Learn how the founder of a billion-dollar brand turned her passion into an empire.
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The following transcript has been edited for clarity.
Late August, we gathered 36 world-class female business leaders from across the country for a three-day retreat featuring thought-provoking programming and inspiring conversation.
Steph Wagner, Director of Women & Wealth, sat down with Kendra Scott to discuss her newly released memoir, Born To Shine, and their shared mission of elevating women.
We hope you enjoy learning how this female founder melded her passion for fashion, family and philanthropy into an empire.
Steph Wagner: Such an honor for you to be here. Kendra Scott, many of you know her story, but until you read this book, you don’t know the full story, and it is incredible. I was so fortunate to get a sneak peek. Let’s just say, many long nights ‘til two in the morning I couldn’t put it down because of course I had to wait until my daily stuff was done and then it’s two in the morning, I’m like ‘I got to go to bed — I’m up at five.’ But it is really good and I just encourage you all to dive in and share it because I think it’s a powerful, powerful story on so many fronts. One of the things that I really appreciate is your unwavering commitment to women inside your organization, outside your organization, and my goodness, what you do to do good in the world is truly remarkable. I’d love to start there. What does building a life you love mean for you?
Kendra Scott: You know for me living a life with purpose is really important. I mean, that’s living the life you love. And I remember thinking about this when I lost my stepfather to brain cancer. He was a two-tour Vietnam veteran, a Purple Heart recipient. He spoke five languages fluently. And while I was in high school he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and I remember thinking how fleeting his life was and how much was left that he had to do and that he wanted to do and accomplish and it really made me think about things differently, going through something that’s so traumatic like that at that age and stage.
And he said to me, ‘Kendra, while you’re on this earth, you need to make a positive impact with the gifts that you were given. You need to do something good that you’re going to be proud of doing.’ And when I lost him, I just remember thinking, ‘I don't know how long I have.’ And I remember thinking, ‘He was 47 years old and basically, you know, my age,’ and I said, ‘OK, what is my purpose? What is it going to be?’ And for me it was living a life that was full and happy. Having the people around me that I loved. I was a young mother when I started Kendra Scott. So for me, being a mother, a family was so important and knowing that I want to do good in the world and make a positive impact. That really for me was just my driving force and it is what makes me build a life that I love.
I want to do good in the world and make a positive impact. That is my driving force and what makes me build a life that I love.
SW: So Kendra, you talk about Rob, and I think first of all, it’s incredible. There is no true definition of the traditional family, and I think the love that you and Rob and your stepbrothers have—it’s absolutely beautiful. I’d love to just go back though, to your roots. Because I think even the love between you and your father and your mother—there’s a few moments in this book that really struck me and brought tears, defining moments as you began to forge that path. And if I can, I’d love to share this from the book:
For a lot of people college feels mandatory: It's something our parents expected of us, especially if they didn’t get the opportunity to go themselves. For generations we’ve been told it’s the path to success, that without it, we’ll end up going nowhere fast. I knew that my dad’s parents had saved their entire lives to make sure that he could go to college and law school, and that my dad expected me to finish school with a degree…. I cried in my mashed potatoes about how much I hated college. I told my dad—who was a bit dumb struck at this emotional outburst—that I know what I was supposed to do with my life, and it wasn’t sitting in a classroom all day… I kept going, crying about seeing Rob’s head red and irritated from rubbing against the baseball hats, about how much I loved fashion and how I thought I could have a business selling hats and that some of the profits could go to cancer research and that this is what I was supposed to do… My face was red and wet from all the crying and when I looked into my dad’s eyes, all I saw was pure love. He reached out, wiped my tears from my cheeks and smiled and said ‘okay Kendra, let’s do hats.'
This struck me. You were 19! To have that confidence and that strength to know what was expected of you, but to know 'this isn’t me.' To your point, your gut. And then the love back, because as a mother you can appreciate how hard that was, given he had different expectations. And I can’t help when I read that to think this changed the trajectory of your life.
KS: Completely, and you know, the thing is, after five years of running, the hat business failed. Miserably. I wanted it to be like 1940 again where everyone was wearing hats. I think I see one hat in the audience. I love you. Thank you. You would have been my one customer because I really only had a few. So nobody was wearing hats like it was 1940. I would cry and call my dad and be like, ‘I only sold two hats today Dad. This is horrible.’ But I kept trying to make this work, make it work, make it work.
