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At the 2026 Boutique Hotel Owners Conference, two hotel founders explained how retail grew from an afterthought into a revenue line, a marketing chan...
November 12, 2026 – 11 min read
At the 2026 Boutique Hotel Owners Conference, two hotel founders explained how retail grew from an afterthought into a revenue line, a marketing channel, and a way for guests to take a property home.
The hoodie is pink and reads “Feel Better Club,” the name of the membership program at Everwild Nordic Spas. When Sky Mitchell, founder and CEO of Basecamp Resorts and Everwild, spots a stranger wearing one, she has been known to chase them down the street. “Oh my gosh, I love your hoodie,” she tells them. “And they have no idea who I am.”
That moment, a guest choosing to carry a property’s name out into the world, sat at the center of a lively session at this year’s Boutique Hotel Owners Conference. Tracy Georgiou, founder and CEO of the brand development firm Long Weekend, moderated a conversation with Mitchell and Kimberly Walker, founder and creative director of Nomada Hotel Group, which operates a small portfolio of properties on California’s Central Coast.
Georgiou set the stakes early. The era of “slapping a logo on a keychain or a mug and setting it next to the front desk and calling it retail,” she said, is over. Both founders came to retail from very different directions, and both have learned, sometimes the hard way, what it takes to make it work.
Walker’s inspiration was El Cosmico, Liz Lambert’s former campsite hotel in Marfa, Texas. “Their retail was so fantastic, and it was such a fun part of the hotel experience,” she said. When she dug in with the property’s general manager, she learned something that changed how she thought about retail: a significant share of El Cosmico’s online buyers had never been to Marfa at all. Even with the hotel closed for redevelopment, its products still sell online. “That tells you a lot,” Walker said. “People love it.”
For small properties, the case is also financial. Nomada’s hotels range from 17 to 33 rooms, and three began as motels. “For all of you who operate those properties outside of the luxury space,” Walker said, “revenue and profit are very important to find outside of just your traditional room stay.” Her own retail now runs from postcards and a coffee program to furniture the group designs for its hotels.
That retail now has a name of its own. Nomada Deco, the group’s shop, sells what it calls souvenirs from the open road, on property and online. It carries the hotels’ look and point of view to people who may never have checked in, the same lesson Walker took from El Cosmico. It also ties into Nomada’s membership program: members receive a discount at Nomada Deco alongside their room perks, so the shop and the hotels reinforce each other.
Mitchell arrived by accident. Her background is real estate. “I was all about the real estate,” she said. “What’s the IRR? Are we going to make investors money?” Brand sat somewhere in the back of her mind.
Nordic spas changed that. The experience, built on a cycle of hot, cold, rest, and repeat, is intimate: guests spend the day in robes and slippers. “All of a sudden it was like, well, maybe we should make a hoodie,” she said. They did, and guests bought them. “I’m like, oh my gosh, people like to buy things at a hotel. Who knew?”
The lesson went deeper than hoodies. “When somebody experiences something at a Nordic spa and hotel, like a lotion, a coffee, a robe, something that’s touching your skin, they want to buy it,” she said. “And then they want to put it on and be brought back to that moment.” Every sale also turns a guest into an ambassador, which is why, she said, “it’s so important that what you sell them is really in line with your brand.”
For owners who are, in Georgiou’s phrase, “retail curious,” both founders gave the same first instruction: look to the guest.
“What are the things that the guest compliments you on? What are the signatures of the property that guests come to see?” Walker said. Those answers point toward a product line.
Walker also stressed range. Some guests want a signature piece, some want a small souvenir for a friend, and some simply forgot their toothpaste. A good assortment covers the basics, a few branded signatures, and items specific to the property.
She was candid about an early misstep. Nomada started with too many expensive signature products, such as the hammocks that are central to the Hotel Ynez experience and cost more than a night’s stay. “It’s really important to speak to that guest,” she said, “and then also speak to the guest that wants the souvenir that is less than $20.”
Mitchell learned her own lesson early. “Back to real estate 101,” she said. “Don’t just throw things on a wall and think people will buy them, because I tried that and it doesn’t work.” Where products sit along the guest journey matters. “People want to touch things, people want to feel things, and people want to be connected to the things that they touched and they felt during the experience.”
The fix was to ask guests directly what they liked and what they wanted, and to listen. That feedback reshaped Everwild’s lotions and incense as well as its clothing. Some winners came from pairing with a like-minded brand: branded Yeti mugs, a natural fit for a mountain property, “sell like hotcakes,” Mitchell said.
