His big idea was that online retail could be about much more than delivering price, quality, and selection, although Zappos offered all of that.
Like so much about Zappos, the experience was both wonderful and weird, which is precisely why Tony’s company became so successful. Vik, the company’s full-time life coach, outfitted me with a crown, sat me on a thrown, and snapped a photo as a keepsake. The tour ended with a visit to the so-called Room of Royalty, where a guy named Dr. The fashion team played dance music and snapped photos as we walked by.
Members of another department rang cowbells and shook pompoms. The offices, already buzzing with energy, became further electrified as we came through: One department we passed made a ruckus with whistles and hand-held clackers. I met Tony in the lobby and he grabbed a “tour flag,” hoisting it high as we set out. That first tour was performance art of the first order, a formal walk-through that quickly became the workplace equivalent of a Las Vegas revue. That visit was the beginning of a decade-long conversation during trips to Las Vegas, at conferences, and over email, about branding, culture, innovation, social change, and so many other themes that defined Tony’s work. I heard back from the CEO himself, who offered to give me a tour and explain what he and his colleagues were building. I was out west doing a bunch of talks, had a free day, and contacted Zappos PR about seeing first-hand what this buzzy company, whose annual sales had just passed $1 billion, was all about. I got my first in-person glimpse of Tony’s artistry back in May 2008, when I visited Zappos’s Las Vegas headquarters. As with so many artists, the things that made Tony so easy to admire were brilliant and messy at the same time, which is what makes his legacy so rich and his lessons so valuable. This helps make sense of his enormous competitive successes, his quirky organizational experiments, and his occasional setbacks and disappointments.
To do so for Tony requires thinking about him as an artist and not just the long-serving CEO of online shoe giant Zappos, as someone driven by big ideas and grand passions rather than business plans and stock-price targets. When well-known business leaders pass away, whether it’s long after they’ve left the stage - or, in Tony’s case, at the young age of 46 - there is an understandable rush to evaluate their impact. “From the first moment I met him, he surprised me,” Fried wrote. Jason Fried, cofounder and CEO of Basecamp, tweeted out a message that captured what made Tony so special - and, to me, so complicated to explain. One particularly insightful tribute came from another much-admired innovator. The shocking loss of Tony Hsieh, a legendary internet entrepreneur and management thinker, has inspired an outpouring of affection and remembrances.
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