With 30 years of executive leadership experience, including stints as CEO and president of Weight Watchers International and the Home Shopping Network, Mindy Grossman has been through her fair share of business transformations. Here, she shares her thoughts on what it takes to succeed in today’s retail environment and how she got her start in the industry.
Inside Retail: Drawing on your many years of experience, what do you see as the biggest challenge retailers face today?
Mindy Grossman: A big challenge that I see is with talent.
We’ve had such a mass consolidation of retail over the years, that I feel like we’re underestimating the power of great creatives, merchants and marketing talent. Today, [the retail industry] is married to technology, from data to AI advancements to supply chain. But at the end of the day, it’s the people who buy the product, right?
There has to be a reason that resonates with the consumer to make them want to make a purchase and ultimately want to continue to have loyalty to your brand and be a part of it.
Then, [retailers need to have] the ability to build out what I would call sustainable franchises. Which is very, very significant in industries like apparel, footwear or beauty. How do you create things that people want to own in their closet or on their beauty shelf? I would also never go without talking about culture. You look at businesses right now that are performing well, the culture is as critical as the experience, the product, and the community.
IR: Considering today’s challenging landscape, what are the common elements that differentiate the really successful retailers from those that are just keeping up?
MG: There is a little part of me that can’t believe we’re still talking about this in 2024 because it’s been a real passion of mine since the early days of being part of the National Retail Federation almost 20 years ago.
The most important thing is you have to be channel agnostic. You need to totally build the shopping experience from the consumer backwards. It is so critical. The way I think about it is you have to create a 360-degree experience for how the consumer wants to interact with your brand.
For example, Fanatics Inc, where I’ve been on the board for eight years, has gone from a vertical commerce business to a platform focused around the fan. So it’s commerce, it’s collectables, it’s betting and gaming, and it’s experiences like Fanatics Fest, with over 70,000 fans joined together over the course of a single weekend. Everything is integrated around every touchpoint for the consumer, which is critical for retailers to consider.
IR: Over the course of your career, you’ve held a pretty great track record for getting people not only to buy into what you were doing, but also to aid you in achieving your vision. How have you been able to manage that?
MG: I’ve always been known for transformation, which is sometimes the most overused word in business.
People think they have a new statement that they’re going to put on the wall and that they’ve really transformed. The reality is that large, radical change is needed to effect transformation.
For that, you need a strategy aligned with a vision, a board that is supportive of your decisions and a culture that is completely aligned. You also need a modicum of investment dollars and resilience, because it’s not always going to be a linear journey. The second thing you have to embody within an organisation is a culture of strategic risk taking. You have to be aligned about trying things, but also need to be able to pivot if something doesn’t work.
I’ve always said that risk taking and boldness are the essence of transformation and often not taking a risk can be riskier.
If you look at situations like the economic crisis of 2008-09 or the Covid-19 pandemic, the companies that led transformation were the ones who leaned in and said, “We’re going to use this as an opportunity to rethink?” “What do we want to look like? What do we want to have coming out of this? What are we willing to do? What are we going to protect relative to investment? Also, what are we going to do to evolve our business?”
It’s more important today than ever before to ask those questions because we are in an environment of uncertainty.
IR: Switching gears a little bit, I’d love to hear about how you first gotinto the retail industry, because I understand it wasn’t part of your original plan.
MG: No. I was planning to be a lawyer and I was also planning to get married. Then, going into my last semester of [university], I kind of blew everything up and said, “No, I don’t think this is what I want to do.”
I decided not to go to law school that fall, and not to get married. I moved to New York, saying I wanted to be in the business of creativity. My first job ended up being in the menswear business, working for a menswear portfolio company called Manhattan Industries. That’s how I ended up starting [out in the retail industry] and falling in love with the business. I started on the sales and merchandising side, and ended up working for very innovative designers, from Jeffrey Banks to Willi Smith and Tommy Hilfiger. Then I spent 10 years with Ralph Lauren, where I was able to work in both men’s and women’s [apparel].
What was interesting is there were no women, absolutely none, running a menswear company. I was one of the first. There really weren’t women running womenswear companies either.
I look back on a lot of my experiences and to this day I believe that the reason I was successful in sales is that I never sold anything to anyone. I identified a need and I went on to service that need. I focus on the success of others, and I feel that I’ve done that throughout my career as well.
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