North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. If you're wondering where purpose-driven leaders direct their time, team, budget, and energy, you'll find out here on the North Star Leaders Podcast. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of this show.

Remember, purpose isn't what you hang on the wall. It's what you do when the choice is hard. Today I am so happy to be joined by Rick Brooks.

Rick is CEO of Zumies, the retailer for teens and young adults focused on action sports and streetwear culture. Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick Brooks

Thank you, Lindsay. Glad to be here.

Lindsay Pedersen

I'm really glad to have you. To start us off, Rick, what's the most energizing part of your job that others on the outside might not guess?

Rick Brooks

I think for me, I guess I have a luxury here in the sense that I get to work with amazing young people who are early in their careers, who most of them have not gone to college, and where they found a passion for where they work and what they do, and also even a passion for how they do it relative to thinking about our culture and their values and how they're buying into what we're doing. We have at Zumies, we have amazing people. At all levels of organization, I think it's largely due to the deeply embedded cultural element we have in the place.

We have people who love to learn. We have people who love to compete. We have people that love to own their businesses.

It's really energizing to work with so many young people like this that are early in their career and are just thrilled with the opportunities to learn more, to do more, to accept more responsibility. I find that incredibly rewarding. I can tell you, people tend to, when they find their place, can spend a long time here.

I know people who are now senior people in our field leadership team, our store leadership team, who I've known since they were teenagers. It's a really, really cool thing because I got to see them grow up and develop into great salespeople, really good managers, really good leaders, really good business people. It's the framework the Zumiez provided, but it's the work they did.

I always tell people it's like the secret mission of Zumiez is this concept that we're unleashing our people's potential. We're letting them do it. It's really, really rewarding to see it.

It's something you can really feel when you're in our events. It's a really cool thing.

Lindsay Pedersen

Say more about that. What's the visceral embodiment of this youth, this energy that you're describing that's so enlivening?

Rick Brooks

I think, again, it has to do with alignment around the cultural values. When you have people that are so committed to a certain way of working, that's what a great culture does. Culture describes how you work.

It's how you treat each other. It's how you treat our customers. It's the framework, the value set of how you do that.

To answer your question, it kind of feels in some ways like a cult in terms of the alignment is so tight, the energy is so high, people are so fired up to do the things we're doing. Like most of our events, there is some level of competition and our big manager retreat, there's actually a teach-off where people compete against each other and people take it incredibly seriously because they're committed to it and they're really working hard. It's a big deal when you win.

For the people that make the final four, it's a really big deal and everyone is supportive of them. It's just that type of energy that people bring to it that I don't think a lot of businesses and a lot of each other's, their teams would be excited to do what our people do.

Lindsay Pedersen

It seems like there's a very particular human who's going to thrive working for Zumiez. I'm curious, are there people who would make great Zumiez customers but would not make a great fit to work at Zumiez? You know what I mean?

It's not that you don't like them and appreciate them, they're just not Zumiez level.

Rick Brooks

That's right. I mean, we love all customers, so let's just put that out there, right? We're happy to help them all, but what makes someone a great employee at Zumiez, again, it's about cultural value alignment.

In our world, it's about wanting to own what you do and willing to drive, so that sense of empowerment is critical. When we talk about values, this is in a hierarchy. This is in an order of importance.

I really believe that's important to prioritize things in a hierarchy because it forces you to think through, which is at the top of the list and they're all important, but what's most important? People that really, truly want to be empowered and own their own what they do because then they're going to put their all into it and we're going to let them own it, right? I would tell you that our store managers own their businesses in ways that most of our competitors don't even approach.

Most of our competitors do what I call check the box retail. They get a list, say, this is what you do today and they do it. We don't do any of that, so we want managers who want to run their store and really cater to their individual communities.

So empowerment, you got to like to compete in our world and we are all very competitive people. That's why in our events, mostly there's competitions because we want to give the people to demonstrate their skills. You have to love teaching and learning because it goes with empowerment, right?

It goes with the idea and this is why we will invest so much in our national programs, but it's what happens every day when our managers help their people get better. That's really critical. So you want, got to love to learn and you got to be willing to help people learn through teaching and so we spend a lot of time around how to make people more effective teachers and leaders.

