The Executive Partnership Behind Stanley’s Hypergrowth | Kate Ridley & Graham Nearn

Welcome to Adweek, Adweek's podcast about the business of marketing, media, and creativity. In this episode, we're sharing a conversation recorded live at one of Adweek's events featuring leaders from across the industry discussing the ideas shaping brands right now. Let's get into it. >> What a privilege and what a pleasure it is to be in front of you today. Um if I can just take a moment to thank you for giving us your time, giving us your attention in a really, really full and packed brand week. That would be so great. Um I'm going to introduce myself and then um and Kate will introduce herself and then we'll get this session going. My name is Graham Naren. And as you can probably tell from how I sound, uh I wasn't born in the United States, though I am privileged and proud to live here in Portland, Oregon these days. I'm originally from Newcastle in the northeast of England. And um most of my career has been spent actually in the sporting goods industry and that's where I first met Kate. Um I spent the first 20 years of my career with Nike. Uh hence why I'm in Portland, Oregon these days. It was Nike who brought me over to Portland, Oregon. And then I had the privilege of crossing the road, let's call it, and went to work at Adidas. And it was in Adidas North America where I met Kate. And then in 2020, I started the third part of my adventure working with Stanley, Stanley 1913. Pleasure to meet you all. >> I'm Kate Ridley and uh like Graham, I'm also not from the United States. I grew up in Melbourne, Australia. And spent uh 22 years of my early career working for Adidas or Adidas in lots of different countries and lots of different brand management functions. And I think it was in 2017 that my boss said to me, "Can you please go and interview a candidate?" And I walked into a pub at like 1:00 p.m. on a weekday, as you do, and I met Graham for the first time. And after about 10 minutes, I rudely texted my boss under the table and said, "Thumbs up. We need this guy." And so, Graham and I have had the opportunity to work together um at Adidas. I then went to work at Allbirds for a few years. And 12 months ago, Graham gave me a call and said, "Can you come and help me in a consulting capacity at Stanley?" And I said, "Yes." And I'm now the chief brand officer at Stanley 1913. And it feels like I've been working in consumer goods for lifestyle brands for like 57 years. And I think something that we don't talk about enough, we talk about how much marketing investment do we have, we talk about do we have the right talent, the right tools, the right systems to be successful. We don't talk enough about our relationships and how they can drive success and ultimately growth and relevancy for your brand. And that's a unique topic that I feel like Graham very privileged to talk about today. Maybe it's going to be a little bit of like a public therapy session. I don't know, that's what it feels like. So, Graham and I have some questions to ask each other and we want to unpack some of our relationship, what makes it work in our executive team, and what are the challenges that we face, and how do we convert that relationship into growth. >> Yeah. And as we go through the session, or as we go through questions or the conversation, what we were thinking about was in preparation for the conversation was there's a lot I think that is very similar about Kate and I, our backgrounds, we have kids the same age, Uh, of us grew up in America, etc. And there's lots of differences as well. A lot of differences. And what we'd like to think is through the conversation or the examples that we choose to use, you'll be able to quickly ascertain what our differences are, what our similarities are, and hopefully how that all works together in greater good of the value proposition that Kate just mentioned as well. So, we'll do that as well. Well, I'll start off and I'll tell you I have two amazing marital relationships in my life. I have my personal marriage, which I'm very, very proud of, nearly 26 years. But I have my professional marriage as well that I'm also incredibly proud of. And my first question to you, Kate, really is for a brand that has gone through the growth that Stanley 1930 has gone through and the growth that we continue to enjoy, what is the concept of that partnership mean to you in terms of like managing executive relationships? And actually then how does that create value, not just for the company, but also for our team, our community, and also of course for our fans around the world? >> Yeah. Well, I think a lot of brands that are scaling face challenges of having the the brand product alignment. Ultimately, what we want is what consumers know about our brand, what perceptions they have. We don't want them to feel something different when they have the product in their hands or when they approach the shelf or they buy something online. We want that to be really consistent. And so, I really appreciate the fact that Graham is my number one partner in