But in retrospect, building that little hat company, having my retail hat store, understanding margin, understanding cost of goods, understanding business and retail — there is no class I could have taken that could have prepared me better than The Hat Box did. I learned everything you shouldn’t do, for sure, and things that I did right. I mean my connections to my customers were so strong, but I didn’t have a lot of them, but I really loved the ones I had. I remember when I had to close that store how much of a failure I felt because not only now, my stepfather had passed away, the one that inspired this business for me, all of my friends had graduated from college and I went without a degree. I have a failed business under my belt. I mean you want to talk about being at an all-time low of lows. That was probably one of the biggest lows of my life and then realizing I gotta go get a job. Because I gotta pay my rent and I’ve got a car payment — I’m not a Rockefeller over here, OK? This isn’t how life worked and I had debts to pay off.
So it was just devastating, and I remember thinking ‘OK, what’s going to happen next?’ And it was crazy because I was making jewelry at my little hat store. Jewelry was kind of my pastime. I’d go home and just make pieces because it made me happy and would calm me. It’s like, some people love cooking. I loved making jewelry. And I would bring my pieces to my store and they would sell the minute I put them in the case at the front of my hat store. But to me, I was so stuck on the hat thing that I wasn’t seeing what was working and it took my customers that were calling me after my store shuttered and saying, ‘Kendra, we need more of your jewelry. I want earrings to match the necklace I bought. My sister loves the earrings I have. I’d like to buy some for her birthday.’ They weren’t calling me about the hats, OK? Not one person called me about hats. But I was still having to buy supplies and fulfill orders for my customers and thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe there’s something to this jewelry thing I wasn’t seeing.’
SW: Well, I think it speaks to your amazing power to recognize the pivot. I love that you just talked about those on-the-floor moments. You’re very open about that. Obviously The Hat Box was one of them, but there’s been a couple of these crying-on-the-floor moments.
KS: And I think it’s important to share that because, you see — all of you are these strong, amazing women. We’re already competing against the world. We have difficulty forging our own paths and we have to always be ‘I’m superwoman. I’m strong. I can handle all these things. I can’t show that I’m weak or that I’m scared because we can’t do that because we’re women and men already think that we’re weak or scared or emotional, so I have to be ultra-strong.’ And I felt like I’m so sick of this myth because, you know, those moments of being on the floor crying, sobbing, scared, not knowing what you’re going to do next, that’s human and there’s power in vulnerability. There’s so much power when we can share that with one another because we’ve all been in those moments. And when we’re having those moments, to have these people around you that you trust, that you care about and they care so much about you, and they can see or reignite the light inside of you when you feel like it’s dimming, you need to have those people around.
Those moments of being on the floor crying, sobbing, scared, not knowing what you’re going to do next... There’s so much power when we can share that with one another because we’ve all been in those moments.
SW: And it inspires them because when they’re on the floor, it’s normal. One thing that was really profound to me was you have said over and over one of the greatest gifts was the Great Recession.
KS: I started my business in 2002. I was actually seven months pregnant on 9/11 with my firstborn son, and he was born 11/11. So two months later, I was a new mom, 11/11/01, and I was making jewelry during my pregnancy. I’d be put on and off bed rest occasionally with him. He was a big baby. And I was making jewelry for some of my customers, but making it for my friends and my family, and I had quit my job at the travel agency after I got married. It was a travel magazine and agency and I was traveling like five or six weeks at a time. So I started a PR company called Glitter. It was the time of J.Lo, OK? And everything was about glitter and rhinestones and it’s still the time of J.Lo. She’s evolved, clearly. She’s on the top of the news. I wanted to be an entrepreneur again. I was not a good employee. I mean, I was. I worked hard but I hated it. I hated when I had great ideas that I thought were great ideas and it would be like, ‘Mmm, that’s not.’ And there's so much red tape and they wouldn’t even take it to somebody to show them, and it was just that entrepreneur in me was like, ‘Ugh, why aren’t you guys doing something? Why aren’t we taking this and doing something with it?’ So doing the jewelry was cathartic for me. So I started that right after 9/11 and February 2002, I take Cade in a BabyBjörn and we go store to store with my jewelry in a tea box that I had gotten for my wedding. And literally went to boutiques in Austin that I had built relationships with over time when I had The Hat Company, and warm and wonderful southern Texas women-owned businesses who welcomed in another woman.