You have to love recognition and then of course you have to do it. The last two of our value set is you have to be fair and honest with people. And the last one is kind of a little bit tricky.

We say fun, but it's fun in the sense that you love living these values. It's not fun on let's have a party is that you find teaching fun. You find competing fun.

Those are the things that make a great Sumi's employees and those are the things we're going to hire for when we do it because then we're going to get the right core that we could really help develop and shape.

Lindsay Pedersen

It strikes me that it's no accident that it's not a very hierarchical organization and yet there's very vivid cultural values. It's almost like you can't have that non-hierarchical, well, it's more difficult to have a non-hierarchical flat organization if you're fuzzy about the North Star, if you're fuzzy about the values. Am I getting that right?

Rick Brooks

That's exactly right. Which is the only way you can have, I think, a flat organization is that people understand how you work. At least let's say that an effective flat organization is that when you align on the value set, and I think very few corporations have deeply embedded, deeply aligned cultural.

In fact, I've only worked at one place that has this, and it's Sumi's. And it's really hard. It's a generational task to get it deeply embedded into your business.

But when you do, then they can truly be effective in a flatter organization.

Lindsay Pedersen

Why is it that it is so rare that Sumi's is the only place where you've worked where this is true? Because this seems so wise and almost not debatable, the value of being so culturally specific about what you stand for, what's in and what's out. Why is this rare?

Why do you think other organizations don't adopt that same ethos?

Rick Brooks

I think a lot of our agents have so much change in leadership. They don't have the governance in place to make sure they're hiring people who are aligned with the value set. And of course, leaders have different values.

People have different values. This is why our systems have to be built over time, I think, to get this deeply embedded cultural values. Because if people are changing all the time and you're not screening for the right value set, or you just make an error and someone's in a powerful position, then they're going to not act in alignment with the values of the organization.

So I think time is a big factor in this and that they generate. And we have the luxury, right? The values I talked about are really started with our founder, Tom Campion.

And so I think we recognize that there was something special about the way Tom ran the business in those days. It was so small. His values just became people value.

This is the way you wanted to work, right? And he came from a big corporation that was a big retailer in those days, JCPenney's, which was one of the major retailers in the country in the 60s and 70s and had a great training program. But there were things when Tom started Zumi that he was very specific about.

That's not the way I want to work. I want to work the way I believe is the right way to work, which is the values that I just described. And so the early days, Tom could manage it through his force of his will.

But as we discovered that when I joined the business and Tom and I were really going to scale the business more quickly, we kind of discovered that we needed to scale. We need to find ways to scale the culture at the same time. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about those topics.

And we would always think about anything we're doing relative to what does it mean to the cultural values. Those were the first years we actually started to write it down because we knew we need to be more explicit about it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. So the writing of it down, codifying instead of letting it just live in his personality, did that precede the scaling? Like, okay, we're going to scale.

Now we got to be crystal clear about what exactly it is that we're going to scale through this culture. Was that the order?

Rick Brooks

I think it went hand in hand and we could see the risk, right, of what it meant moving from just a regional local Northwest retailer. When I started the first or second year I was here, we opened a store in Colorado. Our first store really outside the Northwest.

And when we did that, we said, well, we just can't get everyone together here anymore. Like, I mean, wherever we want before, I mean, just drive here. We're like always respectful of people's time and effort, right?

So we said, if we're going to do this kind of scale, then we have to behave and act differently. So that started the process saying, let's really be specific now about writing down the values and about understanding what scale means to living the values. And the answer was a simple one, which what scale means to it is that we have to be even more committed to the values.

We have to believe in them even more. We have to trust that they're the right things to do. And so it really was about being, having a deeper commitment as we grew the business.

And we did have to rethink things, right? As we did it over time and we evolved things. In our manager treat, they had the first manager treat in just a couple months before I started in 1993.

I missed the first one, but it wasn't until 2000 we added competition because this is that evolution of scale. And it was obvious when I forget, I don't even know who suggested it, but they were like, why don't we have a competition in this event that would be really let people show their skills. And it was the right thing to do.

It was about because it was done around the cultural values.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. You and I have talked separately about brand and how much belief you have in brand in this particular era of business that we're in right now. Talk about the Zumiez brand.

