Ep. 68 Leading By Design: A Passionate And Principled Career in Retail Placemaking with James Damian - Consultant - Gap International Brand Strategist, Design Thinking Practice Leader

About James Damian:

James’ Profile: linkedin.com/in/james-damian-3a54956

Website: james-damian.com (Company)

Email: james@james-damian.com

JAMES' BIO:

Senior Executive and Consummate Business Leader who drove major change across the consumer retail industry by leveraging the power of design thinking as a strategic advantage, delivering economic success. Trusted advisor committed to creating purpose, achieving profit through performance for sustainable growth. While at Best Buy James and his group led innovation and new concept stores making them the most profitable in the history of the company to date. During his time the Store count went to 1400 from 275 and the stock soared from $7 a share to $110.

James is a Design Thinking practitioner, Creative Strategist and Motivational Speaker at International CEO Summits, illustrating how to create a Customer Centric Culture through Design Thinking where Culture precedes Strategy, creating growth through an integrated, collaborative, interdisciplinary process.

BOARD LEADERSHIP
As Chairman of the Board for Buffalo Wild Wings from 2008 to 2017, helped to shift corporate focus to an employee and customer-centric culture with the goal to become the ultimate social experience for sports and gaming fans. This strategic shift accomplished through alignment of the board with management enabled an extraordinary run of top quartile performance delivering an 850% return to shareholders.

STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP THROUGH CREATIVITY
Drove culture of innovation within Best Buy and consequently transformed the 'Big Box' consumer electronics retail format. Pioneered company’s “new store” experience by integrating creative visual merchandising and design into the overall corporate vision. Instrumental in expanding BestBuy from 275 to 2,500 stores. This experience based strategy was instrumental in driving revenue from 8 billion to 50 billion in a 12 year period, attaining status as a Fortune 50 company.

SHOW INTRO:
Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

These dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant.

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

In this episode I talk with James Damian a retail industry leader who was mentored in the fine art of visual merchandising and display by one of retail’s icons, Gene Moore of Tiffanys. James has had a brilliant career leading major transformations at Best Buy where he was SVP and Chief Design Officer of Experience Design Group, the Chairman of the Board of Buffalo Wild Wings and now shares his experience and passion for retail as a consultant with GAP international.

First though, a few thoughts…

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In 1994 I was working in my hometown of Montréal as an architect and at the same time teaching was the director of the interior design program at College Interdec at LaSalle college. 

One day my friend and colleague Monique Piroth invited me out to lunch across the street from the school for a sandwich we talked about the world of visual merchandising, the program that she was the director of and where our careers would take us.

She explained that the college wanted her to go to Singapore to step into the role of the director of the visual merchandising program at La Salle international Fashion School in Singapore, an affiliate of LaSalle College, because our friend and colleague Guy Lapointe had to return to Montréal to tend to his ailing father. 

She effectively said that she didn't want to go and I immediately offered up the option that I would instead. 

This was one of a series of fateful moments of serendipity that would shape my career for the next 30 years. I never planned to be in retail... It just happened. 

I wasn't out looking for it, but it somehow found me. 

And so, after that somewhat joking, off the cuff remark, I was on a plane for Singapore not much more than two weeks later. 

At that point, my life shifted and instead of practicing architecture in the way that I thought that I would, I shifted into the world of visual merchandising and store design. 

While running the Visual Merchandising program at LaSalle International Fashion School, I was asked to do a presentation on visual merchandising trends at a Retail Asia conference.

To be honest, I had very little insight what trends were shaping the retail world since the whole thing was new to me. I was reading everything I could in retail design magazines and trying to learn about who the voices were in the industry and what they were talking about. 

I scoured the magazines trying to determine who were the thought leaders in the industry and compiled a short list of people who I thought had great insights and sent out invitations, by fax, for them to provide some insight on what they considered to be major trends in the industry. 

One of those individuals was a gentleman named Tom Beebe who at the time was the visual merchandising director for a men's fashion store in New York called Paul Stewart.

Tom was an enthusiastic participant and when at the end of my one-year tenure in Singapore I arrived in New York I made sure to make a point of connecting with Tom.

Tom was gracious and enthusiastically set up meetings for me to meet people in Manhattan so that I could start off on the right foot in a new city and upon a path of the new career. 

One of those individuals was Gene Moore. 

Gene was the visual merchandising maven that shaped the visual display direction not just for Tiffany's, where he was the master of storytelling in the small windows on 5th Avenue, but he influenced an entire generation of what were then called window trimmers later being called visual merchandising and display people.

Genes work elevated the making of stories in store windows into an art form. 

I was lucky enough to be invited to spend an afternoon with Gene Moore in the Tiffany display studio on 5th Avenue. It was truly a memorable moment of my career but I confess that at the time, I had very little idea about who Gene Moore was and why I might have otherwise treated him with extraordinary reverence. 

I think the few hours that I spent there were kind of like when you meet someone who's famous but you actually have no idea who they are and so the conversation is casual and unpretentious, and you don't spend time worrying about what you're saying or trying to play to their preferences. 

Gene didn’t have to take the meeting. But he did and shared his delight and passion for his profession with a total newbie with nothing but questions and awe for making magic in retail stores.

What an honor…

Another of the introductions that Tom Beebe made for me was to the late great Peter Glenn.

Peter invited me into his home on Sniffin Court on 36th St. east of Madison where he talked about the world of retail stores and customer experience – his specialty - over a freshly brewed pot of English tea.