I had no investors. I was doing it all on lines of credit and credit card debt. ... So I had signed everything I owned up for collateral.
I always say if I would have done this in L.A. or New York, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here today because my community embraced me, which I’m so lucky. And I also say, if you’re on a sales pitch bring a baby because that always works great and Cade was, and is still, super smiley and charming, so it was helpful. So I started my business after a really scary time, and then as my business started to grow from 2002 to 2008, I was only a wholesale business, so I only sold to other stores. I was never ever going to get into the retail business again because after The Hat Box I was like the baby who touches the fire on the stove. I was like, ‘Oh hell no, I am never going back to retail. That is scary stuff.’
And so I was like, I’m just gonna design my product, manufacture it, ship it off. They can worry about selling it. Life was good. We were growing our business. We were in thousands of boutiques across the country. We had Nordstrom. Great. Fabulous. We were growing — not growing like crazy-growing, but we were growing. We had nice margins, better than I had at my hat store. But you know, you’re selling wholesale. So obviously they have to mark it up. And then this crazy time happens, the recession, right? I call these in the book ‘shake-the-snow-globe moments’ where your whole world is shaken. And all the buyers that I had developed relationships with at these wholesale companies were getting laid off, new buyers were coming in, many decided they wanted to go to direct and carry their own brands, their own private label. Stores, boutiques — every day I’d come in there’d be seven, eight, 10 stores shuttering, one after another, and I realized that all of my eggs were in one basket and the power of the future of my company was held in these buyers’ hands and then these store owners' hands, and I didn’t have any relationship with the most important person, which was my customer. I did not have a direct connection to my customer. And I was so worried for all these years of pleasing the buyers and pleasing the store owners, I forgot that I need to be thinking about my customer first.
I had a website, but we weren’t selling anything. It was informational. Remember, 2002, this is like the beginning of this, OK, you guys. Like we are now in 2022 and you think back like, ‘Why would she not have an e-commerce website?’ It wasn’t quite like that back then, OK? It was a little different.
I had no investors. I was doing it all on lines of credit and credit card debt. Nobody would invest in me, even though I had Nordstrom and all these other accounts. I could not get anyone to invest in my company. So I had signed everything I owned up for collateral. My bank, a very large bank — not Northern Trust — called my line of credit, even though I was paying my interest on time, doing everything I should be doing, I was considered high-risk because we were in this jewelry fashion industry. So it was again, another on the floor in my kitchen, balling my eyes out. What am I going to do? And I had to really shift everything and I remember after having this sobbing ordeal getting up and saying, ‘OK, we have to completely shift our business. We have got to connect with our customer because if she wants and screams for Kendra Scott when she’s inside of a Nordstrom or wherever she might be, then we have the power back. I have the power of the pen now, not the buyer. Right?’ And so literally I came into my office and I was like — we were like seven of us — I was like, ‘Girls, we are going to change our business, and this is going to be scary.’
Now you have to remember in Austin stores were shuttering everywhere. I want to open a retail store, OK? I want to move us to our own showroom in New York City. I want to get out of a multi-line showroom where we are the ones that are personally connecting with our buyers. I shifted the entire business. We’re going to develop an e-commerce site. We were doing this really cool customization for trunk shows with other wholesalers called Color Bar. I said I want to bring Color Bar to life on e-commerce and in our store and I want to make our jewelry shopping experience unlike anything that’s out there. I want jewelry freely displayed where customers can pick it up and try it on and not be scared and intimidated by everything under glass, where they have to ask somebody for assistance.
I want to create give-back events in our stores where we’re bringing in the community. And I laid it all out and I was like, ‘And, I don't know if it’s gonna work.’ And we could fail miserably. But it was like, for those Texans in the room, the Alamo, the line in the sand. It’s like all of you that are in, walk across the line, and if you’re not, I don’t blame you, it’s OK. And all of us walked across the line together holding hands and said, ‘Let’s go for it.’
I went to a local bank in Texas, Texas Capital Bank. The president was a female, Kerry Hall. I like to talk about her because as I sat across a desk, I wasn’t a loan number. I was a human being who she knew, who she respected. She was wearing my jewelry when I walked into her office that day and I said, ‘Kerry, this is my plan, OK, and I also need you to take on this line of credit.’ And she’s like, ‘What else do you have for collateral, Kendra?’
