Zumiez: Tom Campion

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Working as a manager for nine years at JCPenney, Tom Campion learned a critical lesson about how to succeed in retail: you have to keep close track of inventory. Tom’s experience navigating the ebb and flow of style, color, and size—all without the benefit of computers—gave him the confidence to launch his own retail business, aimed at teenagers. In 1978, he and his partner Gary Haakenson opened their first store, Above the Belt, in Seattle, and soon tapped into the hot new “action sports” category and the growing popularity of surf, skateboard, and snowboard culture. Tom placed his stores in shopping malls, and created spaces where teenagers would want to hang out, by leaning into “organized chaos” as a design principle. Today, with roughly 750 stores, Zumiez is the largest action sports retailer in the world.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.4	This is Chip Rantley, co-host of the NPR Podcast White Lives.
0:13.4	Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department, before we snuck
0:18.1	into the graveyard of a federal penitentiary, all we had were the photographs.
0:23.4	Photographs of a group of Cuban men standing on the roof of a prison in rural Alabama.
0:27.5	That's the season on the NPR Podcast White Lives.
0:32.8	We were doing all right, but it was important to get your inventory right.
0:37.9	So many retailers, they fall in love with their goods.
0:40.5	Yeah.
0:41.5	And I always, as I say, you never married to your goods.
0:44.5	Then work, got a market down, you got to turn it, you got to get cash back and buy
0:48.4	something that a customer wants.
0:49.9	Yeah.
0:50.9	But then taking the risk, you're going to buy 100 or you're going to buy a thousand.
0:54.9	A lot of people don't have the ability to do that, to see that.
0:58.7	I mean, it's old school.
1:04.7	Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories
1:11.0	behind the movements they built.
1:18.4	I'm Guy Ross, and on the show today, how Tom Campion saw a major market opportunity in
1:23.7	the culture of skating and snowboarding and built zoomies, the biggest action sports retailer
1:30.0	in the world.
	...

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