Hall of Fame Profile: James Damian

James Damian is a storyteller. He loves the history of store design, the tales and legends of his influencers like young tie-maker Ralph Lifshitz turned Ralph Lauren. He's especially fond of mentor Gene Moore, who is credited with bringing modern art to window dressing. Over the course of a 90-minute interview, Damian spoke passionately about meeting and working with Moore and the man's history at Bonwit Teller and Tiffany's. Of course, the limitations of print can't do his stories and exuberance justice, but this article can convey the commercial artist that is Damian.For nearly 12 years, he's helped Best Buy evolve from a warehouse store that put boxes on shelves to a global, customer-centric and experiential store. "My role is around moving to the next idea, once new ideas have been embraced," he says. And now, at press time, Damian announced he is leaving Best Buy in October. Fortuitously, the above photo was snapped and placed. It asks, "Who's Next?" That's unknown, but the person stepping into that chair has a tough act to follow.Damian can talk art and design (the simplicity of Apple, its Bauhaus inspiration), but he can talk retail business, too. He will be honored April 23 at the In-Store Marketing Summit at McDonald's Hamburger University, Oak Brook, Ill., joining two other Hall of Fame inductees: Mike McMahon, ConAgra, and Parisa Zander, Microsoft.How does Best Buy keep up with the changing shopper?Here's a statistic that has been proven over time: Of companies that have seen extraordinary growth, 95% cannot find the next generation of growth. Why? You get saddled with your own success and you stop thinking creatively. The challenge is balancing short-term results while building and creating a new future through a long-term vision.It's all about staying relevant and staying connected to your one true audience -- the customer. If you can be in lockstep with them and develop an anticipatory method, you might be able to help them witness what's next. And what's next, whenever I say that, the company that comes to mind is Apple.Not to dance on its grave, but what happened to Circuit City? Were they not prepared for what's next?They stopped iterating their concepts. They got mired in their early-'90s success. When they started to change, it was too late, and it wasn't innovative. It was mimicking what we created -- a noncommissioned sales force, a post-and-beam environment, polo shirts, similar pathing and store-planning layouts, the exit of appliances. It's the combination of all of those things that made them irrelevant, much like what happened to Kmart. They got squeezed on the upper end of their sector from Target, and they got totally annihilated in price by Walmart.When we made the move to become a service-driven company with the acquisition of Geek Squad, we stepped into a whole new realm of retail. Either we're going to lead the way and have a relevant point of distinction, or we will fall victim to comp-store sales, pushing boxes and selling more stuff.You'll be a warehouse again.Yes, and we know there's no room for that because the big beast, Walmart, can just suck us up. They are the greatest supply chain in the world at retail. They are the price leader. That's how they built their value proposition. Now what they're doing is refreshing their entire chain. If you look at their new formats, they are taking the best of all kinds of retail and adopting it and putting it into practice in their superstore model and Project Impact.They're going after electronics, Target and Whole Foods in a big way. They're building a whole new Walmart that is centered around the female customer, which sounds very familiar -- that's Target's value proposition. You can see it in certain locations with a great wine selection like Whole Foods. You can look at layouts, open aisles and navigational excellence from overhead signs and their in-store network that they're taking from Best Buy.You are a graduate of F.I.T., and I've seen you discuss how much Gene Moore has inspired you. How does fashion and art influence you as a designer for a consumer electronics retailer?The teachings of Gene Moore continue to influence, motivate and inspire me. It's more relevant for this company to look beyond itself and look at those incredible practices that built an incredible brand called Tiffany & Co. He changed the game with windows and rituals. He changed the game when he went to Bonwit Teller and invited artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and other starving artists, much like Gene was when he came to New York in 1935 with $15 dollars in his pocket.And he found the windows. He looked at those through the eyes of an artist and saw a three-dimensional canvas. At the time, it was all about flooding the window with the total assortment and filling it with price tags and a lot of light.Does that sound any different than the retail store?I approached the big box and looked at it like a window. That's the influence Gene Moore had on me, and I'm passing on his stories, specifically to young people who are committing themselves to the practice of art and commerce. I want them to know that they have a voice and can add value to a company.I do wonder if retail and merchandising is changing, with more focus on the science of the shopper as opposed to art at retail?It's going to continue to converge. If you look at companies that embraced the art and the science, they've been successful. Take a look at Steve Jobs' commitment to design with Jonathan Ive. It's all about design. Yes, it has to function, but the desire comes from form factors, ease of use, environmental atmospheres that are children of the Bauhaus period, the modern age. It's all there. Apple has shattered Tiffany & Co.'s multiple-decade benchmark of $3,000 per square foot in sales. Apple's productivity is approaching $4,400.Do you get out and talk to shoppers and research pre- and post-shop?Yeah, we do a lot of that. Back in '03, I started