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The Moment explores the pivotal moments that changed the lives and careers of the world’s leading CEOs and defined their leadership journeys.
Claire Blake (00:04):
From World 50, this is The Moment where we explore the pivotal moments that changed the lives and careers of the world's leading CEOs and defined their leadership journeys. I'm your host, Claire Blake. Today we're talking to Doug Palladini, former global brand president of Vans and former CEO of Carter's.
Doug Palladini (00:24):
In order for us to fulfill our destiny to get where we wanted to go, we had to be true to ourselves first and being true to ourselves meant truly being the world's number one skateboarding shoe. Until we could achieve that, nothing else mattered and so that is where we started.
Claire Blake (00:43):
For Doug, who grew up in the surfing and skateboarding scene of 1970s Los Angeles, the apparel brand Vans didn't just offer cool shoes. It played a critical role in his coming of age story. 30 years later, when he walked into Vans headquarters as the company's newest senior marketing director, he was surprised to find that the iconic skate products that were once integral to the company's DNA were gone without a trace. He set out on a mission to reclaim Vans' roots, not through nostalgia alone, but by balancing its priceless heritage with relentless innovation and it paid off. As global brand president, he helped skyrocket sales from 350 million to 4.2 billion. In our conversation with Doug, we discuss his brand building philosophy. Sometimes a company's future begins in its past.
(01:27):
Doug, it is hilarious for us to be sitting here with skateboards and magazines, so I feel like we're setting the stage for the kid that grew up in LA, surfing skateboarding culture everywhere.
(01:40):
We have to ask, what was your go-to move?
Doug Palladini (01:43):
Go-to move? Staying on my board was my go-to move. Concrete hurts.
Claire Blake (01:48):
That's hilarious.
Doug Palladini (01:49):
So yeah, that was my go-to move.
Claire Blake (01:51):
All right. So snowboarding, skateboarding, or front row of a concert. Which one is most Doug Palladini?
Doug Palladini (01:58):
Well, I'm going to break the rule and give you two answers. The first answer is snowboarding. Snowboarding is the most soulful experience I have in my life. Just an incredible thing that will be part of me. As long as I can stand up, I'll be snowboarding. Something I've shared with my family, my kids, I just absolutely love it. I love being in the mountains. But if I can get Led Zeppelin back together. If I can bring back John Bonham from the dead and we can have a reunion concert and I get to be in the front row, I would probably take that.
Claire Blake (02:28):
That's it. That's it. Oh, I love that. That's hilarious. But it's the '80s. You're growing up on the west side of LA, you're sporting Vans with skate and surf culture around you everywhere. Just paint a picture of that scene for us a bit more. What does Doug in that scene look like? What did that mean to you at that time?
Doug Palladini (02:44):
I was skateboarding every day when I got home from school, that's what I wanted to do. We used to be my mom to take us to the beach and on the weekends she would break down and take us every once in a while. But we were little, couldn't get there on our own. I was doing kids stuff. I played soccer, but my soccer pictures, I'm wearing vans. But I was so into that world. I was so into the dog town thing. I was so into skateboarding and surfing. I would wait for my issues to skateboarder and surfer magazine to arrive at the house. I can explain what magazines are for people who don't remember. Yeah, that's
Claire Blake (03:19):
Right.
Doug Palladini (03:20):
At some point down the road, but back then it was the cultural touchstone magazines were so important. But Los Angeles was very much like a surf culture kind of place. People from New York will tell you it was a cultural wasteland. I don't know if I necessarily agree with that, but it was a very vibrant surfing and skateboarding scene. Snowboarding wasn't really a thing yet.
Claire Blake (03:41):
For the uninitiated, how big was skate culture? Frame for us what that moment and that skating culture as a whole actually looks like.
Doug Palladini (03:50):
You can't judge these subcultures by size. You judge them by influence and their resonance to other things. When you talk to people like Pharrell, you get a good idea of what we're talking about here. He wouldn't be the musician he is. He wouldn't be the producer he is without skateboarding. That's really what skateboarding, what surfing, what snowboarding are. They're cultural touchstones that influence other things. So their size will always be limited by nature. It's such an insular culture anyway. Skateboarding is really popular until you get your driver's license and then it wanes in value to kids. Fun. It's influence on art, on music, on other parts of street culture are massive. Perhaps one of the biggest ever to corporate minds, it can be very hard to understand. It's like, why focus here? It's so little. There's only two million participants. The whole TAM is only $2 billion.
