David Riordan Wood on Building Vertical Retail Integration
By: Natalie Johnson
The phrase vertical integration makes the idea sound neater than it usually is.
David Riordan Wood, Chief Executive Officer of Human Touch, LLC and Relax The Back, sees the opportunity differently.
For Wood, the advantage is not in blending the product and retail businesses together. The advantage is in knowing exactly where they should connect, and just as importantly, where they should remain separate.
Wood leads two related but distinct operations. Human Touch is a consumer product business that sells through multiple channels. Relax The Back is a specialty retail business that carries Human Touch products alongside products from other premium vendors. That distinction matters.
“Our retail business treats our internal product business like another vendor,” Wood says. “A very important vendor, obviously. But still a vendor. That discipline is important.”
It is a simple point, but it runs counter to how many companies approach vertical integration. Ownership can create an illusion of entitlement. The product side can assume shelf space. The retail side can feel pressured to favor the house brand. Wood believes that is exactly the wrong instinct.
The product still has to earn its place. The retail team still has to serve the customer. And the customer does not care about internal ownership structure. The customer cares whether the experience is good, the product is right, and the value is clear.
Integrate Where It Matters. Stay Flexible Where It Does Not.
The instinct in a vertically integrated business is often to bring more and more functions in-house. The logic is understandable: if you own it, you control it. But Wood is careful about where that principle applies.
The functions that define the customer experience stay close. Store leadership, merchandising, inventory flow, selling standards, operations, and the in-store experience are too central to outsource. Those are the places where the business either creates value or loses it.
For high-ticket, highly considered products, the point of sale matters enormously. A massage chair, ergonomic seating product, or wellness product cannot always be understood from a picture or a product description. The customer needs to experience it. They need guidance. They need someone who can translate features into personal relevance.
That is where Wood believes channel ownership matters most.
“If you are selling a premium product, you have to be able to control the experience around it,” he says. “The product alone is not enough. The way it is demonstrated, explained, and matched to the customer is often what determines whether it succeeds.”
At the same time, Wood does not believe every capability needs to sit inside the company. Marketing is the clearest example. Rather than build a large internal team expected to master every fast-changing discipline, the company uses specialists across social media, search engine optimization, answer engine optimization, email, and website management.
That decision reflects a broader operating principle. Some capabilities get stronger the longer they live inside the business. Others move too quickly to own in a traditional way.
Institutional knowledge compounds in areas like store operations, customer experience, merchandising, and sales leadership. But in technical and digital marketing disciplines, expertise can become stale quickly. The better answer is not always more headcount. Sometimes it is better access to sharper, more current specialists.
Wood’s view is pragmatic: control what defines the business, but do not confuse control with ownership for its own sake.
Discipline Is the Growth Strategy
Many companies pursue vertical integration as a reaction to a problem. They lose control of a channel, struggle with customer experience, or find themselves too dependent on someone else’s execution. Wood’s approach is more deliberate.
Relax The Back’s expansion is built around a measured plan of one to three new locations per year. That pace is intentional. It allows the company to be selective rather than opportunistic.
A potential location must clear a high bar. The company looks for markets that can perform at least 30 percent above the current store average, supported by the right population, household income, and customer profile for a premium specialty retail concept.
But Wood is quick to point out that the model only gets you so far.
“You can have a great retail concept, great marketing, and great real estate,” he says. “At the end, the thing that matters most is people.”
That belief comes from experience, not theory. In Wood’s view, the quality of local leadership is often the difference between a store that works and a store that never quite finds its footing. The right operator can build trust, coach a team, create a customer experience, and make the business feel alive. The wrong one can undermine even a strong location.
It is also why the company’s growth remains self-funded through operating cash flow. That choice limits speed, but it protects judgment. The business does not have to chase openings to satisfy outside capital. It can wait for the right market, the right economics, and the right people.
For Wood, that discipline is not conservative. It is strategic.
Growth only creates value when the operating base underneath it is strong enough to support it.
Build the Data Around the Customer First
The next phase of the company’s work is focused on connecting the physical and digital sides of the business in a more useful way.
Wood is sequencing that work carefully. The first step is connecting the in-store point-of-sale system with the eCommerce platform, with the goal of creating a single view of the customer across store and online interactions. That work is expected to be completed within roughly 90 days.
The reason for starting there is straightforward. The customer view is where the commercial value lives. Once the company can see how customers move between stores, the website, marketing campaigns, and eventual purchases, it can make better decisions about where to invest.
It also gives the company a clearer way to connect marketing activity to actual sales, rather than relying on partial signals or disconnected reports.
Only after that customer foundation is in place does the next step begin: connecting the retail and eCommerce systems to NetSuite, the enterprise resource planning platform that supports the product side of the business. That phase is expected to take six to 12 months.
The order matters. Wood is not trying to connect systems for the sake of having everything connected. He is trying to connect the parts of the business in the sequence that creates the most practical value.
First, understand the customer. Then streamline fulfillment, service, and operational flow behind that customer.
That sequencing reflects a larger leadership theme in Wood’s approach. Data is only useful when it improves judgment. Systems are only valuable when they make the business easier to run, not harder to understand.
The Real Advantage Is Judgment
Vertical integration is often discussed as a structural advantage. Wood sees it more as a test of judgment.
Owning more of the value chain does not automatically make a company better. The advantage comes from knowing which parts of the business need to be tightly controlled, which parts need to remain independent, and which parts should be connected only when the connection creates value for the customer.
That is especially true in premium retail. A customer considering a high-ticket wellness or ergonomic product is not just buying a product. They are buying confidence. They are buying the feeling that someone understands their needs and can guide them to the right solution.
That kind of experience is hard to create from a distance. It is also hard to scale without discipline.
For Wood, the point of vertical integration is not to make the organization look more complete on a chart. It is to create a better, more controlled customer experience at the moments that matter most. Integration only matters when it helps the company serve the customer better, grow with discipline, and protect the operating standards that made the business worth expanding in the first place.
David Riordan Wood continues to share his perspective on disciplined growth, premium retail, customer experience, and the leadership judgment required to build businesses that last.