progress to make sure that consumers have the same experience, whether it's through messaging, whether it's through the purchase experience, and ultimately the product. And Stanley has um a an amazing enduring quality. Um and we have to take that legacy brand history and make sure that it's relevant every single day to consumers now. And that means we have to convince our executive partners very frequently on concepts that can be quite squishy. We have to convince the CFO to invest in sustainability. We have to convince the brand president to um sometimes make intuitive decisions about celebrities and athletes to invest in. And really helps to have you as a partner by my side in those moments speaking a shared language. Having some pre-alignment on those topics that we want to invest in, and making sure that we can back each other up. >> That's right. >> Um that to me, that is what helps us create value. And you mentioned not just external value, but internally we're responsible for a shared purpose for the brand, and making sure that we showcase that, that we give inspiration to everybody who works on our teams to keep like bringing that forward. That's for me, that's what makes the professional marriage really work is shared purpose and shared language, and backing each other up. >> Yeah. An interesting example of this, and it's always like this going my sound so so obvious, but it's real and apparent is we've been approached by our Asia Pacific team who really wanted to build greater value greater brand value, and also just greater awareness of the brand across all of Asia Pacific, but particularly in in Korea. We were approached to by our Asia Pacific team as I say to say, "Hey, what about Have you guys considered Jennie Kim from Blackpink? That'd be a really powerful way for us to communicate to youth culture, really powerful way to show female brand relevancy in Korea and beyond Korea. And of course, Kate and I were was like, "Yeah. Yeah, let's talk." I mean, my God, yeah, I mean, not not just brand relevance from a local point of view in Asia Pacific, but you're talking about one of the world's greatest leading female superstars who's currently actually at the time was currently on just about embarking on a massive world tour. Now, of course, when you're embarking on an investment and setting the infrastructure, whether it's contractual infrastructure or financial infrastructure or product infrastructure for somebody of the size and scale of Jennie Kim, you know, it work, it's a lot of work. When we approached some of our leadership peers, who are wonderful people, um we'd like to think about working with Jennie Kim, you know, is this mic on? Is mic on? Fair thing. Um and it takes um the professional marriage together with also like amazing data that Kate and her team has been able to build to actually showcase the brand value, the monetary value, the consumer value, the new audience acquisition that an investment in in somebody like Jennie Kim takes. And then and I think that's one of the marriage sometimes is at its best where we're able to bring that kind of insight to a to a really skilled executive team who just might not have the cultural insight. >> That was a um really positive example of things that work well, but it isn't always our relationship isn't always easy. It's hard work as well. What is one non-negotiable aspect of our dynamic or maybe a key lesson that keeps building on our trust, the candidness that we have. Um what is one aspect of our dynamic that really plays into that? >> One of the things that I enjoy working with Kate about is there is a a sense of I can always be candid. That's fine, you know, candid is great, and we all know that. And I also feel like I can be my authentic self. You know, I can show up sometimes it's a bit sad, a bit happy, a bit joyous, a bit pissed off. I can't be my authentic self without judgement most times. But actually what it really is, um, pure vulnerability. Secure vulnerability. It's funny in today's executive world. I don't know whether you all feel it sometimes, but there's a sense that, you know, when we're leading teams and communities and businesses and brands, it's like you also have to have a suit of armor. A constant suit of armor. Um, this really weird kind of, uh, almost like maybe it's such a generational trainer for someone like myself. I'm 54. Uh, you just always have to be like alpha perfect. And and it's just absolute in my opinion. I think it's absolute crap. We have to have an ability to be vulnerably, uh, securely vulnerable and say, "Actually, I'm just not feeling that great about this." And or in in or kinda, "I'm not really feeling that idea." And I'm vulnerable enough and secure enough to let you know that you think it's the best thing ever. And I'm going to tell you that I don't. And let's have a conversation about that. Um, I actually think secure vulnerability is a bit of a superpower for our executive team. I think it makes us more resilient. Um, I also think it is actually the very essence of power. Um, it's not about being more powerful