What does it mean?

Rick Brooks

Well, the first thing I want to do with that question is I want to tie it back to the discussion that's had around the importance of culture. Because the number one way that people experience our culture as a specialty retailer, experience our brand as a specialty retailer is through the power of our culture embedded in our amazing young retailers throughout every store. That is the number one brand impression we get is the way they're treated, the how of the culture that when they walk in the store, they feel like they're talking to a person who owns a store.

They feel like this person can solve my problems if I have, or this person is going to find me the most amazing stuff is really here to help me. So the number one brand impression I think that we have is the power of our culture. And with our consumer, which I'm going to talk about, because the second thing we have to talk about the customer in this discussion around brand, with our consumer overwhelmingly wants to shop in our stores versus on buying through a digital channel.

I'm not saying they don't, they use digital channels, but the preferred environment for buying is actually in the physical store. And that's even more true today with Gen Z and Gen A than I think it was with the millennials. Is being in store is really important to them because it's our people, it's a community and we're showing them cool stuff all the time, right?

It's a bit of an exploration. So let's talk about our customer, because I think this is a key thing for a great brand. You have to have a focus.

For us, we are very niche. We're not a retailer focused on 12 to 24 year olds that focuses on all 12 to 24 year olds. We are focusing on a subgroup of that market that says, I want to express my individuality more strongly than other people in my peer group.

And we have built a business to serve that consumer group. By the way, this is our people too. These are our employees.

These are people who are comfortable standing out and expressing who they are, being authentically who they are, right? And getting to live that. So we are serving this subset of teenagers that really want to take a different position.

And of course, what is the process of going through adolescence about? I mean, there's real brain science behind this. It's about finding out who you are, moving from childhood to adulthood and defining and the journey.

It's always a tough journey for everybody, right? You go on this journey. We've all been through it.

And our mission as a brand is to help this subset of teenagers, of young people in that journey through giving them options to express who they are and to try things out and to be just a little bit different than the broader main group of their peer group. And so we have built everything around our brand now around those ideas, which is why we're so focused on the importance of leading on trend. We'll sell trend before other teen retailers will sell trend because that's what our customer expects from us.

That's the standard they hold us to. It's more important for our customer than it is for most, a lot of broader customers. Same with newness on brands.

I mean, we are bringing in small brands who are maybe only serve a very subset. They may only be in 25 or 50 doors, but they're important to those customers in that market. And our job to deliver newness is to live up to the expectation of our customers for leading our brand, leading on new emerging brands and leading on trend.

So they can be the first to demonstrate these differences in how they see things, right? Relative to exploring their identity and what they're about as individuals. So our whole brand is built around this niche consumer and around the deeply trying to serve who they are, including again, the people in our store, we're this consumer.

Most of the people that are store employees shopped in the store environment. So they already get it's innate from that sense to them, right? And we just have to align the cultural values from an employment perspective.

Lindsay Pedersen

And how you hire and how you celebrate.

Rick Brooks

Because you innately get what we're going for with the brand. They're willing to be, and I will hear often some amazing letters and emails from parents saying, my son or daughter has been, you know, they don't fit. But when they're in Zumiez, your people make them feel comfortable that they fit and they belong and they help them in finding and they exploring that idea of who they are.

And it's really amazing when you get those letters because- Wow Rick, from a parent, a grateful parent.

Lindsay Pedersen

I get this sense of like Zumiez providing this counterweight when so much of what these young people are experiencing is pressure to be a certain way, to conform, to be like XYZ. And that Zumiez provides this counterweight to that pressure, especially for young people who have a particular hunger to be individuating with a lot of rigor at that point. Like it feels like a bastion or a sanctuary for this person.

Rick Brooks

I think that's right. And I think it's, again, kind of more unique to our consumer.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's not just any teen.

Rick Brooks

Yeah. Correct. We think about that core consumer I've described to you as our core consumer.

That doesn't mean that we don't get a lot of trend consumers that are following. I think of our consumer as kind of a trend leader. They're kind of the innately natural influencer in their local junior high and high school.

So we'll get a lot of our business is the people that see the trend and now want to wear the trend. And so they'll be the consumer that comes along with that core consumer, but it's influenced in a different way. It's influencing not to make money.

