What causes projects to go over budget? Is it late design changes? Poor vendor communication? Value engineering gone wrong?
At RetailSpaces Spring 2026, Wayne Schuster, Vice President of Store Development at Total Wine & More; Kelly Radford, Vice President of Facility Services at CubeSmart; and Dillon Harding, Director of Construction at Kering, joined RetailSpaces moderator Zia Durrani to tackle those questions head-on.
Drawing on experience across beverage retail, self-storage, and luxury fashion, the panel explored where project costs spiral, which cost-saving measures are worth making, and how retailers can deliver better outcomes without sacrificing the customer experience.
Start with the biggest misconception in the room. When Harding, who oversees construction for Kering, the luxury group behind Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga, shows up on a project, vendors often assume the budget is irrelevant. “They go, ‘Oh well, we can pad the numbers a little bit. It’s luxury. They’ve got the money for it.’” It does not work that way. “We still have budgets to meet, and we still have to do value engineering throughout a project to make sure we’re hitting those targets.”
The HVAC debate, the durability-of-finishes conversation, the question of whether to limp along aging infrastructure for another three years: all of it comes up on luxury builds exactly as it does everywhere else. The cost-per-square-foot benchmark is higher. The pressure is the same.
Every panelist had a version of the same story: a cost-saving move that passed the spreadsheet test and failed in real life.
At Total Wine, the team looked at removing garage doors from the wine education rooms to save on sprinkler costs. The owners signed off. Then they walked the finished store. The garage doors went back in. “Even though it looked good on paper, at the end of the day we’re trying to get that experience to the customer,” Schuster said. “We wanna make it open. We wanna make it inviting.”
Radford’s go-to example is flooring. Go cheaper, and two years in you are ripping it out and replacing it anyway. But the one she comes back to most: HVAC. “Can’t we just do some Band-Aids on it?” Almost always followed by closing the store and bringing in temporary coolers during opening week. “If you need to fight it with finance, it’s not a fight, it’s an education. Give them the total cost of ownership. Once you do, finance is going to agree.”
Ask the three where their cost overruns really originate, and you get one answer with three different examples: the teams are siloed.
“The design team might not know the impact of the material they’re selecting,” Radford said. “They might not know that certain lighting gives off heat and it’s going to impact the HVAC system. If that collaboration doesn’t happen, you’re going to hit every one of those points on cost overruns.”
For Harding, the biggest culprit is late design changes. The bigger and more high-profile the store, the more eyes are on it, and the more changes keep coming. “We’re about to mobilize a GC on site, and suddenly someone asks if we can flip two rooms in the layout. That’s where I start to lose sleep.” His goal is always the same: lock the floor plan at the end of schematic design and hold it.
The most practical insight of the panel came from Radford, and it applies well beyond fixtures. At a previous company, her team needed to serve three different store tiers: premium, mid-tier, and concept. Rather than building three different fixture specs, they built one. The bones were identical. The finishes were swapped at the end.
They called it the BMW system: Brass, Mirrors, and Walnut for the high-end stores; different finishes for the rest. Because the base fixture was the same, they could pre-order for the full year’s pipeline before deciding which tier each store would be. Lead times stopped being a problem. “It was a significant savings, and it worked out really well.”
Harding uses a version of the same logic across Kering’s brands. Walk into a Bottega Veneta versus a Boucheron and they look completely different. But look closer: almost all of them use some form of high-density shelving. Standardize the bones, bulk-purchase the back-of-house, and let the finishes do the brand work. “Even if the stores on the surface look really different, the bones and the back-of-house elements are often very similar.”
Durrani asked the panel: when you walk into another brand’s store, what gives away that they cut corners? The answers were telling.
Harding goes straight to the ceiling. “A good ceiling layout is one of those things that just disappears into the background ideally. But if it’s bad, if it’s cluttered, if it’s not organized, I’ll notice it right away. I can tell really quickly from walking into a store: was this an A, B, or C tier store for you based on how much you spent on the ceiling.” Most customers never look up. He always does.
Schuster looks at the exterior first. Signs and monument signage. “That’s your image, and that’s the first thing you’re gonna see coming into a store.” He admits to walking in competing stores with his wife, touching fixtures, checking construction quality, looking behind displays until a concerned manager appears. His actual test: ask his wife what kind of flooring they had. If she says she doesn’t know but it was clean, it passed.
All three landed on the same closing point. The vendors who save you money are not the ones who win on price. They are the ones who tell you the truth.
“Knowing that I have a vendor that I trust, that’s going to tell me, ‘Hey, I can’t make that on time’ or ‘I can’t meet the number you’re looking for and here’s why,’” Radford said. “Those relationships are critical. Trust is critical.” Harding put it plainly: “Having trusted partners who you can pick up the phone and call when you need a decision fast, knowing the person on the other end is going to give you real useful feedback, even if it’s not what you want to hear, is absolutely invaluable.”
Schuster added one more thing. With four or five stores opening in a single month, Total Wine deliberately carries two vendors for the same category. Not because they don’t trust either of them. Because they trust the redundancy.