The Turning Point for Palo Alto

My Journey in the Footwear Industry that lead me to Zappos #129

n Blog #128 I talked about about a little bonding time Daryl, Terry and I had together. In this blog I want to talk about the turning Point for Palo Alto.

We were starting to have great increases in the department. Larry and I made a great team and our 2nd Asst. was learning the ropes. We also had a great sales team too. Five Pacesetters graced our floor now. Andre, Jeff,Mina,Saeed and Abraham. The other two floors also had really good teams which was important because they could sell our product too.Everything was starting to gel.

Nora was happy

Nora came down one morning all smiles. She told us “ I can finally step foot in your department”. It was a great moment for us. We had a great laugh about that and she left for the rest of her store walk, looked back and said “ Great job, keep it up!”This was the turning point for Palo Alto.

The Turning Point for Palo Alto

We had five people trending towards Pacesetter where as before we only had two. Everybody got along really well on the floor with a few squabbles here and there. This was to be expected when your team becomes more aggressive on the floor. This reminded me of Arden Fair and was really happy in our progress.

We had a lot of help from some really great reps too. Terry from Nickels, Steve from Sudini, Jimmy from Enzo, David from Munro, Joe from Magdesians, Steve from Keds, Tom from Clark’s and as I mentioned in the last few blogs Dean from Wolfe shoe company and Jerry from Callisto. There were others too but these reps had huge increases in their business with us. They were all really good at coming in for timely reorders and balancing our inventory.

We were trending really well, Scott our RMM was very supportive which also helped in our success. People, Teamwork, Merchandise are all reasons the got us to the turning point. It was usually the same everytime I had issues with business that these were the solutions.

My own Challenge

One thing I always tried to do when I would ever take over a store was to look back in history to the best ever year and try to beat that year. We could very well beat the best year ever but needed an extra push to make sure. What was missing? started to look at my future Po’s and had an idea on what that something was…