(04:50):
It's like, no, you don't think about it that way. You think about it in terms of what it influences. And I think that is the unlock for what skateboarding has become.
Claire Blake (05:00):
Yeah. That's super interesting and something we can unpack even further. But I do want to kind of shift us into how you ended up at Vans. This is obviously a huge part of your childhood. It's a full circle moment. What was your first job? How did you get that opportunity?
Doug Palladini (05:15):
In the magazine world, I worked with Vans every day. They were one of the largest advertisers for most of our magazines. And so I knew the people at Vans and I continued to understand their business and know everything I could about Vans. At the time, I was working for DGWB, which is a regional, small, traditional advertising agency. I was learning a ton, but agency work just wasn't my jam. We were doing hotdogs and copiers and hospitals and you work on the work you can get when you work at an agency. You don't get to pick and choose. I wanted to pick and choose. Probably because of my own naivete, I thought I could. And I heard that there was this job open at Vans and I asked a friend of mine if he would recommend me for it and he did. I got an interview and I got the job and I was the senior director of marketing at Vans in the summer of 2004.
Claire Blake (06:09):
So this podcast is all about really unpacking the seminal moments of CEO's lives and careers. And my understanding is for you, one of those moments was literally your first day walking into Vans, because as we've just discussed, this is your childhood on your feet. This is a brand that you've not only worked with now, but you've loved and respected and part of the culture. So walk me through walking into headquarters that first day. What were you expecting to see and what did you see?
Doug Palladini (06:36):
The Surfer publications, when you walk in the door, both sides of the main hallway are lined with vintage surfboards, some of which are priceless and you feel like you're a baseball fan and you're walking into Fenway and standing at home plate. That's what that experience was like for me. And Vans was the same thing. It was walking into this very special place that had been a part of my life. I was so excited. The kid in the proverbial candy store, however you want to say it. I go up to the marketing department, I meet, start to meet everybody. So I finally get to meet Steve Van Doren and Steve Van Doren's father was the founder of Vans. And I said, "Steve, it's such an honor to meet you. I'm so proud to be here and be a part of this brand now. I want to see all the stuff.
(07:23):
I want to see Stacy Peralta's first contract. I want to see all the Tony Alva decks. I want to see the first Half Cabs and how we made them, the first signature skateboarding shoe. I want to see all of it." And he got this kind of strange look on his face and he said, "Well, I have some crates in my garage." And my jaw dropped. And I said, "You mean there's no archive? There's no..." And he said, "No, we don't really have any of that stuff around here." And I could tell he was disappointed. He has so much reverence for what his family had built. I could tell the look in his eye was like, "I wish we had that too." So that was a very important clue to me. Then I went to the sales meeting, which was also part of my initiation.
Claire Blake (08:03):
Yeah. So tell me more about what happened at that sales meeting.
Doug Palladini (08:05):
So here's what I remember. At the time, what was working in skate shoes was these big puffy shoes. The tongues looked like small mattresses. I don't know how to describe it. They were so ugly. They were so overbuilt and gigantic and you're wearing your jeans and then you have these massive things around your foot. I could never really understand it. The Puffy Skate catalog was like a phone book, but the things I grew up loving about Vans, the checkerboard Slip-Ons, the Sk8-His, the Old Skools, I said, "Where are those?" And it was a trifold brochure, Claire. So it was pretty easy to see putting the pieces together right away that we had completely lost touch with what made us famous in the first place back then. So from day one, I had it really stuck in my head that this was going to be part of the opportunity.
Claire Blake (08:58):
You recognized this kind of tension of we need to honor our past and there's a lot here that we're missing in terms of, I mean, let alone a culture and an employee base that you're trying to inspire day to day. So what did you do next? Because I understand that you went on a tour to see how Vans was showing up globally. You did a few other things to try and kind of gather some more intel and knowledge to move towards a direction that honored your heritage that then had major dividends that we'll talk about in a moment. But talk me through, okay, I have this realization, I'm talking to the Van Dorens, we have no archives, we have no history. What did you then do next?
Doug Palladini (09:35):
It was very clear to me that we had lost touch with our roots. At the end of the day, it's a sort of a captain obvious, simple thing. I cannot tell you how often I see brands fall prey to this miss. You cannot lose touch with your roots. You have to keep them well-watered. That's a core tenet of growing brands. At Vans, our roots are based on skateboarding. Now we came to skateboarding serendipitously. Skateboarding adopted us. We didn't adopt skateboarding, but that's part of what made it special, this organic connectivity that we had. I set off on a mission to go to skateboard shops around the country and prove to the executives that we had lost our way. I was very well supported by our new president. So we went around the country and visited skate shops, went to five different cities. I saw what I thought I would see.
