For the Fastest Growing Retailer in the US, Old Playbooks Won’t Do

The sports apparel market is projected to reach almost $300 billion globally by 2032. In the United States alone, it’s predicted to double from $25 billion to over $48 billion over 6 years.

Despite the dominance of e-commerce, physical stores remain the most powerful growth lever for retail brands, and JD Sports knows that advantage better than anyone. In 2025, the company was named the fastest-growing retailer in the country, a title fueled by an ambitious expansion and strategic acquisitions.

In this episode of Permission to Build, we speak with Josh Dunning, Director of Construction and Facilities, who is in the eye of JD Sports’ hurricane of growth. We explore how he navigates one of the most underestimated complexities in retail expansion: permitting, and how he treats it not as a compliance step, but as a competitive lever.

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An Early Lesson on Fragmentation

Josh’s perspective on development was shaped by early exposure to the entire process. He worked as an architect at a retail-focused firm, drafting production and construction document sets for large rollouts. He watched as his boss made a deliberate decision to pull permitting, surveying, and GC management in-house, expanding the firm’s role beyond design alone.

“We realized, as a team, that we were just bundling up drawings and sending them to a permit expediter,” Josh explained. “We thought the process through a little bit further and realized, we’re paying a company to do a survey and then reworking that information. Why don’t we just do the surveys ourselves?”

That experience gave Josh early exposure to how fragmented parts of construction could be consolidated and managed in a way that reduced risk, reduced cost, and even allowed more transparency into the process for his team.

Old Playbooks, New Environments

As Josh moved through roles at companies like Allbirds and Brooks Brothers and eventually into his current role at JD Sports, he watched the built environment change.

Throughout his career, Josh became very familiar with the retail industry's standard playbook: hire permit expediters, submit drawings…and wait. This model was one built on the assumption that permitting is simply a compliance hurdle, something you budget time for and hope works out.

And for years, it did work out. “Prior to COVID, it was just a process,” Josh recalled. “It was something you had to allocate time for and it would work itself out.”

But over the years, and especially post-COVID, that old system broke down. AHJ labor shortages, increased building complexity, and external volatility made on-time approvals much harder to come by. “Ten years ago, things seemed to be a little more static,” Josh explained. “Now you do have to kind of see around corners and try to guess the future.”

Josh describes today’s environment as deeply interconnected. A disruption far from the job site can still have immediate consequences. “A butterfly flaps its wings in China and it has a direct effect on what's going on in the United States,” he describes.

When Old Permitting Processes Fail

Earlier in his career, Josh had seen the cost of a reactive permitting approach on a Brooks Brothers project in Beverly Hills (arguably one of the top five most challenging places to build in the country).

The project seemed straightforward, relocating a store into a century-old building, but the city's overwhelmed building department sent the drawings to a third-party reviewer who didn’t have the right expertise. Suddenly, weeks turned into months of review limbo. When construction finally started, inadequate due diligence revealed costly surprises that required reworked drawings and additional review cycles. The delays compounded, and the store never opened.

Looking back, the math was simple. Josh explains, "Had we gotten a permit sooner, back in June or July when we were supposed to start, it would've been fine. We would've completed the store." In the traditional permitting model, where you submit and wait and hope, there was no way to create the buffer Josh needed.

Making the Decision for a New Approach

Today, at the fastest-growing retailer in the United States, Josh operates under high stakes. He’s not managing just a handful of high-profile flagships, but hundreds of stores per year—all with critical opening dates.

He’s seen how permitting becomes a place where accountability slips. “You can 1000% weaponize permitting,” Josh shares. “'Why didn't you start on time?’ ‘I was waiting on a permit.'”

It became a way for teams to deflect, costing him time he can’t afford to lose.

But Josh knows permitting could create leverage when treated intentionally. “Every retailer knows the value of a day or a week or a month,” he explains. “If I can buy two weeks at the beginning of a project, it may save me two weeks minimum, maybe a month at the end. Again, getting that store open early selling shoes that much sooner.”

Josh's partnership with Pulley wasn't about outsourcing permitting, but about gaining visibility and speed where it mattered most: faster store openings. He specifically loves the transparency Pulley’s platform has enabled for himself and his project managers. “In our partnership with Pulley, the dashboard: I love the fact that on a call, my PMs can look and give me real time data back. It’s really streamlined my ability to be proactive.”

And when asked what he would change? Josh chuckles, “If I had a complaint about Pulley, it would be some of the stores that I give you come back too fast.”

Leadership Looks Like a Duck

The transformation Josh made was about redesigning permitting as a system that creates leverage. He doesn’t (realistically can’t) monitor every little detail across hundreds of projects. Instead, he designs for visibility into what actually matters.

When the right information surfaces early, teams can move independently. When it doesn’t, leadership attention gets pulled into places it doesn’t belong.

Permitting is a clear example. When it’s visible, predictable, and moving forward, it fades into the background. When it isn’t, it demands time, explanation, and escalation. Josh’s approach is about minimizing those moments, not reacting heroically when they arrive.

He often describes what this looks like with a simple image: “If you ever see a duck on a lake… what’s happening below the water, like his feet are moving a million miles an hour. If a program looks like it's calm and working, you don't see the behind the scenes or behind the curtain.”

Focus Enables Scale

For any retailer like JD Sports, growth introduces complexity by default: hundreds of jurisdictions, multiple markets, and thousands of ways things can go sideways.

Josh Dunning’s role isn’t to remove that complexity. It’s to absorb it, organize it, and prevent it from obscuring what matters most: opening doors on time.

He recognized that at JD Sports' scale, the old assumptions about permitting no longer held. Treating it as the black box it’s always been was the riskier choice than trying something different. Now, he creates more visibility, speed, and predictability, giving him leverage instead of friction. The work beneath the surface may be relentless, but his direction stays steady.

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