Zappos is the Amazon of shoes, marrying deep selection with discovery tools. The company combines a highly functional and easy-to-use interface with extreme customer service. It has expanded from shoes to selling clothing, jewelry, eyewear, and even housewares. In 2008, the 10-year-old company's gross sales exceeded $1 billion. Zappos describes itself not as a retailer, but as a customer service company that sells things, and one of its core values is "fun and a little weird."
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Brian Kalma is director of user experience and web strategy at Zappos.com.As head of user experience and web strategy, it is Brian Kalma's job to cultivate the fun while making sure customers can find the perfect boot, blouse, or blender. Kalma joined the company in 2003, to head the image processing and photography department. On his watch, the company has continued to innovate, testing -- and sometimes abandoning -- new features.
Its most recent twist is a beta version of My Zappos, which lets people save items to a personal closet, share them via Facebook or Twitter, and get comments from friends.
iMedia: As head of user experience and web strategy, how do you interface with other marketing execs at Zappos?
Brian Kalma: User experience isn't technically in the marketing group, it's a standalone group. We have a director that handles search, affiliates, etc., and a brand team that handles identity work. Our team has to be keenly aware of what's happening in direct marketing, and, from a brand perspective, we have to make sure the site looks and feels like what we want the brand to look like. Keeping an open line of communication is probably the biggest area of operations we can improve upon, making sure we are a unified, aligned group. It's tough, but I don't think the solution is putting us into one big ball of a group.
iMedia: What is a typical day in your job like?
Kalma: I almost always start my day by looking at the previous day's site performance, making sure nothing alarming is happening, just a basic analytic check. I manage the team, and have a weekly touch-base meeting. More often, it's making sure I'm communicating with the merchandising group, the customer loyalty group -- putting it all into the washing machine, making sure everybody's needs are being translated into a positive experience. I wish I could sit and do design work -- I have passion for it -- but we have a team for that. I try to be a conduit for information instead.
iMedia: What are the challenges for online retailers in this economy?
Kalma: Improving your brand. Right now, there are lots of price-sensitive shoppers. We're not a discounter, we're full margin. Our challenge is making sure that the emotional connections with our customers are secure. In hard times, people will stick with companies they know and trust.
iMedia: I think your free shipping in both directions makes people feel more comfortable about ordering from you.
Kalma: We invest as much money in customer service -- that being one piece of it -- as massive companies do in advertising. That's what's going to get customers to try us. It's a huge expense but paramount to what keeps customers loyal. There's no better time than now to prove how much you want to please the customers.
iMedia: Zappos was a very early adopter of social media. For example, you've always let customers rate and review shoes.
Kalma: When we started our onsite tools, there wasn't the thought that it was social media. It was just useful. A lot of the stuff that happens on our site, it just made sense. It was not about a social media strategy.
iMedia: So, as head of web strategy, what is Zappos' web strategy?
Kalma: We're experimenting with a lot of things. Now that Twitter and Facebook are big, we're trying to give people tools to integrate with them better. We're also trying to capture the emotion that happens when you shop offline and translating it into the online experience. A lot of brick-and-mortar retailers who come online try to create fancy Flash applications to replicate this emotion. I think the emotion is derived from interacting with people while you shop. "Does this look good? Does that not look good?" The question is, how do you bring that online -- literally? We created My.Zappos.com to find out if the direction we're going in works. Our goal is to still let people browse, with a single sign-in to allow them to share products with their friends. It's a little clunky right now, but we're learning a lot.
iMedia: What are some early insights from the beta?
Kalma: People don't like to go too much out of their way. That means we need to find a better way to integrate not only with the social media sites people use every day but also our site. I don't think people want just another place to go to.
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