Because of that recession we changed our business model and we opened that store with lines around the block when there were stores shuttering. Our website, I remember when those first few orders came in, and then it was like 20 orders a day, and a hundred orders a day, and it was just like, oh my gosh. And we were in an office above our store. So all of us would walk through the store to get to our offices so that we could all engage with our customer. And from 2010, so just a few years after, to today, it’s been lightning in a bottle growth. And it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the recession. I would have kept piddling along just doing my wholesale account. Safe. It was safe. But I had to take a big risk to do that.
SW: Absolutely. One of your superpowers is you are a forward thinker, and you talk a lot about how you embrace fear. I mean, it’s scary. It’s not easy. But you know, I think one thing that I read here that really spoke to me was:
Every moment of dramatic, positive forward change in my life has come from fear: I was afraid to move to Texas, afraid to close The Hat Box after Rob died, afraid to divorce, afraid to dramatically change our business model.
But you leaned into it and I think it is very inspiring regardless of who you are as a woman, whether you’re a business leader or whether you’re a woman going through change, a life event, you know, leaning into it. It opens up opportunities and it certainly did for you.
KS: Well, failing forward. Every single difficult moment of my life, there’s always come something amazing from it. It is the struggle that makes us stronger, and we learn so much in these moments. Even with our children, I think about this all the time, we want to protect them from failure and anything bad happening in their lives, but to be a great parent is to allow them to fail and to know that they have the power to be resilient, that they’re gonna overcome this moment, that this is a moment in time. It is not forever. It is not always, and there’s going to be something great that’s gonna come from this, lessons that you’re going to learn.
And for me, it’s always been the bridge to get me to the next place I’m going. If I hadn’t had The Hat Box, I wouldn’t have the successful business I have today. I was a single mom with my boys when they were 1 and 3, very early, early in my business, right? So now I’m a single mom trying to get this business off the ground. And I think a lot about that because those boys gave me power that I probably don’t know if I would have had because looking at these little faces, failure was not an option. I had to get up and I had to figure out how I was going to provide for them, how I was going to be able to pay for school for them, all of these things. We were living paycheck to paycheck and it was so hard, but at the same time it wasn’t an option. I had to keep moving forward.
It is the struggle that makes us stronger, and we learn so much in these moments.
SW: But what’s also beautiful is it’s a gift to them because they watched it.
KS: Well they were in the office with me every day. I mean I had a Pack ’n Play set up. I remember being on the phone with Nordstrom and passing Beck to one of my other employees because I didn’t want the baby crying, because you’re faking it till you make it. I mean they had no idea how small we were, that we were in a little attic office. They had no idea.
And then as my other employees had babies, their babies would come to the office and we would be doing the same thing. And if somebody had to run to a recital or a doctor’s appointment, we would all be there to support each other and we were creating and cultivating our culture of family, and it was becoming the DNA of not just who we were, but who we wanted to be as we grew. Because we thought, wow, if we can keep instilling that you can have a great career and you don’t have to choose between being a mother — a present mother — or a parent, and you can have a village support you around that and to be positive about those things. The first person usually in the company to hear about a pregnancy still is me. They cannot wait to tell the boss that they’re pregnant. They tell me first because they’re so excited to share it, where in so many workplaces they will hide their pregnancy as long as they can. How devastating is that to think, right? So we’ve created this environment, but it started at the beginning.
SW: It did, and if I can even go back farther, and we talked a little bit about this, backstage, it touched me as a woman who did opt out. I want to share something that was another moment that at two in the morning, I’m crying.
KS: You’re not gonna cry the whole book. You’re gonna laugh a little bit too.
SW: But I can assure you there are moments that will make you laugh and then moments, depending on your own journeys, that will touch you because of your own life experiences. And the way in which you tell your story is very effective. But as a woman who did opt out, who didn’t have role models, who left my career — I was in private equity, I wasn’t about to go announce to the founder, ‘I’m pregnant.’ If I can share this:
In 2020, women represented only 21% of C-suite executives, meaning that nearly four decades after [the movie] 9 to 5 came out, there were more CEOs named John than there were female CEOs. The pandemic saw 2.5 million women leave the workforce altogether, crumbling under pressure of managing the second shift of family life: bearing responsibility for cooking, cleaning, making kids’ dental appointments, buying birthday presents. It’s obvious that the changes I felt so certain were here when I was a girl are simply not available to the majority of working women. And that, my friends, is b*******. We all know it! Because just like my mother and plenty of women before and after her, many of us have been forced to choose between work and the rest of their lives.
