Road to Duke
Rey Essex grew up an American student at the American School in London, the K-12 international school in St. John's Wood that has educated generations of American expatriate children whose families were stationed in the United Kingdom for diplomatic, military, or corporate reasons. He attended ASL from 1982 to 1985, graduating with the Class of 1985 - a three-year ASL student rather than a four-year, which suggests a family that arrived in London during his early high-school years. The American School in London is the kind of institution whose graduates spread back to American colleges and universities at the standard 18-year-old age and whose curriculum, while American in framing, exposes its students to a more international worldview than the typical American suburban high school does. Rey Essex was a 6'6" forward by the time of his ASL graduation, and he was bound for Duke.
He arrived in Durham in the fall of 1985 as a freshman in the Class of 1989, enrolled in the Pratt School of Engineering on track for a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. The Duke he walked into in October 1985 was a basketball program in transition: the Johnny Dawkins/Mark Alarie/Jay Bilas/David Henderson senior class was about to play its 1985-86 season, a team that would reach the 1986 national title game and lose 72-69 to Denny Crum's Louisville Cardinals at Reunion Arena in Dallas. The senior class would graduate en masse. Tommy Amaker would take over as the senior leader of the 1986-87 team that Rey Essex would join. The Duke roster Rey Essex tried out for was a roster where the available minutes for any Duke big man behind Danny Ferry, Billy King, John Smith, and the rest of the established frontcourt were essentially nonexistent. Rey Essex went out anyway.
At Duke
Duke's 1986-87 season was the first post-1986 senior class season - the team that demonstrated, for the first time, the consistency of the program Mike Krzyzewski was building. Tommy Amaker won the inaugural National Defensive Player of the Year award. The team went 24-9, won the ACC regular season at 9-5, reached the Sweet Sixteen, and lost 88-82 to Bob Knight's Indiana team that would win the national championship two weeks later in New Orleans. Rey Essex was a sophomore on that 1986-87 roster - one of the eight freshmen-and-sophomores Coach K was carrying as he rebuilt the program's depth chart after losing five seniors at once.
The box score record of Rey Essex's Duke basketball career is one season. Per Sports-Reference, he played in six games, totaled eight minutes across the season, made one of his two field goal attempts, made one of four free throws, scored three total points, and grabbed seven rebounds. That seven-rebound number is notable: across eight minutes of game time, a rebound-per-minute rate that suggests the 6'6" forward was, in the limited mop-up minutes he saw, doing what his body type told the coaching staff he should do. He was on the floor for end-of-game cleanup, and when the ball came off the rim he went up to get it. He played in six of the team's thirty-three games. He was not on the basketball roster the following season.
The 1987-88 Duke team that began the program's run of five consecutive Final Four appearances added Clay Buckley, Joe Cook, and other freshmen to the roster while losing the seniors who had carried the 1987 team. Rey Essex was not on that 1987-88 roster. Per his post-Duke educational records, he continued at Duke as a student through his Class of 1989 graduation, completing his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at the Pratt School. He had played one season of varsity Duke basketball as a sophomore, scored three points, grabbed seven rebounds, and gone back to engineering school. The Pratt School in 1987 was, like the basketball program, beginning its own long ascent into the elite tier of American engineering education. Rey Essex was twenty years old, an EE major, six-foot-six, three-time published box-score author, and finishing his degree.
After Duke
Rey Essex graduated from Duke in 1989 with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Pratt School. The career he built from that degree spans, by 2026, more than thirty-five years and reads like a tour through the inflection points of American enterprise technology. He started in 1990 at IBM in Research Triangle Park as a Systems Engineer, and stayed at IBM for eleven years, moving through various technical and sales roles during the era when IBM was transitioning from mainframes to client-server architectures to the internet. In 2001, he left IBM for HAHT Commerce as Director of Business Development, working on e-commerce technology alliances at the height of the early e-commerce era. He moved through three more enterprise software roles - Vice President of PIM Solution Sales at GXS, Director of Business Development at DataFlux - before, in 2008, joining Apple as a Senior Director of Retail Business.