than your teammate or more powerful than your peer or more powerful that because you're in charge of X versus Y. It's just the very essence of creating a really power, uh, a power dynamic that allows for an enormous amount of trust, enormous amount of, um, authenticity, but also the ability to go, "Nah, not so much. Not so much. Maybe it's not." >> And I Graham knows I've seen him do karaoke Elvis songs enough times that I can go, "Yeah, not so much. Not so much." Um, but I really I I think there's a lot of power in that. There have been times in our relationship where, you know, we once when we we were in a meeting and Graham got up from the other side of the table and showed me his phone and it was something that our social team had just posted that was launching a partnership and he was like, "What is that? This is bad. This is not good." And having a partner that can be that honest with you about work, which we're all very sensitive about, um I think is incredibly value I value it so much. Um and yeah, I think there's probably that suit of armor is sometimes holding us back from those moments of truly evaluating what's working in the moment and what isn't. >> All right. So, as you know, Kate joined us about a year ago. Thank my lucky and the company's lucky stars. Um so, you've been around the company and the brand and our the community now for about a year. How would you describe the Stanley 1913 brand? >> Well, I already said one of the words. I think Stanley is a very enduring brand and we have an experience, a shared experience that when you, you know, meet new people and you tell them that the company you work for is Stanley, people have a lot of stories and and they'll usually say the stories are very similar on a thing. Um they'll say, "Oh, my grandfather had the green Stanley. He had it for 40 years. He still uses it. I used to go fishing with my dad. We he he had the green Stanley." And uh what I love about those stories is they're speaking to quality. They're always underscoring the incredible quality that has always been part of the Stanley promise. Uh it's the reason why every product that we have, in tiny letters on the bottom of every product, it says built for life. Um it's a lifetime warranty because we believe in it so much. Uh so, to me that speaks to the enduring quality of the brand. The second thing I would The word that I would use is evolving. We can't live in that place forever. It have We have to change it. And as it speaks to our relationship, I think that's a point of contention, actually. How do you take How do you shepherd a legacy brand that has over 100 years behind it? Uh, how do you get aligned to that if you're the two people who are responsible for moving that forward? Sometimes that's challenging. We don't always agree to what that should look like. Um, we Sometimes we make mistakes. And um, I don't make that many mistakes. But sometimes we make mistakes. And And I think like that uh, if if we can keep that trust going and the background alignment on what it means to evolve a brand, I really I think that's some secret sauce. Um, and that background alignment, I would say, is part of the strength of our relationship. Um, we don't wait for the meeting to share what our thoughts are. We usually spend If you could see our text chains, um, we spend hours texting and talking before we have to present those ideas in front of other people, even if it's informal, to try to make sure that we can keep that evolution in an aligned place between everything that's consumer-facing from product, brand, marketing, brand strategy. >> Yeah. That's right. The other thing that we've been managing together, um, is what I would describe as, um, hypergrowth. We've been managing hypergrowth together, which is like a privilege and a pressure. And of course, what what Kate and I are managing together at the well as well as as we've grown so fast with such an aggressive revenue line and and and decent EBITDA to follow, but we got lots of ambitions to be to be more global, etc. What we found is our systems, processes, tools, people, infrastructure, certain capabilities, and certain capacities have just been outstripped by growth. Absolutely outstripped by growth. Um which brings us back to, you know, one of the things that is important for relationships like this is where we're able to speak candidly together actually about the capabilities that exist in our team. You know, many times I've really enjoyed Kate's ability to bring in what I saw at Adidas and certainly what you delivered at Allbirds as well, which is the ability to quickly diagnose incredibly hard things, then make those hard things very simple for everybody to understand, get real clarity, and then bring in like real-time decision-making parameters like, "Guess what? Data." How do you use data to inform decision-making? And I think that I've really enjoyed the yin to my yang of that. Kate is very, very intuitive, but she's also very data-driven. She's very rational. She never presents her convictions as facts. Whereas on the flip side, I'm the more