Shelf

Welcome to Cinema on a Shelf, a podcast about movies and physical media.

My name is Matt and thank you for spending some time with me instead of watching a movie.

I promise I will try to make it worth your time.

Looking to be doing quite a few more of these.

I'm really enjoying these episodes and been noting a few people that I want to reach out to and invite to come on to the podcast.

If you do want to stay up to date with other guests or even new episodes of Cinema on a Shelf, you can check it out on Instagram at Cinema on a Shelf.

I also do have a Letterboxd account.

It's my personal one, but it tells you a lot about what I might be reviewing for certain episodes.

They have a larger portfolio of that total category of a buzzy called a competitive set, right, that they're looking at as well.

And we can't ignore their perspective because they actually control a very limited resource of shelf space, right? So if we decide that we're going to move away from mainstream and move more to premium or more to value, right, is that growing again that category as a whole in a way that we can see across that value chain?

Yes, because it is true, again, Shelf space is limited, you know, real estate kind of.

And retailers

are smart, right? They're very,

Go ahead,

Shelf.

I'll be a little controversial.

I think Caleb Williams is the best quarterback.

I'm Karen Novak.

This is Behind the Shelf, and it's brought to you by Curion.

In each episode, I sit down with founders, product leaders, and industry experts to unpack what really drives product success, from innovation and testing to consumer behavior and market trends.

No guesswork, no buzzwords, just real insights backed by real consumer data.

That approach has helped them grow into more than 15,000 retail locations, including Whole Foods, Sprouts, Albertsons, Kroger, and Costco.

Today, we're talking about what happened once that big idea met real consumers, what people responded to, what the company had to change, and what actually drove that repeat purchase.

Haley, welcome to Behind the Shelf.

Hi, thanks for having me.

[laughs]

And the next comment is, "You and Matthew the Shelf fall deeply in love.

One thing leads to another, and you end up married with two lovely nightstands for children." And the comment's like, "Guys, show some respect on its name.

It's not a shelf, it's a KALLAX."

Yes.

Like, we're missing something that's, like, uh, not on a shelf somewhere.

Right, which is h- why we're casting about so desperately and why-

Yeah, it feels desperate.

[laughs]

It's not ordained, I know that.

It's just on the shelf or whatever.

You know that right in the middle there, that's Cardinal George, who was of Chicago.

Let's continue with the show.

Round three, fight! And finally, we're gonna wrap up the show with our final segment with something that Kelly has brought to us, and that is, of course, her recommendations, her nominations for our favorite game, Play Shelf Trade.

If you haven't seen Play Shelf Trade before, where the heck have you been? We do it quite often on this show.

What it is is we're taking three games, and we're gonna figure out which one we wanna play right now, which one feels great to, oh, I gotta bust that out, which one we want to shelf, put on our shelf and keep it forever because it's just dear to us.

And we think we have a bond with this game.

For even more historic research, check out our blog.

Welcome to On the Shelf for September 2026.

It's been quite a month.

The first week of August, I was in Orlando for the Golden Crown Literary Society Conference.

There's also a good explainer for the process on the Authors Guild website.

I link several good resources in the comments, although given the timelines, they will soon be obsolete.

I took another one of my inadvertent vacations from blogging articles, though in my defense it's only been three weeks since the last On the Shelf episode, and one of those weeks was spent at Worldcon.

I have a couple of books I'm reading on intersex topics, which will be my focus this month, and possibly the topic of the next podcast essay.