Paco Underhill

Paco Underhill is the founder and Managing Director of Envirosell, a behavioural market research and consulting company. He is also the author of the international best selling book, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, which has been published in 27 foreign languages. In the book, Underhill dissects the behaviour of everyday consumers in a most informative and entertaining fashion. His latest book, What Women Want, was published in July 2010. In it, he reviews how the changing status of women is affecting the physical world we live in.

After a career in urban land use planning, Underhill formed Environmental Analysis & Planning Consultants in 1979 and began to apply his research methodologies to issues in retail environments. The firm changed its name in 1989 to Envirosell, Inc. Envirosell is a leading research and consulting agency for stores, banks, restaurants, and consumer product manufacturers.

The firm specializes in analyzing the interaction between people and products, and people and commercial spaces. Its Fortune 500 client list includes: The Gap, Ann Taylor, CompUSA, Unilever, Gillette, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, McDonalds, Starbucks, Citibank, and NationsBank. The firm’s clients also include e-commerce ventures like Yahoo and innovative developers like The Rouse Company.

Envirosell’s work has been profiled in The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, Fortune, and Fast Company Magazine. The New Yorker piece published in 1996 and written by Malcolm Gladwell has been one of the most reprinted articles in The New Yorker’s history. Envirosell started its offshore practice in 1987 and now operates offices in Milan and Sao Paolo, Brazil.

Paco is never dull, often funny, and always on target.

• 4. The State of Retail and Industry Trends

• 3. The Future of Category Management

• 2. Signage and Merchandising: Making In-Store Communication Work

• 1. The Science of Shopping 101: How Store Planning Affects Store Performance

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  July 2010

  What Women Want: The Global Marketplace Turns Female Friendly

  Paco Underhill reports on the growing importance of women in everybody’s marketplace—what makes a package, product, space, or service "female friendly." Underhill offers a tour of the world’s marketplace—with shrewd observations and practical applications to help everybody adapt to the new realities. With the same flair and humor that made his previous books universally appealing, Underhill examines how a woman’s role as homemaker has evolved into homeowner and what women look for in a home. "The point is," writes Underhill, "while men were busy doing other things, women were becoming a major social, cultural, and economic force." And, as he warns, no business can afford to ignore their power and presence.

  
  
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  December 2004

  Call of the Mall: The Author of Why We Buy on the Geography of Shopping

  This follow up to the best-selling Why we Buy describes the ethnography of the typical American shopping mall.  He describes what does and does not work in the typical mall environment for shoppers and outlines how the rise of ecommerce and fatigued boomer shoppers will force us into a period of history he terms the "post-mall era". 

  
  
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  May 1999

  Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (also updated 2008)

  Based on extensive market research conducted over the previous 20 years, Paco Underhills the patterns of American shopping and differences between types of shopper. 

  A second edition of this book was released in December 2008 that touches on the rise of internet shopping including: The latest trends in online retail -- what retailers are doing right and what they're doing wrong -- and how nearly every Internet retailer from iTunes to Amazon can drastically improve how it serves its customers. A guided tour of the most innovative stores, malls and retail environments around the world -- almost all of which are springing up in countries where prosperity is new. An enormous indoor ski slope attracts shoppers to a mall in Dubai; an uber luxurious Sao Paolo department store provides its customers with personal shoppers; a mall in South Africa has a wave pool for surfing.