Because just like my mother and plenty of women before and after her, many of us have been forced to choose between work and the rest of their lives.
KS: I do cuss a little bit in my book here and there. Sorry.
SW: And they do say it’s a sign of intelligence, my friend.
KS: OK, great. Wonderful. My Christian mother won’t like it, but that’s OK.
SW: But let’s talk about your mom and her journey. And then I would love for you to share the connection to 9 to 5 because, I didn’t even think about it until I read the book and I was like, wow, how forward-thinking that movie was.
KS: How many of you have watched 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda? OK, if you haven’t, that’s what you need to do. I had the VHS tape of 9 to 5 along with Grease and a few others that I would watch until they would just be worn out. And 9 to 5, everything about this movie, seeing three women, first of all, who didn’t want to like each other, that were competitive in the workplace, being critical a little bit of each other too. Two of them got divorced, mothers, you know, trying to have a career and not being able to share anything that they could do as a mother even though they were struggling to do all these things, see them join forces, become great friends and then change an entire male-dominated business into listening to what the majority of their staff was, which were female, and their needs and then creating a utopia for these working women, of childcare and flexible work hours and you know, just this amazing thing. And I was like ‘wow.’
My mom was in Mary Kay Cosmetics and she became a director, and she had Jan’s Jewels, and they would meet in our basement on Monday nights in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and all of them would pull up in their cars and they’d wear their pink blazers and they were all dolled up and they would get down and they’d start their meeting with a song. I would sit at the basement stairs and I’d watch and my mom would start the meeting with ‘How are you? Do you have anything personal you want to share? Is there anything we can support or help you with?’ And you saw these women being vulnerable with each other and they had this bond and they were so supportive and then they’d share their successes of the week. ‘I got five new clients’ or ‘I this or that’ or you know, whatever happened, and then they’d all be like, cheering ‘Oh way to go Judy,’ you know, ‘I’m so proud of you,’ you know, and the power of seeing women and the strength that they had and how they lifted each other up. It was, to me, my dream of a world that I wanted to live in and I didn’t know how that was going to look.
So when I created Kendra Scott at first it was just in this little attic after it left my bedroom. It was still this idea of women being vulnerable with each other, being there for one another, lifting each other up, supporting one another, finding the best in one another, looking for the best, not the worst, and you know, really just helping each of us find that light in one another and just letting it explode.
My first assistant sample maker is a senior vice president of customer and creative right now, Denise. She’s been with me 17 years. Cheryl is our senior vice president. She started back in the attic with me. So we’ve got all these women who are still with me today, a few who are not. One of them called me this week and was like, ‘Kendra, I want to come back. I don’t like the real world. It sucks out here.’
We created a utopia. At our corporate headquarters we have five wellness rooms for nursing moms with dedicated mother’s milk refrigerators. We’ve got prenatal vitamins, cashmere blankets. They can watch TV. Of course, now Born To Shine will be in there for them to read while they’re pumping or nursing babies. We have a nail salon. We give you complimentary manicures and pedicures at Kendra Scott. Because who has time to go get their nails done, especially if you’re a working mom? Our ladies can be sitting getting pedicures and have a meeting together. They have their little laptops on their laps. We’ve got a fitness room that’s open all week long. We have yoga, we do lots of different classes where groups will join to do boot camps or whatever. We have wellness lunches, lunch and learns, where we find out what topics people are interested in. We have groups. We have groups right now of women that are going through fertility together, folks that are going through divorce, potentially. We had a huge mother’s group during the pandemic because we were all like, ‘Does anyone know how to teach school? Please help.’ We created this dream of 9 to 5. It just took a long time to get it, but we’re one of the only ones like this out there.
SW: But talk about the economics because it’s shifting. Companies can’t afford not to go in this direction because losing people costs more.
