Blog #142 I talked about how Bob and Blake knew how to Motivate . In this blog I want to talk about the Valley Fair Opening for a combined floor.
My friend Joe decided to leave Nordstrom to go run the Macy’s floor in San Francisco. Their floor was huge so it was a great opportunity for him. He really wanted to run the Nordstrom SF floor but that wasn’t happening in the near future. Tom, who I worked with in the East Bay as Buyers gives me a call. He had been promoted to the RMM for the East Bay and wanted me to come over to replace Joe.
Valley Fair
Valley Fair was one of the busiest malls in the area. It had a fashion forward customer base and the Nordstrom floor was a Salon/Women’s shoes combined floor. This would be the next evolution in my career growth I thought. Joe had tremendous success though so I’d be going against big increases. Always better to go against tough business as a rule.
This floor was also one of the biggest buy responsibilities since it was combined. I felt Joe was great in Women’s shoes so maybe the opportunity would be to grow Salon. The floor had some pretty well known salespeople in the company. Mostly because they were all in the top 10 corporately.
The Tom Factor
The other piece was Tom. He was known as “Salon Tom” in Walnut Creek so if I was right about the Salon thing Tom could help me develop it. I did have some background from my sales experience, just not on the buying side yet. Martha and Michael taught me so much which will help. There was also the sales experience on Steves floor since it was also combined. Daryl was great with introducing me to his reps so I knew some of them already.
The hard part would be to tell my team and Daryl I was moving on. I think it would be nice to have a RMM like Tom as well, him and Rob were pretty close so there would be more than likely some hint of Rob’s influence there which I’ve missed. Just good old basic retail 101.
My gut was telling me to take it. The Valley Fair opening for a combined floor was very tempting. I called Tom and accepted the position.
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Man you have a good memory !
It’s a combination of talking to people, pictures , emails and notes i’ve kept over the years. It’s funny the more I write the more I remember as well.