The Story of Mast General Store with Lisa Cooper

Lisa Cooper is the CEO of Mast General Store, a fifth-generation family business that has become a cornerstone of mountain retail across the High Country of North Carolina and beyond. Lisa didn't choose this path at first—when her parents sold everything they had in Florida to buy a shuttered 100-year-old general store in Valle Crucis in 1980, 11-year-old Lisa cried herself to sleep on the third floor wondering what they'd done. But somewhere between cleaning out old coolers, working the candy counter, and learning the art of buying from scratch, she fell in love with the store and never left.

In this episode, Lisa walks us through the unlikely origin story of Mast General Store—how her parents took a leap of faith in their early 30s to reopen a historic building in the middle of nowhere, how they asked the community what they wanted and brought back the post office for a dollar a year, and how they built a business on the foundation of treating customers like they're walking into your home. We talk about Lisa's own journey from reluctant kid to candy buyer to fashion buyer to learning open-to-buy systems by hand with a pencil, and eventually stepping into the CEO role when her employees told her it was hers to lead.

We get into the realities of running a 500-plus employee, 11-location retail operation—how they weather financial storms, why every store has creaky wooden floors by design, and what it takes to ship same-day orders from every location. Lisa shares the story of surviving the 2020 pandemic when they went from 580 employees to 38 overnight, how Hurricane Helene knocked their sales down to 10% of projections in a single month, and why their Employee Stock Ownership Program has created a culture where people stay for decades. We also talk about the power of nostalgia in retail, why Charleston Chews and Charles Chips still matter, and how Lisa is bringing Bats of Boone to life as a new downtown scavenger hunt for families visiting the High Country.

From Valle Crucis to Boone to Waynesville to Chattanooga, this is a conversation about legacy, community, creaky floors, and what it means to sell stuff so you can do good stuff.

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