I look back now at how fortunate that I was to meet these two luminaries in the most early days of my retail career and grateful I am to have had an industry friend like Tom Beebe who, out of the goodness of his heart and genuine love of retail and visual merchandising, shared his passion for the industry as well as his connections to some of the great influencers of the day.

Over the years my path has crossed with Tom.

His passion hasn’t waned neither for the world of creating compelling retail places with stunning and cleaver visuals nor his love of one of his mentors Gene Moore. Tom gave a compelling and impassioned retrospective presentation on Gene Moore, with another industry friend and colleague Eric Feigenbaum, at the International Retail Design Conference in 2023.

Both of them aficionados and ombudsmen for the world of visual presentation – Eric being the New York Editor for VMSD magazine and a standout writer and educator in the field.

In New York I settled in as the resident architect at a small 3-4 person consulting firm called New Vision Studios lead by another industry icon Joe Weishar. Another strange serendipitous occurrence since I had read Joes book “Design for Effective Selling Space’ while in Singapore and had canvassed Joe for a trends report for the Singapore presentation but… he was a non-responder. 

Ironically I end up working for him.

Joe Weishar truly taught me what I know in the retail design and visual merchandising world bringing together the art and science of visual presentation in the making of great stores.

In the late 90’s, and into the next decade, the world of retail and visual merchandising was magical. 

The Christmas season in New York meant the NADI show, showroom parties that were spectacular and windows on 5th Avenue were a must-see event.

During those years there were a number of people in the New York area who were making things happen in the retail design space. These were the people who were a few years ahead of me in their careers and unbeknownst to them, became my mentors from a distance. James Mansoor, Tom Beebe, Eric Feigenbaum, Linda Fargo, Judy Bell, Ellie Chute and Denny Gerdeman, Ken Walker…

A bit later, in the mid 2010’s there was Christian Davies, Harry Cunningham, Ray Esheid, Anne Kong and Elisabeth Jacobson, Bevan Bloomendaal, Ignas Gorischek, Linda Lombardi, Bill Goddu, Christine Belich, Tony Mancini - All who had begun to create a wave of new thinking about retail stores and how to design them. 

And there was James Damian…

I knew James Damien more by name and for the fact that at that time he was the head of Design at Best Buy. 

Things that were happening at Best Buy were extraordinary. 

The creation of magnolia, the introduction of Apple shops - within an electronics mass merchant - and the complete rethinking of that category of Retail stores was about.

But more than that it was a presentation that I saw James giving at the International Retail Design Conference in Atlanta in 2005 or 2006 that completely left me awestruck. 

I can't truly remember what James was talking about, but I distinctly remember him becoming emotional on stage and needing to take a moment to gather himself. 

That moment of vulnerability began to change my thinking about being an impassioned, creative an emotional leader.

If a senior leader at a major electronics company could become ‘Verklempt’ on stage… I don't know… it just captured my imagination and I have not since forgotten it.

It turns out that, and maybe not so surprisingly, James Damien and Tom Beebe are deeply connected as long time industry friends and colleagues but also grew up in the retail industry under the mentorship of none other than... Gene Moore of Tiffany's.

Are you getting all these weird crossovers of interconnectedness? 

I don't even think that there's 7° of separation here I think like there's this interconnected interwoven set of interdependencies and crossing paths that keep on surrounding my retail career. 

In any case, James Damien was another one of those names, luminaries of the retail industry who I, from a distance, would admire and borderline stock over the years watching and following what he was doing in hopes that I would learn what the secret sauce of creating great retail spaces was.

And so, it may also not seem as a surprise that I would eventually find my way to getting James Damien as a guest on this podcast and that it would be a delightful conversation that unfolds with ease and mutual admiration. 

Which to me, makes it all the more special. 

I have held such great respect for James over the years and that unbeknownst to me he shared the same feelings. I'm not sure whether it's because I followed him, and the others I've mentioned so closely, that my ideas about great retail space, visual merchandising and leadership are so similar or that somehow, independent of each other, we both grew to believe in the same things. 

In any case, the points of connection are plentiful.

James came up in the world of Retail in the windows. Really from the artistic side rather than the  corporate leadership side and I think that gave him a different sensibility that is emotionally closer perhaps to what happens on the sales floor.

He took a risky step out of the windows into the machine of corporate retail in a somewhat unlikely segment – consumer electronics – with Best Buy. While at Best Buy, James and his group led innovation and new concept stores making them the most profitable in the history of the company to date. 

James drove a culture of innovation within Best Buy and consequently transformed the 'Big Box' consumer electronics retail format. He pioneered the company’s “new store” experience by integrating creative visual merchandising and design into the overall corporate vision. 

During his time the Store count went to 1400 from 275 and the stock soared from $7 a share to $110.

While there James, evolved into a Senior Executive and consummate business leader who drove major change across the consumer retail industry by leveraging the power of design thinking as a strategic advantage, delivering economic success.

Through his own moments of serendipity, James’ skills, experience and passions landed him the role as Chairman of the Board for Buffalo Wild Wings from 2008 to 2017. 

While in this role, he helped to shift corporate focus to an employee and customer-centric culture with the goal to become the ultimate social experience for sports and gaming fans.

James Damian is a Design Thinking practitioner, Creative Strategist and Motivational Speaker at International CEO Summits. In his talks he illustrates how to create a Customer Centric Culture through Design Thinking where Culture precedes Strategy, creating growth through an integrated, collaborative, interdisciplinary process.

James knows the power of a good pause… he can tell a good story and he has had some remarkable experiences to share.

I have hung on every word in his presentations that I have had the good fortune to listen to and our talk was no exception.

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ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites:  https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: david.kepron@NXTLVLexperiencedesign.com

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.