(10:26):
There was no Vans anywhere. Where there were Vans, there was a dusty pair on the bottom shelf in the back. We were a non-entity in skateboarding and I came back, we blew up the pictures, we put them on the wall all around the executive conference room and we invited the executive team in to look at all the pictures and I said, "We have to get back to our skateboarding roots." Everything emanates from there. Back to what I was saying earlier, it's not about the size, it's about the influence. Until we can look people in the eye and say, "We are the world's number one skateboarding brand." We will not be able to achieve what we hope to achieve. And I think that was a real aha moment.
Claire Blake (11:03):
I do want to circle back to something you said earlier about how you felt supported by the new president. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? What gave you that confidence?
Doug Palladini (11:11):
I got my job at Vans as VF was acquiring Vans. As a matter of fact, the day I got my job offer, VF'd made the announcement that they were acquiring Vans. And I called Cheryl Van Doren, whose father founded Vans. She ran HR and I declined the job offer. I said, "I don't want to be a part of a big corporation. They're from North Carolina. They don't know anything about skateboarding," which they didn't. "Here's my concerns. I can't take the job, sorry." She said, "Hang on a second. Let me work on this." I get a call from the CEO of VF, Eric Wiseman, and he says, "I understand you have some concerns. What are they?" I detailed them. I said, "You're going to change our name. You're going to move us to Greensboro, North Carolina. You're going to make us sell to Walmart." Because all these things that were just inherently evil to me at the time.
(11:59):
And he said, "I understand your concerns. If I write them down on a piece of paper and promise you I will not do any of those things and sign my name to it, will you take the job?"
(12:08):
And I said, "Wow, you would do that for me? I'm senior director of marketing." And he said, "Yeah, absolutely I would do that." And I remember specifically because it came across on that thermal paper and a fax machine and he did it. He did it. He did it. And so I said, "Okay, well, if he's willing to do that for me, I'm going to take the job." And to this day, he will tell you he saved my career by doing that. And he would get me in front of the board and say, "Here's the guy whose career I saved." So he would make fun of me incessantly after that, but it was a good sign for me that we were going to get things back. He put a guy in charge of Vans named Steve Murray and Steve Murray saw the same thing I did and was really a major influence on helping us get back to these roots.
(12:53):
So I knew that the boss also believed that this was the right thing to do and it gave me the room to go and help craft this story.
Claire Blake (13:02):
The punchline here is actually you become global brand president. You help grow Vans from 350 million to 4.2 billion in a shorter timeframe than one might imagine. You kind of originate the idea of the Original. So we're going to go against the dupes with our Classic Slip-Ons, Old Skool by doing the Original. This actually really did work. We're going to go back to our roots and this is why it's important. But if you kind of take me back to that moment of clarity and then what happened next and the visuals on the wall, how did you start to get buy-in? Because you saw it clearly, your president saw it clearly, but you had to get more on board with that. And so just talk to me through what was the resistance and how did you get buy-in on what you needed to do next?
Doug Palladini (13:47):
On the inside of the tongue of the Sk8-Hi, there's a sewn-in patch and it says world's number one skateboarding shoe. I took a picture of that. I got everybody, everybody who worked on Vans in one big room and I put that picture up and I said to everybody in the room, "Who can offer me proof that this is true?" Crickets, crickets. I said, "Who is comfortable continuing to put this patch in our shoe while none of us believe that it's true?" Crickets. Everybody got it at that moment. In order for us to fulfill our destiny to get where we wanted to go, we had to be true to ourselves first and being true to ourselves meant truly being the world's number one skateboarding shoe. Until we could achieve that, nothing else mattered. And so that is where we started.
Claire Blake (14:37):
That's awesome. And I feel like I have chills in that moment because it really is a clarity moment. I mean, what's fascinating to me is talking about heritage and progression. I'm thinking about, we've talked a lot about skate culture. My 12-year-old daughter wears Vans. My 70-year-old father wears Vans. You've clearly expanded the brand. You've honored its roots, but you've expanded it beyond. You're a publicly traded company, you've got a mothership in VF. How did you get the board and VF at large onboard with this? What was the tension in other stakeholder sets that we may not be aware of?
Doug Palladini (15:12):
That was above my pay grade at the time, and I'll give Steve Murray a tremendous amount of credit for doing the heavy lifting that was required. But I will tell you that Eric Wiseman said in his wildest dreams that Vans could be a billion dollar brand.