KS: So this is what’s so funny, and especially when I’m talking to a room full of male entrepreneurs, the looks on their faces are like ‘wow, she’s spending a lot of money on stuff. Nails? What an idiot. I mean, oh my God,’ and I’m looking at them going ‘Oh, sweetheart, bless your heart. You have no idea because you are spending so much money on turnover.’
When you give your employees trust and respect, you will see them flourish and give you everything they possibly can because you have that trust and respect for one another.
When you lose a person because they are unhappy in the workplace, the cost of replacing that person is 10 times more than any of these things that I’m doing for my team. When you give your employees trust and respect, you will see them flourish and give you everything they possibly can because you have that trust and respect for one another. If it’s better for you to come in at 7:00 a.m. and leave at 3:00 p.m., that’s fine. Whatever works for you. If you need to stay home on Tuesdays and Thursdays and work from home, great. I trust that you are going to get your job done. I trust you and I want what works in your life.
And with each team what I say is you need to know the makeup of your team. Now we have over 3,000 employees. So, you know our marketing team, whatever it might be, know the demographic within that team. Maybe they’re all in their 20s and they don’t have kids that they’re wanting to go take to recitals or pick up from school or whatever. Their work environment and their times for meetings, when they’re huddling may be different. We have no-meeting Fridays. We don’t allow anybody to meet on Fridays. That is a day that we’re like, look, you’re getting ready for the next week. We want you to not be bogged down by a million meetings and also, the million meetings. After COVID I realized, why are we having all these damn meetings? Right? And you can be killed by all these meetings.
So it really is that listening, and I think as a leader, listen more than you direct and the direction becomes very clear. And leading by example. My team knows my family comes first. I’m a mom before I am a chairwoman — was CEO, now just chairwoman, thank the lord, after 20 years. I’m so excited. But they know that, and I lead by example by showing them, and then saying to them ‘Don’t you have this thing? I heard about your kids playing soccer. Isn’t it on Tuesday nights? Get out of here. We don’t need you in the rest of this meeting.’
SW: Well and you said it, the core is trust. You’re showing trust and they trust you. It’s very powerful and very important in terms of the direction of corporate America, and I think you know for many leaders in this room, great, great pieces of advice. But I think what you’re doing is also having a tremendous impact on male leaders because they’re seeing the results. They’re looking at the data and they’re looking at your success with this new, innovative way of redefining the workplace. On the same note can we talk a little bit about retail now and your opinion of retail today? Because there’s so much talk about the death of retail.
KS: Retail today is so exciting, but let me just tell you. What we just talked about — trust. The most important person you can hire is not your CEO. I know that’s gonna be crazy. None of your C-level executives. If you’re in retail, it is the people that are standing on the floor interacting with your customer every day. It is the people in your customer service team answering those phones. And so many retailers are just paying people kind of not great. They’re hiring just whoever, not doing a lot of training, not really investing in them. And it’s like, ‘Hi, you’re in this zone. Fold T-shirts and say hello and you can’t do anything. If a customer needs something you have to ask your manager or the assistant manager has to then ask the manager, and if the manager’s not there then they’re gonna get back to the customer.’
I mean it is so crazy to me. I worked in retail. I worked at the Gap. I worked all over the place. I always was working my whole life and I remember feeling handcuffed and feeling like they don’t respect that I can actually take care of the customer. So if I’m gonna hire, whether you’re a part-time sales associate, holiday help, manager, I give them the power to please. I trust you. I am giving you the most important role in this company. I’m here. We work for you. We work for her. My CEO, our customer is our boss and the people that are engaging with her get all the resources they need from us.
And that is how it should be and they have the power in that moment to please the customer and I will never get mad, even if they make the wrong decision, because they’ve done something. They have done something. I can coach them later. Our managers can coach. ‘That was so good. Thank you for making that decision. Next time maybe we would do XYZ, but I’m so proud of you for making a decision and moving something forward and not making that customer wait or not know what’s going to happen.’ So then they get this feeling of like, then their posture gets better. They feel confident and you see them come in after having bosses and companies that they worked for where they literally were just treated like here, check in, check out. You’re standing here, you’re doing… where they didn’t have that ability.
And then getting them engaged in philanthropy. So through our Kendra Gives Back events, through our Kendra Cares in pediatric hospitals — we’re in 40 pediatric hospitals across the nation — where our sales teams in the store get to volunteer their time to bring Color Bar to children in the pediatric center. So they get to make a piece of jewelry for themselves, for their favorite nurse, their mother. It’s all given to them, just to bring them a little bit of joy, and our employees now are part of something bigger than just a retail job because they see that their power, their impact of what they’re doing is meaningful.
