March 29, 2024

You’re the Boss Blog: Can This Retailer Make It in New York?

Lee Rhodes, owner of Glassybaby, a Seattle-based company that opened a store on Hudson Street in New York.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesLee Rhodes, owner of Glassybaby, a Seattle-based company that opened a store on Hudson Street in New York.

Case Study

What would you do with this business?

A case study we’ve just published details the predicament faced by Glassybaby, a creator and purveyor of small hand-blown glass cups that come in lots of colors and are used as decorations, vases and candleholders. Founded in 2001 by Lee Rhodes, the 97-employee company operates three stores and a glass-blowing studio in Seattle, as well as a store in New York.

In the fall of 2009, Glassybaby made its first retail foray beyond its rainy hometown, opening a store in Greenwich Village. Foot traffic, however, has been far lower than expected, sales haven’t been strong, and the store is not profitable. The case study assesses Ms. Rhodes’s options, including packing up for another location, investing more time in bulk sales to restaurants or finding new partnerships with charities to promote the brand.

Below, you can read what other business owners and management experts think Glassybaby should do. We hope you’ll use the comment section to chime in, too. Next week, we’ll follow up with a blog post about what Glassybaby decided and how it worked out.

Dan Levitan, a founder of Maveron, a venture capital firm based in Seattle: “Glassybaby is selling a concept, not just a physical product. The New York City store manager needs to get that concept outside of the four walls of the stores and into fashion and charity circles in New York City. The staff in the new store need to learn the company culture so they can become a mirror image of the store experience in Seattle.”

Christina Norsig, chief executive of PopUpInsider, a Manhattan group that matches companies with empty retail space for temporary leases: “I recommend moving the New York store to an area with more foot traffic. They could use temporary retail spaces to find the right geographic locations and boost brand awareness through public relations events. Glassybaby is a perfect concept that also lends itself for wholesale distribution to department and specialty shops.”

Emeric Harney, general manager of the Harney Sons SoHo store, an expansion of Harney Sons tea company, which is based in Millerton, N.Y.: “Glassybaby might also take advantage of social media platforms, expanding its business with Facebook check-ins, Foursquare deals, etc., in an effort to reach a younger demographic, which makes up a large portion of New York City. Using these platforms, they might be able to organize brand outreach events or partner with other businesses to pool their client bases together.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0294db209309bffda3e68e77faba1bd8

Corner Office: David Sacks: Fostering a Culture of Dissent

Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

A. I’d say probably the most formative experiences came when I was at PayPal because it was this three-year experience going from zero to a $1.5 billion company. At the time we sold the company we had about at least 700 employees. I think about 500 were reporting to me.

One of the things that Peter Thiel, our C.E.O. at PayPal, did extremely well was just to focus on the few things that were the most important issues at that time, and make sure we got those right. And he was a very good delegator. So that was a great lesson. But at the same time, I saw that some very small product decisions had a disproportionate impact on the business. And you just can’t always delegate those things. You have to be willing to get involved and make sure that the work gets done properly.

And so I say that my own style would be like some sort of balance or synthesis of that, where I try to focus on the biggest-picture issues, but at the same time some aspects are so important that I have to get involved at a pretty detailed level.

Q. What else in terms of leadership?

A. I have an open door policy. Anyone can walk into my office and start talking to me. I also walk around the office and just start talking to people about what they’re working on. I’m not trying to micromanage what they’re doing, but I am trying to find out what they’re working on and talk to them about it.

Anybody can ask me questions and debate me. You could be a new employee and you can start getting into a debate with me about something. The start-up culture is very democratic in general. I think you need that in order to attract good people. You’ve really got to create a company culture that people want to work at. And so you try to give them a voice, give them a sense that they influence the direction of the company, and try to avoid unnecessary process and hierarchy — things that might frustrate employees.

Q. A lot of people say they have an open-door policy, but they don’t really mean it.

A. I think you’ve got to create a culture in which dissent is valued. And there’s probably a lot of ways to set that tone. Certainly you can tell if you’ve got a culture of dissent when you walk into a company. People can figure out very quickly whether dissent is encouraged or whether it’s actually something that’s not welcome.

Q. How?

A. It’s a red flag to me if there’s just too much consensus and not enough dissent. I feel like in any human community there’s always dissent because people just disagree. Anytime there doesn’t appear to be dissent, it means that the corporate culture has just shifted way too much toward consensus. That means the leadership just doesn’t welcome dissent enough.

Q. So how do you create a culture of dissent?

A. You’ve got to constantly ask your reports whether they think we’re on the right track, whether the strategy you’ve laid out is right, what they think about the strategy, where things aren’t going well. You’ve really got to dig into that.

We let employees voice their opinions about everything. There’s no sense that, O.K., I am an engineer, therefore I can’t voice my opinion about what’s happening in customer service or sales or vice versa. We try to create clear ownership so everyone owns an area. But that doesn’t mean that people from other parts of the company can’t voice their opinion about something that’s happening there. And it may not just be about a dissenting opinion. It may just be to provide more information. It doesn’t have to be, “I don’t like what you’re doing.” It’s more like, “Here’s a bunch of things I’m learning over here — are you guys taking this into account?”

Q. It’s very easy, though, for people to get their back up and say, in so many words, get out of my sandbox.

A. And that’s why you have to have clear ownership. One of the ways political cultures develop is when it’s not clear enough who owns which areas, and so you need to get lots of people on board to do something. That’s not true at our company. One reason people can feel comfortable about dissent here is because their own responsibilities are clear.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=782bb8947c1c1fb0a377614efe46481e