Switch - Chip Heath [41]
She joined Target in 1992 as the “ready-to-wear” trend manager, which made her responsible for black stirrup pants, sweats, and Looney Tunes T-shirts. She’d wondered how she’d managed to slip from Versace to Tweety Bird.
The company was at an important inflection point when she joined. Bob Ulrich had just retired as CEO, and he’d become chairman of the board. He had a very clear vision of Target as an “upscale discounter” that would differentiate itself through design. He dreamed that Target’s bull’s-eye would become a “love-mark,” as respected and well loved as Coca-Cola or the Beatles or Lego. He wanted the bull’s-eye to be as ubiquitous as McDonald’s golden arches.
At the time, though, Target was a long way from realizing that vision. The merchants at Target—the people who select the merchandise that will show up for sale in various departments—had traditionally been copycats. Waters said the mind set among the clothing merchants had been to “find the best seller this year, take it to Asia, knock it off, and sell it next year at half the price.” For Target to become a design powerhouse, the company had to stop lagging the trends and start riding the trends. That was Waters’s mandate in the trend department.
The problem was that Waters had almost no power to advance this “trend-right” vision. The merchants didn’t have to deal with her. “I had to win them over. I could never mandate, ‘We have to have purple this year because that’s the trend,’” she recalled.
Waters slowly built up believers. An early convert was the merchant responsible for turtlenecks. She was fed up with using the same tired patterns each year—you know, the cutesy snowflake-and-reindeer prints used by every discount retailer. So, at Waters’s urging, she hired a designer to create some fresh patterns, and as they both predicted, sales improved dramatically.
These early-adopter experiments gave Waters much-needed success stories. Since Target had an analytical, numbers-driven culture, publicizing the early results was critical. Waters could point to “heroes” in the organization who’d taken a risk and succeeded. (“Check out what the turtleneck merchant did.”)
For a time in retail, trendy clothing was neutral in color. Everything was gray, white, khaki, tan, or black. Then, one season, color exploded at the fabric shows and in the retailers in London and Paris. It wasn’t an obscure trend; it was a big wave. So, as the design champion at Target, Waters needed to get her merchants excited about color. But the merchants, being numbers driven, would review the past few years’ sales and see that color hadn’t sold. (In this situation, a Rider appeal couldn’t possibly succeed because the data contradicted Waters’s position.)
Waters had to get creative. She went to the candy store at FAO Schwarz, where you could buy M&Ms in whatever color you wanted, and brought huge bags full of bright-colored M&Ms to her internal meetings. She poured the candy into a glass bowl, creating cascades of turquoise and hot pink and lime green. “People would go ‘Wow,’ and I’d say, ‘See, look at your reaction to color.’”
She brought in samples of Apple’s recently released iMac computers—in lime, strawberry, grape, and tangerine—which had been a sensation. For the first time, consumers were choosing the color of their computers with the same seriousness they used to choose the color of their cars. And she constantly brought in photographs from boutiques around the world. She’d show a merchant the photo of a polo assortment and say, “See how they have three neutrals, and a mild yellow, and then they add the bright blue for a pop.” Then she’d create a mock-up display with actual clothing samples so the merchants could see for themselves, Yup, that blue color pops. And, soon after, that blue polo shirt would show up on the floor of Target, for one clothing line, for one season.
This is how organizational change happens.
When Waters talks about this period,