Claire Blake (15:26):
Wow.
Doug Palladini (15:26):
So when we blew right past that, he's like, "Okay, what's next? What do you want to do?" So honestly-
Claire Blake (15:32):
By those wildest dreams I meant, a $4 billion brand.
Doug Palladini (15:34):
Yeah. Honestly, what it really came down to for us was achieving what we said we were going to achieve. And as we achieve what we said we were going to achieve, the rope was let out a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more. VF was undergoing a really significant change in its business model. It was becoming a house of brands. In 2000, VF acquired The North Face and it had tremendous success in turning that around. So it thought this was a repeatable thing. In the long run, it wasn't super repeatable, but then it got Vans and saw that it was also repeatable and they got very excited. So The North Face and then Vans and they were like, "Let's feed this. This is going to be big for us. Let's do more of this." And so we had a lot of inertia based on the change in the business model from the company.
(16:16):
And then we had a very powerful leader in Steve Murray who was able to help the VF corporate team understand what the magic of the Vans brand was.
Claire Blake (16:26):
I want to kind of transition a little bit towards this moment day one. I mean, I feel like I am still feeling nostalgic towards you getting to walk into Vans and then driving what I'll call a heritage driven transformation. What did that teach you about who you are as a leader? How did that become defining for you in your kind of leadership journey and how you operate?
Doug Palladini (16:48):
So I need to clarify one thing first. It's not just heritage. The equilibrium that we saw, Claire, was heritage plus progression. And I think we really have to create a balance of the two. And the way that we did that was fully embracing the iconography, the backstory, the legacy of our brand, but always trying to progress through innovation. At the end of the day, we had that permission because skateboarding shoes are part of the performance of skateboarding. So we were able to innovate by making our athletes better at what they did. It's the same with board shorts and surfing. It's not a fashion accessory. You actually have to have functional board shorts to be a good surfer. You have to have functional skateboarding shoes to be a good skateboarder. It's just part of what makes skateboarding work for people. And so we had that opportunity to lean into progression in that regard.
(17:40):
Then we progressed from an aesthetic point of view as well, but it was all driven from these heritage iconic silhouettes. Even when we got into apparel, which ended up being 20% of our business when I was there, we still tried to harken back to our iconography and build out from the checkerboard, from the sidestripe, from the waffle on the sole, from the red tab on the heel of the shoe, from all those things into apparel as well. So it's about harnessing the power of your heritage and your legacy and then bringing it forward in new and interesting ways. If you're going to do purely a look back, you get a moment out of that, but it's not sustainable. So I think that's an important thing to call out.
Claire Blake (18:20):
So then how has it defined who you are as a leader working through both of those scenarios as both heritage and progression?
Doug Palladini (18:27):
Yeah. I'm a brand builder. Brands are what I love. Brands with stories are what I love. What it taught me is that I need to be true to myself and I need to do things that truly mean something to me. There's this horrible misunderstanding in some brand leaders that when you look at your past and you honor your heritage that somehow makes you old, wow, that is so misguided. Everybody who understands consumers today will tell you that the story behind the products is so meaningful. It's so critical. And if you don't have to make it up, if you don't have to be one of these PE generated agency generated things, all we have to do is go back and tell the true stories of where we came from and how we got here and what makes us so iconic. And that's going to unlock all this latent equity that our brands had that we've just been avoiding.
(19:19):
You just can't conflate your legacy and old. Only if you're purely looking back, are you old.
Claire Blake (19:25):
Yeah.
Doug Palladini (19:26):
If you can create the balance between heritage and progression, then I think you're really in a sweet spot.
Claire Blake (19:32):
Yeah. We've just talked a lot about heritage and the past. What is Doug Palladini hoping to leave behind? What do you hope the story is of your career and the impact you've made as a leader?
Doug Palladini (19:43):
What I really want to leave behind are these purpose-driven brands that connect in the most sincere and authentic and meaningful way possible that truly leverage their legacy and their heritage, but also drive progression forward. Instead of financial engineering and instead of being P&L driven that our financial outcomes are truly outcomes, Claire, that one of the things that I am most proud of from my past is that in doing the right things for our brands, we generated financial outcomes that exceeded expectations. And I very much think the order is important. The legacy I hope to leave behind is that when you do the right things for brands, the financial outcomes can be what we saw happen.
Claire Blake (20:30):
Yeah, that's awesome.
(20:31):
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