The Numbers
In two years our small team at Cole Haan flipped an eyesore of an organization within Nike’s portfolio into the media and fashion darling of premium fashion. Over the years the brand had episodes of brilliance but never lived up to Nike’s expectations as a fashion satellite 3000 miles outside of the berm.
Originally purchased by Phil Knight in the ‘80’s because conventional business wisdom prioritized ‘brown shoes’ over sneakers, Cole Haan‘s real identity was the shoe that Nike employees bought for weddings at half price.
When Gordon Thompson breathed life into the brand by adding visible ‘Air’ and other technology, people took notice. Then he left and it got quiet again. Oprah left the building.
So when I dropped into the studio focused on learning the craft of wingtips, Mark Parker smiled at me and simply said, “Just do what what you did in NSW.”
LunarGrand.
Fast forward two years and the brand was on fire and then up for sale. Nothing about Cole Haan fit into the Nike portfolio so Inc was ready to shop their NYC fashion brand.
That’s where I got my MBA.
For six months I sat through daily meetings and weekly presentations to VC’s as they asked question after question about inventory, revenue, EBITDA, turn rate, property, etc. Hundreds of questions on repeat from business folks in suits trying to kick the tires and check the oil.
I thought I’d be bored but I was far from nodding. I was busy looking up every business term they used like I was in a new country. They had math I didn’t know existed and I consumed as much as I could.
But the part that completely fascinated me was their omission of one of the most costly columns of the balance sheet and reason for the brand’s resurgence.
Design.
No one ever asked about the creative teams. Marketing or product design. They could not have cared less.
This was an extreme pitfall if you asked me because over the prior 3 months as the sale was announced, key creatives jumped ship. They understood that their worth in the industry had been amplified by a the run created by Nike’s belief in design. Most businesses use design as a buzzword - like sustainability and diversity and data and innovation. If you check under the hood you’ll find that they run business as usual with a couple of folks dedicated to the buzzword with no real budget.
For the most part those that remained were not the heat that put the brand on the map. My small team was cooking but the collective of creatives throughout the building was what drove the LunarGrand.
The fact that not one VC questioned the integrity or fortitude of the creative team told me that either a) they didn’t believe in the importance of design or b) they didn’t know how to quantify the creative process or judge the creative team.
Years prior the VP of Nike Design John Hoke introduced a way to quantify the real work that was done by the design team. He had just finished his MBA and understood the importance of understanding the fundamental business reality of recruiting, developing and retaining resources.
I thought the idea was genius and implemented it immediately. Some creatives dragged their feet on the concept because they believed you couldn’t put a number on our creative expression.
While that may be true, the business is measured in numbers and resources are divided by numbers and money is spent in numbers. So I did the math and got my resources. We had a business to run. As a design director and manager it was my responsibility to ensure that my team was worked, rewarded and resourced accordingly. Keeping them fed was not a creative task. It was business.
The scary numbers allowed me to request necessary resources to keep our team driven or deny services based on our team’s capacity. In the creative world that second option is unheard of. So many business and creative leaders think that design can be forced through a number of hours and if you simply keep drawing you’ll get quality results. This drive typically leads to low quality, repeated output or personal burnout.
All three of those outcomes produce business success. There are plenty of businesses built on crappy design, unoriginal product or a high design turnover rate because the brand is cool.
But those outcomes are rarely positive for the individual creatives.
So whenever we get the opportunity to help an organization balance the creative process and people against the bottom line, we share what we know because sometimes creative leadership is only about the numbers.
