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Executive Session with Charles Nesbit Jr.
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Chico's
PERSONAL
AGE: 50
FAMILY: Married, daughter, 19
HOMETOWN: "I was a military brat, so I moved around all my life. I was born at Marine Corps Air Station in New River, N.C., and I graduated from high school in Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. I guess the most of a hometown I had was Winston-Salem, N.C., where I lived for 20 years before I came to Fort Myers to work for Chico's."
EDUCATION: B.A. in American government, University of Virginia; M.B.A., Wake Forest University.
SO ARE YOU A CAVALIER?: "I guess I am. Or a Wahoo, as we call ourselves. The Cavaliers are the official mascot, but for some reason, and it's hidden in the dark ages, the students call themselves Wahoos. And it's not the fish, so maybe it was from drunken revelry in the late 1800s."
DO YOU HAVE HOBBIES?: "Genealogy. On my mother's side, I've tracked them back to the 1500s in England. And on my father's side to the mid-1700s when they came over from Ireland. It's fascinating. I've got 3,500 people that we have found at various places on the trees. It's fun and it's intellectually challenging. There's a lot of work you can do on the Internet, which makes it easier than in the old days when you had to plow through courthouses and old deeds. I do woodworking and stained glass as well."
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST PAYING JOB?: "I worked in tobacco when I was 6 years old in North Carolina. I helped tie the leaves onto the sticks and put them up in the tobacco barns where they got cured. When I got out of school my first real job was when I went to work for Hanes Corp. as a marketing intern working on men's' and boys' underwear. That's how I got into the apparel business. Hanes was in Winston-Salem."
PROFESSIONAL
HOW LONG DID YOU WORK FOR HANES?: "I was there for about a year and a half. I left for three years and worked for a Swiss company in Oklahoma called Hilti; they're in the construction-fastening business. So I moved from apparel to construction. I actually followed my boss out there. Three years later, in 1983, I came back to Winston Salem. Hanes hired me back and by that time they had been bought by Sara Lee Corp. I was hired back to be director of strategic planning for their underwear division.
From there I moved up the ladder. I worked in the hosiery business for a while. Then I moved to the intimate apparel business in 1987 at Bali. I went over to launch a new brand, Just My Size. I worked on launching the Hanes Her Way business as well and kind of worked my way up that organization. I became president of Bali in 1996.
In 1999, I became president of the intimate apparel group for Sara Lee, which is the largest intimate-apparel company in North America. It has brands like Playtex, Bali, Hanes, Just My Size. Another brand that I was involved in launching in 1994 was the Wonderbra. It was kind of a marketing and public relations phenomenon. It was a lot of fun and my team put the whole idea together. We launched it and had David Letterman doing Top 10 lists for the Wonderbra and got lots of great publicity. We chased the business for a couple of years."
DID YOU EVER THINK THE WONDERBRA WOULD GET SO MUCH ATTENTION?: "We thought it might. That's why instead of a traditional advertising-driven marketing campaign, we tried to do this guerilla public relations campaign to get people talking about Wonderbra. We were really fortunate to get Dave Barry to write a column on it. We were launching it in the U.S. and the U.K. at the same time, and he picked up on it in the U.K. It got people in the press buzzing."
SO IT WAS A DIFFERENT APPROACH?: "We were trying to launch a new brand, and we didn't have a lot of money. Obviously it maximized cleavage, and that was the 'wonder' of the Wonderbra, and we happened to hit a good time. We had a good campaign that was kind of cheeky in tone, and it inspired the press and it inspired women."
WHEN DID YOU LEAVE SARA LEE?: "I left Sara Lee in March 2004. I was a consultant to Chico's in April 2004. I was looking for a life change. I had run a pretty large organization. I had reached a point financially where I was pretty comfortable. I was less and less satisfied working in a large $20 billion corporation and had decided to look for a change.
I wanted to work for a smaller, more entrepreneurial, very aggressive, fast-growing organization. I had seen Chico's was getting in this business (intimate apparel), and my wife and I admired the company. She was a very loyal customer. I really felt like Soma's concept was right on. So I contacted Scott Edmonds, the CEO, and said I've got a lot of skills that you can probably use, and I'm very interested in working for an organization like this.
Certainly, I'm not the traditional hire for Chico's, so we worked out an arrangement. I came from a wholesale background, not a retail background and obviously my experience was in a much larger organization. We kind of worked a deal where I would work as a consultant for a while and we'd see how it went for both of us. After six months we decided to get married."
AND YOUR DAUGHTER WAS GOING TO COLLEGE AT THAT TIME?: "Yes, that was another thing that gave me the freedom to look at a lifestyle change because she was leaving the nest. There are a lot of great things about corporate life, but there are a lot of handcuffs on you. Things don't move very fast, and they don't tend to be as creative.
As a wholesaler of apparel today it's a very tough world to live in. You've got Wal-Mart dictating a lot of what you do. Even on the department-store side, May and Federated are combining to create another big Wal-Mart-type organization. When you're supplying these people and you've got global free trade, it makes the competitive situation much, much tougher. The power is in the retailers' hands. So, for me, moving to the retail side was exciting."
COMPANY AND THE POSITION
WHAT ARE YOUR IMMEDIATE CHALLENGES AT CHICO'S?: "One of my primary responsibilities is getting the Soma intimate apparel through the test phase and into the rollout phase. The sportswear group here at Chico's launched the intimates business. They did a great job. For people who weren't in the industry, we hit the target. We may not have hit the bull's eye, but we certainly got on the target.
The sales numbers have been very promising. We do have a number of misses, with our customers saying: 'You don't have this kind of styling, I don't like that,' or whatever. It's a matter of fine-tuning the product to get it exactly right for the customer.
You know, we're going after the Victoria's Secret graduate; no one else has developed a retail brand for that classification. Then, once we get the store volumes to certain levels, we'll really roll this program out and it will be another huge business for Chico's."
SOMA'S WILL BE SOLD IN STAND-ALONE STORES?: "Right now we have a combination of stand-alone stores, like at Bell Tower Shops in Fort Myers, where the Soma store is directly across from the Chico's store. At St. Armands Circle in Sarasota, the Chico's and the Soma's are side-by-side, and the customer can literally walk between the two stores. We're testing a number of formats. And that's part of the test phase; to figure out which format works best."
WHEN DOES ROLLOUT START?: "We've committed to an additional five stores this year, which means by Feb. 1, 2006, we'll have gone from the current 10 stores to 15. The timetable right now is primarily driven by what we can manage internally as well as the availability of real estate. We are very choosy in terms of where we want to go. We're building a brand from scratch. We need to be in the right locations. We're really driven by the availability of premier locations. We want to be near a Chico's store. It doesn't have to be side-by-side, but we prefer side-by-side. My guess is for the next two years, we'll be somewhat constrained by the real estate availability, as well as ramping up production.
My focus working for the company over the past 12 months since I've been on the payroll has been strategic planning and business development. For example, we recently made a strategic investment in Lucy, which is a small retail chain of 18 stores on the West Coast that sells active-wear products to women age 25 to 45. It seemed to fit real well within our portfolio of brands because it wasn't cannibalistic at all. It's a different lifestyle segment. That's something I worked to put together. I look at acquisitions; I look at new categories of business. We tested cosmetics a few months ago in Chico's stores. That was one of my projects."
- Jean Gruss
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