to ask the question, 'What do women want from Best Buy?' That was the birth of the Studio D concept store. When we got women in a room, we asked them, 'What do you like about Best Buy and what do you dislike about Best Buy?' The list of what they liked was very, very short. Women told us, 'Best Buy is a store for guys and they treat me like a second-class citizen. When I go in with my husband, I'm invisible.' But, women have an influence on every purchase. They're the chief operating officer of the household. She's telling the husband, 'You're not bringing those big speakers into my living room.'Studio D was a model and an experiment. It's no longer a store today, but I can tell you that the knowledge we gained has been embedded into all Best Buy stores. You can see it in our latest practices around hiring -- we're committed to getting to a 50/50 workforce male and female. We've changed our environmental and visual merchandising practices to accommodate the female consumer. It's softer. The palette is warmer. We created home office atmospheres, kitchen atmospheres, family room atmospheres. We took down all of the sightlines of high-bay fixtures to 60 inches in height because the average height of the female is 5'4." That's only part of the solution.Talk about the Escape store.Similar strategy but different customer. Escape was more urban. The model for Studio D was Naperville, Ill. -- middle America, average population around 105,000, suburban, accessible to a big city, operated in the town square environment. For Escape, it was the male and female getting their first apartment, getting into the workforce after college, and they looked at technology as a mobile way of staying connected. It was no longer centered around the home. It was the fashion-forward technology enthusiast who looked at technology as an accoutrement to their lifestyle. That's where technology crosses over and becomes the fashion of the times.Talk about Best Buy's global work. Is there a trend to be more consistent worldwide or are stores very different?Companies usually have two selves that fight with one another. One self says we have to be consistent globally. The other self, which is the voice I practice, says to immerse yourself in the culture and the shopping behaviors of that particular country. If you're not a student of this culture and understand the way in which they shop, you can put a model in there that's right for the United States but fails miserably in Europe and Asia.When we first went to China, maybe six years ago, we entered from a global sourcing perspective. We created an office in Shanghai so we could source products directly. That led to an understanding, because you're already there, and we hired Chinese executives to navigate through the country and introduce us to the manufacturers and suppliers. If we didn't travel through the eyes of a native, we wouldn't have had the confidence -- because going in we said we were not going to build stores in China -- that we actually could do this. If we have the patience to do the same thing as we enter into other countries, like we just did in Turkey and what we're about to do in the U.K., then we have a chance.Back in the U.S., how are you working with brands in merchandising?Best Buy has no bias or allegiance toward any one brand. Our job is to present the differences so that the shopper can make a better choice. We'll show shoppers how products work, separately and collectively, and what they will need to activate them at home or on the road. It's got to be more of an experience-based model that is part showroom and part convenience.We have to be ambassadors to get vendors to work with other vendors, allow them to have a shoot-out on the floor through teach-outs and launches, or actually put vendor stuff together with other vendor stuff to show the bigger, broader experience. Customers today are not brand loyal. They are creative, and they are putting parts and pieces together from other vendors to enhance the experience. We have to be the destination to make that happen.What are you doing with digital in-store? I know you have a DVD rental kiosk in stores, but will you be offering more in the way of retail media?Yes, there are many tools that we will have to adopt and use. We've got something in our Roseville, Minn., store, which is how we see our next-generation experience. We have this in-store media network using our BlueShirts and Geek Squad agents in virtual kiosks. You push a button and the BlueShirt talks to you about gaming, streaming music, renting movies, the benefit of Slingbox, VUDU, all of these latest and greatest technologies.If I don't have time to spend with a live BlueShirt or take a class, I can also push a button and the BlueShirt will appear on these bigger-than-life screens and talk about what I can do with a game and what I need. This should happen in concert with online, so I can get that same quick service if I choose to learn that way, or schedule a class for a deeper dive. That model is in play in Roseville.What's new with your private-label lines?That has become an incredible value, and we've done it very sloppily. I'm now pushing an initiative around the portfolio of all brands within Best Buy so that we get credit for it. There has to be more attention put toward Insignia, which is now a billion and a half in terms of revenue. We've given the customer a greater value, another choice, but we're not getting credit for it as being a member of the Best Buy portfolio. A lot of our customers think that it's somebody else's brand or that Geek Squad is really a third-party service provider. It's not.This is part of the growing pains. We've grown so fast that we never thought of these things holistically. That's kind of what I'm driving in the company that we have to look at everything as one thing. They should all be integrated and connecting with one another to create higher brand equity and value in the company.

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