In just under a decade, Viewpoint International Inc., a retailer of clothing, accessories, and home furnishings, has built the Tommy Bahama product line into a $300-million powerhouse.
How did three guys turn their love of the beach into a brand worth hundreds of millions?
I've heard earfuls about Tommy. People love him. They all agree that he's smart. Virile. Debonair. They don't all agree on the details of his life, however. Some say he resides in the Bahamas, while others think he lives in Florida. Some suspect he used to work on Wall Street. And he has a small trust fund. Owns two vintage convertibles. Goes fishing daily. Travels a lot. What a life.
It's said that this tanned enigma has Jimmy Buffett's blood pressure and Gary Cooper's bearing. Such equanimity comes in handy. For a guy whose watchword is relax, Tommy's plate is full. His tastes and preferences are the basis of a lifestyle brand created by Viewpoint International Inc., a nine-year-old company with sales estimated at more than $300 million. Like Martha Stewart, Tommy oversees every choice made in his name, from distribution to product design to advertising.
The punch line (as perhaps you've guessed) is that Tommy is not a real person. He is a fictional character devised by three flesh-and-blood entrepreneurs to develop their brand -- the Tommy Bahama line of merchandise, which includes clothing, accessories, home furnishings, and more. The company's three founders debate "What would Tommy do?" whenever they consider a key business decision. Does he golf? Yes. Does he own an overcoat? No way. Does he own a tie? That last question provoked a feud, which only underlines the obsessiveness that has become the hallmark of this company. "One of the reasons we've been a success is that we know what came first," says cofounder Bob Emfield, 59, a grave Minnesotan with sharp features and silver hair. "This guy came first. He has a strong personality, and we cater to him."
Emfield's obsession is shared by his partners, Lucio Dalla Gasperina, 44, a bon vivant and designer who runs the Seattle office, and Tony Margolis, 59, Viewpoint's New York City-based president, who is the quiet power at the center of the Tommy empire. The three men have a combined experience of nearly a century in the apparel industry. They've seen brands rise and fall, sometimes so quickly that the whole cycle could be timed with a stopwatch. But despite their expertise, it's amazing they succeeded at all. "We spent our first two years going out of business," Dalla Gasperina jokes.
Though Viewpoint is now a smash success, its start-up was a botch, hampered by too many projects aimed at too broad a consumer base, an exorbitant payroll, and a miserable distribution strategy. And yet the business endured -- a testament to the steel of its founders and the strength of the brand they created. Along the way, they developed tactics that would well serve anyone growing a brand from infancy to adulthood. Tactics like choosing distribution channels for what those channels do for the brand, not what they do for short-term profits. Like never marking down prices. Upgrading quality to stay ahead of knockoffs. Insisting on employing homegrown merchandising methods. And -- in a bravura moment -- taking money they might have spent on advertising and instead spending it in an unexpected way.
Now that the hardest parts are over, the guys behind Tommy Bahama may be tempted to rest. That would be a mistake. As the scope of the Tommy Bahama product line surges like the sea at high tide (now sarongs, now lamps, now golf bags), the company is in danger of expanding carelessly, even as the partners proclaim that "brand is not about volume," as Margolis puts it. Already, they seem to be contemplating some extensions that sound utterly ridiculous. But even their craziest ideas can't be dismissed because of one simple fact: in just under a decade Viewpoint has created a brand that even the most accomplished entrepreneur would envy. Under the guidance of Tommy, of course.
For a management discipline that's written about a lot, branding is a pretty fuzzy concept. And giving birth is the stage of the process that's often ignored. Few of the recent books about branding detail the particular rigors of brand entrepreneurship; instead they focus on professional brand management. The distinction between the two is an important one. If you have a brand lying around the office and spend your time thinking about ways to build it out, then what you're engaging in is essentially science. But if you have to create a brand out of whole cloth -- well, that's more of an art. It takes a different mind-set. And time. Henry did not build Ford in a day, and Michael is still nurturing a brand called Dell some 17 years after founding that company.
In her recent book Brand New, Harvard Business School professor Nancy F. Koehn defines a brand broadly: it's the relationship between a company and its customers. That relationship encompasses everything a company says about itself and everything customers perceive to be true about the company. The relationship is hard to sustain and even harder to create. As the CEO of a start-up or small company, you face the toughest circumstances of any brand creator. You don't have cash. You don't have time. And you have a lot of other priorities. Unless an entrepreneur is disciplined, the process of brand creation gets ignored, Koehn says.
In the case of Tommy Bahama, the company's three principals didn't let a lack of time or money stand in their way. They were dogmatic when it came to building their brand, focusing relentlessly on every signal they sent to the market. And they were rewarded. That's because if a start-up builds a good brand, it can grow very quickly. Witness Tommy Bahama, which has grown from $3 million in revenues to more than $300 million in seven years.
But what appears now as a textbook example of how to build a brand began as a lark. In the 1980s, Emfield and Margolis and their wives bought neighboring beach homes on Florida's Gulf Coast. The two men had met in 1969, when they worked for blue-jean maker Brittania Ltd. Over the years, as their vacations drew to an end, the couples joked that they never wanted to leave the beach. They wanted a trust fund. An island home. To fish all day and walk all night under the stars.
"If it wasn't red-white-and-blue Hilfiger, Polo, or Nautica, they didn't want it."
--Bob Emfield
Those musings became a game of invention. The two couples created a character named Tommy Bahama -- the man for whom life is one long weekend -- and began to tell stories about him. On beach blankets or walking along the shore, they painted for themselves a portrait of Tommy: where he lived, what he did, what he owned. Unwittingly, what they were doing was creating a story that, because it was at once complex and focused, could easily become a brand. And for Emfield and Margolis, who had at least one more apparel industry escapade in them, the Tommy Bahama story did become a brand -- as soon as they posed the question "What would Tommy wear?" "The four of us kept adding to the story, and that became the springboard for a sportswear company," says Emfield.
