Blog # 234 I talked about the Private label team heads to Shanghai.  In this blog I want to talk about 2006 comes to a close at Zappos

Zappos partners with Chase to offer customers a Zappos Visa Card in November. It was the first attempt to have some sort of rewards program for the customers without discounting brands that had map policies.                  

With the Stuart Weitzman add in 2003, it started conversations with other big brands to come to our site. Most notably Cole Haan and Nike. While Nike was still negotiating with us, Cole Haan launched during the holidays which was really good timing. My friend Dan had long been gone from Cole Haan at this time as he was focused on his own company RZ Designs in which we tried a few things through private label together. Cole Haan was was an amazing add to our growing group of brands we now had on the site. Fred was pretty pumped up on this as he had a big part in the negotiations. Our brand count exceeded over 1,000 different brands that we carried now. We had just about 175 brands when I started in 2003.

We had different themes on the site that you could shop such as Skate Park, Shoes for the Office, The Gym, After Hours,etc. which would take you to a group of items for that category. Zappos launched the Outdoor Vertical which included everything you would need for the Outdoor experience. This included everything from Shoes to hiking poles. The landing page was much different than the other themes and looked amazing. It also had links to outdoor stories and tips which made for good content.

Our annual sales reached 585 million to end 2006. The employee count now was at around 1100 and we had 5.2 million paying customers. One statistic that stood out to me was that one out of every 60 people in the USA was a Zappos.com customer. That’s amazing!

I had mentioned earlier that Tony started doing surveys on what our new logo would be. Since we now carried more than just shoes, we needed to reflect that on the site as well. To start the new year we changed our logo from “The web’s most popular shoe store” to “Powered by Service”. Tony was all in on creating the best customer service for our customers. Not only was it in our core values but always the main topic in our discussions. Tony’s library of books that was available to all employees included many books about the customer service mindset.

It was an exciting time, and many changes were happening in our company. In fact, the only constant was change. In 2003 I witnessed many changes that at the time I thought was incredible. It blew my mind that we could maintain this pace of a ever evolving company. I looked forward to see what 2007 was going to bring us.