The Apple years, from 2008 through 2015, ran across the explosion of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Stores as the dominant force in American retail. Rey Essex was a Senior Director on the retail business side of Apple - the part of Apple that translated the consumer technology Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were building into the physical retail experiences that customers walked into across the world. The Apple Retail Store was, in those years, the most innovative retail format on earth. Essex's role would have brought him into the operational, technological, and customer-experience design questions that the Apple Retail business was solving on a daily basis at scale.
After leaving Apple in 2015, Essex spent a year as President of Redwood Perspective and Vice President at Stark RFID - both early-stage technology firms focused on RFID retail applications. He had found the next frontier. In 2022 - at age fifty-five, more than three decades after his Duke graduation, after working at IBM and Apple and a string of enterprise software firms - Rey Essex co-founded EXO Checkout. He is the company's Co-founder and Vice President of Business Development. The company, headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, builds RFID-powered self-checkout solutions that have, in the two years since launch, deployed at thirteen retail locations and fifty-seven stations across AT&T Stadium (the Dallas Cowboys' home), at Yankee Stadium (live for the 2025 MLB Playoffs), at Great American Ball Park (the Cincinnati Reds, via Delaware North), and at the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord's in London (via a Jonas Sports partnership). The technology is on display at the NRF '25 retail technology conference. EXO's expansion into the UK and EU is happening via a partnership with MiTEQ.
Where Is He Now
In a December 2024 episode of the BlueStar Nation TEConnect Podcast titled "RFID in Retail & Checkout," host Dean asked the EXO Checkout co-founder a single direct question: was 2024 the year of RFID? Rey Essex's answer: this is the year of arrival. The line frames the entire arc of his post-Duke career - the patient three-and-a-half-decade build from IBM Systems Engineer to Apple Retail Senior Director to RFID self-checkout co-founder is, in his own framing, finally arriving. A 2025 CIOReview profile of EXO Solutions ran a quote from him on the same theme: that the RFID-powered self-checkout system optimizes operations, minimizes errors and losses, and elevates customer satisfaction with speed and simplicity.
The Brotherhood Coach K built reaches, in Rey Essex's chapter of it, beyond the Cameron tunnel and beyond Pratt's electrical engineering department and through the Research Triangle Park IBM years and the Cupertino Apple years and the Stark RFID years into a small Greenville, South Carolina headquarters where the most innovative retail technology in American sports stadiums is being built by a 6'6" Duke engineer who scored three points across six games as an end-of-bench sophomore in the 1986-87 season under the same head coach who would win the next two national championships four and five years later. The Brotherhood that runs through Cameron Indoor Stadium in 1987 runs, in 2026, through AT&T Stadium and Yankee Stadium and Great American Ball Park and Lord's Cricket Ground - because a Duke engineering graduate who once grabbed seven rebounds in eight minutes of garbage time as a Coach K sophomore is now the man on the conference-call line explaining to a UK retail partner how the RFID antenna picks up every item in a shopping bag before the customer reaches the door.
Rey Essex is, in his own description on his EXO Checkout profile, an engineer who over the last twenty years has had the privilege of partnering with the most fantastic companies. He is, in his RocketReach metadata, a 1985-1989 Duke BSE in Electrical Engineering. He is, in his LinkedIn header photo, a man in his late fifties with the kind of weathered open face you would expect from someone who spent three decades in enterprise sales and has just discovered, in his sixth decade of life, that the thing he was building toward all along was a startup he could co-found. The Brotherhood, as Rey Essex has lived it, is the kind of Brotherhood the eight-freshman 1986-87 Coach K roster produced again and again across its membership: the kid who came in, scored three points, finished the degree, went out into the world, and built a thirty-five-year career on top of a Duke diploma and a competitive instinct that had been forged for one season in Coach K's practice gym. The Brotherhood reaches the Reds' clubhouse store. It reaches the Cowboys' team store. It reaches Yankee Stadium. It reaches Lord's. And it reaches a Greenville, South Carolina office where a Duke engineering grad is building the future of retail.