Her rule for the rest is simple trial and error. “If something doesn’t sell, don’t buy it again,” she said. “If something’s selling like crazy, buy more.” And the service around the sale has to match the service across the property.
Walker pointed to the advantage hotels hold over any shop. “In a retail store, you walk in, you see the product, you buy it, you leave,” she said. “In a hotel, people can try the sheets that you sell them.”
The more a product is part of the stay, the more naturally it sells. And the right vendor relationships mean a hotel does not need to carry the inventory. Walker described working with a mattress supplier to drop-ship directly to guests. “A guest says, ‘Oh, I love this night’s stay.’ Great, you can purchase it,” she said. “You don’t ever have to take delivery of the mattress.”
Nomada also built its retail out of its design. When furnishing River Lodge and Farmhouse, the team ordered extra of some pieces, including beds, and folded them into the program from the start.
Inventory is where Walker has made her costliest mistakes. Signature products often come with high minimum orders, sometimes a hundred or more units that a small property may not sell for months. Working with existing vendors, and selling across multiple properties, helps absorb those minimums.
At Everwild, curation starts with what guests have already experienced in the spa: what they smelled, touched, and used. Then come the essentials, chosen with care. “People forget their bathing suit all the time,” Mitchell said, “so we were very specific about which bathing suit brands we carry and why.”
The company, currently in Canada and expanding into the United States, stocks local brands wherever possible, so the assortment differs by location. “We love all of our brands,” Mitchell said, “but we want to be as close to home as possible.”
Retail is a department, Walker said, and small properties rarely have the staff for a new one. What they need first is a point of view. At Nomada, that comes from ownership, and it runs from design through operations to retail. Once that point of view is clear to the team on site, retail becomes something they want to take part in.
Both founders named the front desk as the best sales channel. “When you get them involved in the journey, they are your salespeople,” Walker said. Retail also gives staff something to talk about with guests beyond how they slept.
Mitchell added a lever: money. “I do give them financial incentives to sell things, and it works,” she said. “They make more money. We’re happy. We have better margins from retail. And we have more people running around being brand ambassadors. So it’s really a win-win-win.”
Mitchell’s first Everwild Nordic spa and hotel opened a year ago without a retail plan. A few weeks in, she arrived to find the shelves empty. “Where’d you guys hide all the stuff?” she asked. The team had sold it, and no one knew how to reorder. “We ran out of hoodies. Are you kidding me?”
The lesson: decide before launch who tracks inventory and who reorders, whether through technology or a person with clear responsibility. “Like anything in hospitality, you need a system that works,” she said.
Walker admitted to her own ambitions at the outset. “I wanted El Cosmico sales and El Cosmico retail program from the start,” she said. Nomada launched retail last year, and it was harder than she expected. Hiring a dedicated retail manager can be a heavy lift, especially with California labor costs. Her advice: “Start very small and with your current team.”
Both founders described healthy retail margins today, with room still to grow. Walker said Nomada is working toward its target as the program matures.
For Mitchell, the margin is almost beside the point, at least for now. “For me, the retail experience, especially anything that we brand Feel Better Club or Everwild Nordic Spas, it’s not about the money at all,” she said. “It’s about the amazingness of someone being out there and wanting to wear something that says my brand.” Retail has been one part of a larger shift, from a company led by real estate to one led by brand. With demand now proven, she expects margins to matter more as the program grows.
Georgiou summed up why retail is worth the effort: “It’s part of the journey. It’s part of your story. It’s a line on the P&L. It does many things.”
From the audience, Maya Mallick of The Culver Hotel asked a question every owner weighing a candle or a bath amenity eventually faces: when should a hotel sell its own brand, and when should it partner with an established one?
Walker answered with advice she had once resisted. When Nomada opened its first property, Granada Hotel & Bistro, she wanted to launch proprietary bath amenities. Her consultant stopped her. “He said, ‘You haven’t earned that yet,'” she recalled. The hotel first needed to align with brands that reflected who it aspired to be, so guests could understand it quickly. Only after earning repeat guests would it make sense to collaborate or launch its own products.
“It went against everything I wanted to do,” Walker said, “and it was also incredibly smart advice.” Nomada now partners with a local company on organic, sustainable bath amenities and has developed a signature scent for each property. Every product, she said, needs a story alongside it. “They want to feel like they’re a part of this boutique hotel experience in their retail as well.”
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