Buffering the Consumer from Hard Work, John Tucker ’96

Posted on Mar 24, 2016

Buffering the Consumer from Hard Work,  John Tucker ’96

In 2009, Trunk Club launched online. Its mission: create a better way for men to shop for clothes. Trunk Club wanted to make it easier for men to show up at work and on weekends looking good, especially if they had little time and even less inclination to shop. An early player in a burgeoning field, “Trunk Club was a problem solver when it launched, which accounts for its early success,” says John Tucker, co-founder and vice president of member experience.

Trunk Club isn’t a designer-to-customer direct sales company. Nor is it a digital version of the mall stores, rendering a quick view of every denim work shirt on the market.

tucker2As John puts it, “It’s a consumer brand that’s known as an easy way for men who like to look great to build a wardrobe that works for them.” If you suffer the pain of shopping for clothesfeel overwhelmed, that you’d rather spend time on almost anything else, that no matter what you spend you still don’t seem to have what you needTrunk Club has you in its sights. If a pleasant, efficient personal stylist could help you build a closet that works, at no charge, would that get your attention?

Unlike shopping, trunkclub.com feels easy and rational. After a short survey (How do you dress for work? How do you like your shirts to fit?), you’re connected with a personal stylist. Once he or she has learned more about you and how you like to dress, the stylist mediates the range of choices in Trunk Club’s inventory, and builds a group of “best clothes for your size, style, and preferences.” Ideally, the stylist’s trunk meets your needs, and perhaps tests your willingness to be won over by a couple of things outside what you thought you wanted, or a price point higher than you expected. You preview the trunk online, receive it at home, try things on with a critic of your choice, put what you like in your closet, close up the trunk, and return what you don’t want. Shipping both ways is free and you can arrange for the package to be picked up.

Like many companies in its genre, Trunk Club now offers “the club as well as the trunk,” as the website describes it. Clubhouses, where customers can make appointments for one-to-one shopping in a more comfortable setting than department store fitting rooms, are in Chicago, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and New York.

tucker4John describes himself as “the voice of the customer” at Trunk Club. He’s primarily focused on the tech team, designing and evaluating the user experience, continually improving service as the business gets more complicated. He is also “an accountable person” for any client’s less-than-perfect encounter, diagnosing it, resolving it, detecting trends and eliminating the root causes for the future.

John spent ten years in technology and design consulting at Sapient and IDEO before helping to start Trunk Club. “I learned a lot about business as a consultant, but I got frustrated being just another outsider giving advice. I was looking to work on a consumer problem I completely understood in an environment where I would have a direct impact on the company’s results.”

John’s close friend Brian Spaly is Trunk Club’s CEO, and Trunk Club is Brian’s second menswear startup. When the opportunity arose to run a small business with a somewhat different model than Trunk Club, he, John and others researched several ideas. They came to the realization that putting together their own sales teampeople who wanted to build a consumer brandand building a sales culture was what they needed to do to fulfill their vision. “Once we had that, a head of sales and stylists who could build relationships with people, we could become a trusted advisor and go-to provider for men,” John says.

“Our inventory is designed to allow stylists to curate sets of items relevant to our customers’ needs,” John says. “We help make sense of a universe of items, rather than what stores do, which is to lay out all the merchandise and let the customer figure it out. We create value by buffering you from the work of finding and buying what you need, and making it easier to dress well. Our customer gets the benefits of highly personal attention without the cost.”

tucker1Simple, personal, seamless, positive experiencesfor customers interested in buying clothes: That’s the ideal Trunk Club brand. It’s a retail business, a customer-service-based retail business, and “creating a retail business is hard,” John notes. “It’s capital-intensive and labor-intensive.” The name of the game is talent. “As in any service business, our ability to compete is directly tied to our ability to attract, train, motivate and inspire awesome people.”

Stylists, for instance, not only need to derive joy from spending time with people, make them feel good about figuring out their wardrobe; they must also be highly motivated, driven salespeople. They may work with a customer in a relaxed, fun atmosphere, but career progress is based on sales results. Senior stylists are sales directors, accountable for their team. They recruit both for clients and for would-be stylists strategically from their own networks. “Stylists come from across the board,” John says, “from sales, marketing, fashion, practicing law, right out of college, and after years of work experience.”

The market’s insatiable demand for the best engineers, designers and product managers makes recruiting the right tech professionals an abiding challenge for every business. “Techies are often drawn to the coasts,” John
says, “but Chicago’s tech community has grown a lot over the last five years, and Trunk Club will attract people who really want to make an impact on the business,” John says. “They’ll be building a consumer brand people know about. When they ultimately move on, they will have developed relationships with a great team, new personal and professional skills, and understand intimately what the customer experience is.”

From a sofa in one of the clubhouse’s chic sitting/changing rooms, John points to the similarly loft-style building across Chicago’s West Ohio Street, where 150 people other than the sales and inventory staff steam ahead: engineering, product design, the creativity teamvideographers, photographers, copywritersmerchandising, analytics, finance. All told, roughly 1,000 people work for Trunk Club.

Trunk Club capitalized on the meteoric growth of consumers’ expectations for speed, convenience and service, which continues to rachet up, and on the public’s willingness to “outsource,” as John puts it. “People
had relied on a tax guy, a lawyer, a decorator, a personal trainer, perhaps. Now they rely on nutritionists, organizers, concierges to take care of things for them.”

tucker3Nordstrom acquired Trunk Club in August 2014. Trunk Club extends Nordstrom’s product line and shares Nordstrom’s well-known ethos of customer service. Trunk Club gains Nordstrom expertise in core operations, and access to Nordstrom’s extensive inventory, which facilitated Trunk Club’s launching for women, as it did last fall.

Trunk Club’s startup years demanded a high-tension balancing act, as John describes it: “putting out the fires, solving short-term problems to avoid running out of money, and sustaining this deep optimism for what you think your company can be, what we were trying to build.”

At six years old, Trunk Club is not a tiny startup anymore, and it’s not yet a household name. Retail is a market with tons of competition. “Now,” John says, “the most important focus is identifying people who are better at what they do than we are, who are super-skilled, and developing a great career opportunity for themhelping them do the things they do well. It takes a lot of dedicated team members who want to build something lasting, together. It also takes learning how to use feedback and make changes, being as self-aware as you can be and caring deeply about your co-workers. My job now is to figure out how we can use our time most effectively as a team to create a net value experience for customers.”

John’s passion for Trunk Club’s mission burns bright. He sees the moment-to-moment changes in retail and e-commerce as both exciting and scary. “I’m hopeful,” he says, “that we can set the bar for personal service in retail.”

by Cathleen Everett

Photos courtesy Truck Club