And so, we don’t have this turnover like we’re seeing in other retail businesses. We have this commitment and we have so much love and respect for our retail team and they know that they can literally email me direct. Any one of them, and I will get what they need done. Like I will make it happen, and that is pretty amazing.
SW: I told you she’s a forward thinker in every aspect of the word. I definitely want to dive into community here because it is throughout everything you do. Right? Philanthropy, retail, within your workforce, but let’s talk about really creating a differentiating retail experience for the customer.
KS: Well the customer experience is so different when you experience that, right? How many of you shop at Neiman Marcus? I’m sure all of you. I love Neiman Marcus, but I hate shopping in there because I feel like the sales associates are like attacking each other or they’re mad if you talk to somebody else and this commission structure there is like, oh my god, I get anxiety walking into my Neiman Marcus. So I buy everything online because the store experience has become so vicious because of their pay structure.
We have a joint commission structure. Everybody wins when we all win together. So it’s based on your hours that you’re working that day. So if you’re working Color Bar and setting stones, it doesn’t matter because that’s a very integral part of the sales process to do that task for this customer. So everybody’s working together. Everybody’s working as a team to make something happen for that month, that week, whatever it might be. We also look at it very differently. Everybody looks at UPT, and not that those things aren’t important. Of course, we’re looking at those in our financial statements at the end of the year, but we stop putting those things in our back room. We stopped having those tracking methods and I just literally threw it all away.
And I said, OK, we have to go back to what we did in the beginning of Kendra Scott. Connection before transaction. Connect first. If a customer leaves with a smile and not a yellow bag, that’s OK. We were successful because she’s happy. She had a great experience with your brand. Brick and mortar today in retail has to be about experience. It cannot be about the revenue generated in necessarily that store at that moment. That will happen, I promise you, but when we focus on the experience of the brand, she’s gonna buy it. She leaves, she’s like, ‘That was so awesome. They were so great. I love that earring.’ And you know what? She’s in her bed that night ordering online. She’s seen it in person — that connection has turned into a transaction.
Connection before transaction. Connect first. If a customer leaves with a smile and not a yellow bag, that’s OK.
Our Kendra Gives Back events where we’re hosting, let’s say, for the Go Red campaign for women. They’re coming into our store. They’re having this amazing evening of friendship and community. We’re making a connection with them that’s so much deeper and we’re having champagne and we’re eating heart-shaped cookies and everybody’s happy, and a lot of them obviously buy for the cause for that evening, but they’ve also created something bigger than that.
Our stores have become a place of community. You cannot go into a Kendra Scott store and not see an event happening at least twice a week in every single one of our stores across the country. We do not wait for customers to come in. We are not even looking always at the high volume street or wherever. We go to where our customers are and we engage them to come in, we give them reasons to be there and create community.
You don’t have to buy something to hang out at a Kendra Scott store. You could just come in and our sales associates, a lot of our customers become their friends. They call them customer-friends. They just come in to chat with them because they form such a nice relationship. So when the pandemic hit you can’t even believe what happened. Our customers were calling us, emailing us, saying you have always been there for us for these events, these things. We’re going to be there for you today. Our business thrived during COVID because we had such a connection with our customer, and that’s why we not just survived it, but then thrived moving forward.
SW: If I could add to that, again, you embraced the power of the pivot because you really took things virtual. Here was a business that was based on connection and there was suddenly no connection. And so you took it virtual and were very successful at it.
KS: Totally. We had our stylists, we’re like, ‘Look, OK, we have to close the stores March 16th.’ I remember it well because I didn’t sleep March 15th. And March 16th I had to do a video to all my employees telling them we had to close the stores for COVID and how this was very important for their health and our customers’ health and, but then I was like, OK we have to be thoughtful and creative.
So we started doing all of our Kendra Gives Back events virtually and doing a code for that charity and we ended up seeing a 40% increase in every single one of our Kendra Gives Back events because a lot of times people couldn’t make it to the store from five to seven. We’re all busy, we have things going on. And now that’s just a component of every single Kendra Gives Back event. It may be for a charity locally, but you have a friend in Massachusetts who loves that charity, or used to live in Texas and wants to buy something to support it. Now she can and that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the pandemic.