It's influenced because it's our core consumers trying to express who they are. It's finding their identity. Right.

And it'll shift over time. I mean, again, that's the process of going through adolescence. And so, yes, for our core consumer, that's true.

And I think maybe a little bit for the consumer that wants to, when they're picking up on the trends of the brand and wants to, it moves more towards the mainstream. Yes. Then I think it might play that role too.

But all kids are definitely influenced by social media. There's all of them. I know.

Right. And not always the most healthy way. But I think our brand is designed to kind of help offset that.

And again, today's consumer world, today, young people, it's very isolating, I think, this concept of social media. And I think if you look at the data, a lot of kids will say they have a lot of friends, but very few close friends. And that, I think, is why there's this backlash, is why our consumers shopping in-store is their overwhelming preferred way to shop.

It's a community thing for them. It's an exploration thing for them. But it's like 80% of our consumers prefer to buy product in the store environment.

Lindsay Pedersen

That is an amazing number. And it's like this person, this customer can't get the oxytocin rush with a digital transaction. Sure.

Maybe there's like a little bit, but it's the physical animal bodies being near each other in a store, in a safe environment that celebrates whoever it is that wants to come forward. You can't have that in an online environment, or you can, but the approximate just is not the same.

Rick Brooks

Yeah. And then we have to back it up with the really cool stuff, right? The really cool brands, the current trend-leading product, and it's not right for everyone.

But the point is they'll find their place there, right? They'll find what is right for them because we're showing a lot of different kinds of looks and they'll find their thing that really represents how they see themselves. It's a really cool, I love the brand position because again, it's, and I'll tell you one of the other byproducts of brand position and one of the tests you can have on this, if you're doing it right, people will pay full price.

Lindsay Pedersen

I mean, that's why the CFO should care about your brand positioning.

Rick Brooks

Exactly. And I can tell you our CFO does because he understands this and that's why the brand position is so critical, right? And we spend a lot of time socializing our brand elements too with the organization because everyone can contribute to them and you have to understand what we're doing for those customers.

So again, this is where the teaching and learning aspect of our business comes back into play is that we have a hierarchy of brand elements and we socialize them deeply across the entire organization. But the biggest measure of success of a retail brand is doing something powerful for your customer.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. It's all about pricing power. The evidence is in your pricing power or your lack of pricing power.

I'm curious because there's so much commitment and discipline to the North Star, the brand tenants, the cultural tenants. When have you had to make a trade-off as a leader for something that would be economically attractive if it weren't for these pesky brand values and cultural values where you've actually had to turn down revenue or something, an attractive opportunity in order to remain really committed and coherent with these values?

Rick Brooks

If I have ever had to deal with that, I don't think it's been in any major significant way. We think of it differently. Here's how we think about it.

We think about how we constantly have to be transforming our business. The speed of consumer cycles have never been faster and it continues to accelerate. So I think we're constantly in a reinvention mode of the underlying business itself.

The tactics we use that we have to use to be successful as the consumer evolves. So I don't believe we ever have to compromise the cultural values or the brand elements if we're planning ahead and thinking about how we execute in this rapidly evolving consumer world. I'll give you a simple example.

In the whole Amichana world, we were there I think early because we knew this would be important to our customer, right? And 08 type of timing where we really laid out in writing, this is how we think we have to evolve. And then in 2012 when 3G really came out for cell phones, right?

This is really the power of cell phones. 3G came out. Now they're more useful because now you can net stream video.

Their websites are more functional on them. And in thinking about how we're going to evolve in this world, we literally listed out the things we're going to do. And again, to prioritize and begin that we need to evolve to serve the customer better.

And when we did that, we thought about the cultural values. We thought about the things, some things we didn't anticipate, but our employees did it anyway. And here's a good example for you in terms of the endless aisle concept.

We call it sold one, which is, and I think it must've been 2010 that we're starting this concept of we can sell anything to anyone and we can do it in the store. We literally just start by picking up the phone and calling a central place where if we didn't have the size, we would get it and ship it to them, right? And evolved it to digital answer relatively quickly.

And what we found though, was that when we shipped the product and particularly it was shipped out of a store, store manager was writing notes to the customers on the receipts. We eventually did. And again, it during this line, because being in our world, our customers thought the time it took to ship the product was terrible.

