I'm most passionate about personalization. I firmly believe that personalized experiences with brands will most drive loyalty and relevance for customers in the future.
Every day, every one of us sets the stage for our sentiment, our confidence, and our success by getting dressed. When you feel great, when you feel your best, it opens up a world of possibility. Feeling confident and self-assured are important inputs into good days, successful days, and happy days.
When I founded Stitch Fix, I wanted to create a company that I would want to work at for the rest of my life.
I founded Stitch Fix to take on a very human problem: How do I find clothes I love? Like most people, I want to look stylish and feel my best. Spending a day at the mall or devoting hours of time to sifting through millions of products online is time consuming, overwhelming, and neither effective nor enjoyable. I knew there had to be another way.
I wanted to be a doctor. I was pre-med at school, and I actually even took the MCAT. My ultimate decision was that I didn't love the work environment in a hospital.
Be known as a great resource. Are you an Excel genius? An expert on local restaurants? Fabulous at proofreading? Go beyond your job description by being an open resource for others in the company who could benefit from your talents. I believe that paying it forward will serve you well one way or another in the future.
Find someone within the company who is on another team but is at a similar level or role as you to be a friend, a sounding board, and a place to go for candid feedback. Find a mentor within the company who resembles the leader you'd like to grow to be.
Ultimately, my belief is that the best marketing is creating a product that people are excited to talk about. Period.
I love cooking. It's what clears my mind, since it's pretty hard to multitask when you're chopping vegetables.
Creativity was definitely a big part of our household, and I remember always writing stories and being encouraged to be creative.
'Personalization' is a popular word in retail, and people often misuse it to describe simple marketing tactics, like segmenting emails or using big data to identify the likely gender of a visitor to their websites.
I like to wear more traditional work outfits like pants and a blouse, but I want the blouse to have something that is a little bit different and interesting - like with some studs on it or a little bit of lace. I want to feel comfortable and confident and don't want to have to think too much about what I wear every day.
Ultimately, I didn't quite find the company I wanted to join, but I met more than 100 entrepreneurs and realized that all these entrepreneurs were just as unqualified as I was. If I wanted to be this retailer of the future, or if I wanted to join the retailer of the future, I could just start it.
When I feel like work and life are both going well, I feel like I can be fully present at both. I think the reminder to me is that both are super important, and I need to be able to feel like I can experience both in the way that makes me happiest. If I'm not happy in one or the other, it really affects the other side.
There are millions and millions of products out there. You can look at eBay and Amazon. You can look at every product on the planet, but trying to figure out which one is best for you is really the challenge.
Brick and mortar stores will ultimately mark down between 50 to 60% of its merchandise because they don't know who's walking in the door on any day, so they lose control.
Customer-centricity is unbelievably important.
When the business really works is when we hear clients say, 'I've never had jeans that fit me until I got a pair from Stitch Fix.' We'll also hear, 'I would never have tried this dress on in a store.' It's not just about convenience. They're happier in their clothes.
Delivering a service that consumers feel truly connected to and providing an experience that people love and love to organically share and talk about is the most effective form of marketing I know.
Figuring out how to scale the very human art of personalization is difficult, but I believe that it is also the key to building a lasting connection with customers for the long term.