Our stylists became virtual stylists, calling our customers and FaceTiming with them in the store, showing them new collections, giving them a sense of normalcy while they’re at home. And we found people wanted to wear jewelry because they’re on Zooms. So we had a whole Zoom collection of like, here is your Zoom impact. Zoom it up, let’s go. And being creative in how we were reaching them. And then we had customers that were elderly. Our store staff, I said, ‘Look we are boots on the ground right now to support our communities. I want you out there bringing things to our customers that need support, going to the hospitals where we can’t do Kendra Cares in person, bringing nurses gifts, partnering with taco bars or hamburger huts and we’re gonna go and bring everybody lunch.’ And we were keeping our team so busy during the pandemic with our philanthropy pillar and fortunately we were able to do that as a company, but it also translated back to so much loyalty from our customer base.
Yes, we need men on board. 100%. But we need each other rooting for one another instead of being like ‘oh, her success is a fluke. She got lucky.’
SW: Well, like I said community runs through every aspect and you’re clearly doing it effectively to create change internally and externally. When we think about community, obviously there’s men in the picture, right? If we really want change — which we need change, right? We’ve seen a lot of great change with female founders. We’ve got a lot of stuff in the forefront that’s helping raise capital, there’s a lot of great conversations happening. We’ve got to pull those men into the picture if we really want to have an impact. So I’d love your perspective on that.
KS: We have to have men, right? And I think there’s so many men in my life when you read this book that have been supportive: my father, my stepfather. Some of my greatest advisors. My first investor Steve Hicks was a mentor for me for years and was the first person after 10 years of asking for investment capital from people all over he finally said the words I never thought I’d hear: ‘I’d like to invest in your company.’ I was like, ‘Wait, can you repeat that? I never heard that before.’ But it is men that had believed in me, right? And that gave me that sense of, OK, if they see it then I can do it too.
And I think also raising men to see the strength of women and having that respect and knowing that they also admire that and they want that but they’re still gentlemen. I’m very southern with my kids about being a gentleman still and they’re like, ‘Some women don’t like that mom. Some women don’t want you to hold their door open,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but that’s how you were raised. You’re gonna do it because you’re my son and then you can figure it out later.’
But I think it’s that men have a very important role in the future success of women. I recently opened the Women’s Entrepreneurial and Leadership Institute at the University of Texas, where every woman — it’s open to men too — but every woman at the university, no matter what your major, will have access to entrepreneurial classes. You do not have to be in the business school. And so whether you’re in the school of education, why can’t she become the superintendent of the school someday? I want to give her that entrepreneurial mindset and the ability of having these leadership skills. And so those, I think, are the things for us to really think about and then as women, how we interact with one another is really even more powerful.
Yes, we need men on board. 100%. But we need each other rooting for one another instead of being like ‘oh, her success is a fluke. She got lucky.’ We want to discount women because we’ve got this competitive thing instead of us going ‘wow, that’s amazing. She’s awesome. Way to go for her.’ And lifting each other up because we already are having so many people trying to pull us down. So we have got to change that conversation and be the ones of change when we’re at that dinner with girlfriends and you start to hear that chatter, stop it and change the tone of it and then everyone
else will start to kind of awaken to like, ‘oh wow, I was sounding kind of petty.’ I think we have so much power as women to really change that and the future of females finding success and then being there as mentors for young women, taking the time for those 30-minute calls here and there to mentor young women. I know many of you already do that in this room and what joy it gives you. I know when I get off these calls or meet with them or teach my class at UT on Tuesday nights, I mean I leave so energized and so excited.
My last day of class, my students do a pitch like I’m a shark on Shark Tank — so they do a pitch just like Shark Tank for a group of judges. There’s not one time I don’t leave there crying because I’m so proud of seeing these women succeed and have confidence and strength. So it’s a combination of all of those things, right? And I think it is the combination of the power of kindness, empathy and love. Coming from a place of love and looking for the best in people rather than trying to find something that’s wrong with them.
SW: Well, thank you. This has been an incredible conversation and I so appreciate your partnership, and I know we all share a passion for building that community.
KS: You know, I’m so honored to be in a room with all of you amazing, badass women.
SW: Amen. »