They want it now. They don't want to have to wait. This cool thing they wanted to buy.

They don't want to wait.

Lindsay Pedersen

Instant gratification. Yeah.

Rick Brooks

So that drove us to do by, by, we started experimenting with that in 2012, 2013. And by 2050, we decided to actually close our web fulfillment center and be a hundred percent in-store fulfillment with the goal of positioning the product in local markets, because now we can get to them right now. And we can tell if you look on our website, you can actually shop the availability and you have been in for 10 years now, shop the availability of what's in my local store.

I really want this because the convenience for them is I can get it in 15 minutes by getting to my local store. And the way you did that, we had even more so of our employees writing notes to customers say, wow, this is really cool. Let me know if I can help you come see me.

And our employees just took it to even a new level, but this is what happens. We have to transform. You think about the challenges and you tune it to the cultural values.

And what we told our employees when we're going to do the a hundred percent local fulfillment, we said, this is really amazing because we're going to going back pre-internet days. We're actually going to return the local customer back to you. They're your customer.

And now you get them back and you get them back in both the digital sense, as well as the physical sense. And that's why the note writing things took place that were just like, we didn't anticipate the note writing our employees because they just did it because they knew it was right. They knew what the right brand thing was to do and invite them back to the store or suggest another item.

It was just natural for our employees to do that. But I don't think you have to make these compromises.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. It strikes me just how much deep respect you have for the employees and the customers and this kind of curiosity and humility and willingness to learn from these young people and that that's at the basis of this, like that deep respect. People feel that, but whether it's employees or customers.

Rick Brooks

To the extent that becomes self-governed and if we get out alive at the corporate level, thinking that we have a better way of doing something that diminishes the empowerment of our store managers, we will know about it instantly.

Lindsay Pedersen

They tell you?

Rick Brooks

They will tell us. That's the self-governing aspect that I think of when it's deeply embedded in the organization. People are like, Whoa, wait a minute.

This is my job, not yours. And I know what I'm doing too, by the way. Now, if you need to give me more information to make better decisions to do that, but I'm going to own this.

And so it becomes self-governing in that nature, right? When it's truly deeply embedded and likewise, customers will tell us if they think we're off track, obviously not only through sales, but we'll hear about it. I don't know why you're doing this, right?

And we'll get the feedback. So when you have that clear position, I think in that sense, it does become both from a culture perspective. There's some self-governing aspects to it from the people.

Lindsay Pedersen

From these people that matter the most. This has been such a wonderful conversation. As we wrap up, I have a few kind of fun, rapid fire questions that have nothing to do with business.

So one word, two word-ish answers. Are you a morning person or a night owl?

Rick Brooks

Night owl.

Lindsay Pedersen

What's the name of the greatest teacher you've ever had?

Rick Brooks

David Droege.

Lindsay Pedersen

What is your favorite sport either to participate in or to watch?

Rick Brooks

Basketball.

Lindsay Pedersen

What's your favorite dessert?

Rick Brooks

All forms of cookies. Freshly made cookies, just so I'm clear.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. All freshly made cookies. Are we talking chocolate chip, snickerdoodles?

Rick Brooks

All of them. As long as they're baked in real time.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. Crispy or chewy?

Rick Brooks

Soft, chewy.

Lindsay Pedersen

Chewy. Okay. Lastly, what is the most recent thing that you've bought for yourself from Zumiez?

Rick Brooks

I just bought some sandals, some reef sandals.

Lindsay Pedersen

Reef sandals. Love it. This has been so great.

For folks who want to learn more about you and Zumiez, where should we send them online?

Rick Brooks

Into the store. You don't send online. You go to the stores.

Lindsay Pedersen

Go to the Zumiez store nearest you.

Rick Brooks

That's right. If you really want to learn more about Zumiez, go in and talk to our people. I think at times, outsiders can maybe view our stores as a bit intimidating, but they're not.

Go in and you'll have a great time.

Lindsay Pedersen

They're really fun.

Rick Brooks

They're really fun. You'll have a great time.

Lindsay Pedersen

Love it. Okay. Thank you so much for joining.

My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders.

Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star Leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter.

I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.