Get Inspired: Stories
Steve Hill | VP of Merchandising | Zappos | Las Vegas, Nevada
My name is Steve Hill, I am VP of Merchandising, and I have been with Zappos since November of 2004. The core value I want to talk about today is Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit. In merchandising, even before we had formal core values written down, it was one of the most important things we would do. Make sure our vendor partners felt like they were a part of the team, a part of the Zappos family. We do that in a lot of ways, from giving them complete access to information via the Vendor Extranet to making sure that they really care about the growth of the companies together.
One of the things that we do to wow them and often surprises them over the years and has really caused some of the greatest emotional connections between the buying team and the vendors is we nearly always will buy dinner for our vendors when we go out with them or when we visit them at shows, it doesn’t matter where it is.
A couple of stories that I can relay that have happened even within the last year or so is we had a company called David Tate, out of Los Angeles, that was here visiting our office here about a year and a half ago. Our senior buyer for comfort, Graham McCollough, had worked with that brand since even his previous job, so he had known them for a long time and took them to dinner. At the end of the dinner, he did what we always do, had arranged before hand to make sure that he was able to pick up the tab. The owner for the company, who’s been in business for over twenty five years, said it was the first time that he’s ever had a retailer pick up dinner for him and his team. It teared up the table and was just very, very emotional. They couldn’t believe what great partners we were and that we cared so much about the business that we would do that.
More recently, just a couple of months ago, another great partner of ours Maui Jim, hosted four members of our team over to Hawaii near their corporate headquarters. We went out to dinner that night and had a great dinner, made some new friends, it was a fairly new brand for us, a brand we hadn’t worked with much in the past, this was the first real time we had a chance to get out with them. At the end of the dinner, when we picked up dinner, the national sales manager said that they had been hosting companies out there in Hawaii for the past 12 years and it was the first time that they had someone offer to pick up dinner for them. Again, the whole group, there were four or five folks from Maui Jim there, and it was very emotional, they couldn’t believe that a company like ours would be so caring about the partnership and caring about the team. They really felt like they were part of the Zappos family.
It’s a little thing we do, but it goes a long way to building that positive team and family spirit between Zappos and our vendor partners.