laughter, and education are intertwined.
In this candid conversation, Paco shared the real stories behind his unique path to becoming a retail anthropologist, the biological constants that dictate consumer behavior, and his vision for the future of sustainable shopping.
1. The Coping Mechanism. Paco revealed that his lifelong career as an acute observer originally stemmed from a severe childhood stutter. Because his father was a diplomat who moved the family to a new country every 18 months, Paco was constantly thrust into unfamiliar environments. Embarrassed to ask questions due to his speech impediment, he learned to rely entirely on meticulous observation to understand his surroundings. He effectively turned this childhood coping mechanism and handicap into a massive, global profession.
2. The Illusion of Self-Reporting. Having pioneered the use of cameras to study interior spaces for early clients like Citibank and Burger King, Paco strongly warns against relying purely on asking people questions or analyzing sales data. He notes that sales and clickstream data only provide a myopic view of where a business is “winning,” completely missing the vital insights of where it is losing. Furthermore, he routinely proves through his field experiments—such as following people around Bryant Park or Walmart—that what consumers say they did and what the photographic evidence shows they actually did are often entirely different.
3. The Biological Constants. Paco explained that finding quick, easy victories in retail often simply comes down to observing basic biological constants. For example, because 90% of people are right-handed, they naturally carry or push items with their left hand to keep their right hand free to pick things up. He also demonstrated this physical reality by identifying that the seating in high-end women’s shoe sections was often built too low for a 40-year-old woman to easily stand back up. Simply adjusting the seat height at major retailers like Macy’s and Selfridges drastically increased their sales conversion ratios.
4. Beyond the Cardboard Box. When predicting the future of retail, Paco stressed that the industry desperately needs to evolve from merely recycling to actively repurposing. He noted that the modern obsession with home delivery is actually increasingly clumsy and vulnerable in dense urban areas like Brooklyn or Harlem, even if it works perfectly in gated suburban communities in San Jose. To combat packaging waste, he is currently working with natural food retailers to explore radical repurposing concepts—such as creating shipping boxes out of birdseed so consumers can simply feed the packaging to their chickens instead of throwing cardboard in a recycling bin.