emotional marriage partner. I'm the one that I think is a little bit more likely to go, "We should just do that." And Kate's much more likely to go, "We could." Yeah, wait, not should, but we could. Let's talk about what could actually cost. What does that mean in terms of investment? How do we build capability capacity in order to do that? How do we make that a long-term proposition rather than just kind of some seasonal in and out? And I've really enjoyed that about your leadership. >> Relationships are really tested, as you said, in times of explosive growth or or transformation. What would you say has been the biggest challenge over the past 3 years when the brand has been going through that incredible transformation? >> If we think the The answer to that question lies in our employee engagement surveys. If you look at your employment engagement surveys, 99 out of 100 employees that we'll survey will say, "Oh my god, we are so engaged with the brand. We're so engaged with the company. We love what we're doing. We're so passionate to come to work every day." And you go, "Yes." And then the same employees will go, "You guys have to enable us with the tools and systems to do our best work. To do our best work. Whether that's a new product line management system, whether it's ensuring that our Connect to Technology, which helps us understand demand planning, is linked to that product line management technology technology system. Whether there are meaningful paths for employees to grow, whether there are meaningful paths for employees to gain new skills, all like tools, the systems, the technologies, and the investments necessary to really enable employees to do their best work. That has been the biggest challenge. >> Yeah, I I absolutely agree with that. Um we had a we had a launch last holiday. Stanley has a wonderful partnership with LoveShack Fancy, which is a amazing fashion brand, and uh we have had three or four We're about to go into our fourth launch with LoveShack Fancy. It's a super creative, highly um in high demand uh collaboration. And we had a launch last holiday. It was like I think it was like the second day that I joined Stanley. Boy, did Boy, was it a big learning for me. We had in the first 10 minutes of that launch, we had uh about 250,000 people on our site with multiple products in their basket. And we had a sixth of uh inventory that we could actually fulfill the demand with. And Shopify actually turned the site off because they were worried it was going to impact the rest of the infrastructure. And it was such an important learning that, you know, we had not anticipated the level of demand and hype that we could create. And our teams, the DTC team, the demand planning team, just didn't have the tools and the systems available to them to do their best work and make sure that we were set up for success. And so I agree with you. I think it has been a challenge, but unless you go through those moments, you don't realize what it is that uh um that you don't have. And I think I appreciate having you there in those moments. There are times when if you're responsible for brand experience and you have a situation like that, it's a bit of a Um you know, you you can have partners around you who are extremely critical. Uh and it is something that's unique about the Stanley culture, but also my relationship with you is that um I always feel supported that mistakes happen so that we can learn from them. It's super rare, in my opinion. >> Kate, you are one of the most privileged things about having Kate on the team is Kate's almost senior female leader. And one of the biggest parts of our brand pivot since 2020 has been more effective in serving female consumers. And also ensuring that our employee base matches that as well. So my curiosity for you to share with the audience is as almost female as almost senior female leader, what do you think and what are you doing to engage our employees and also our consumers that are female? >> Ironically, I would say you have made the biggest champion of our female consumer. You you never let me forget that the Stanley 1913 brand over the past 6 years has been truly built and truly energized by women, young women who are super invested in health and well-being and fitness. And that's very important. And I won't forget that, I promise you. I I it's important to you. But I do think that it's important. You know, you have those challenges. I'm sure many people in this room have had the challenge where you invest heavily into connecting with one consumer, and then you realize you might be alienating others. You might not be able to transcend and speak to a broader audience. Um so, I think the the shift that we recently made to look at a consumer segmentation model that's more psychographic and needs-based and not as focused on hard demographics like gender, age, region, location. I think we're in a different place right now. I think we've transcended that probably in popular culture that um information is so real time that I don't know, maybe it doesn't matter what gender you are, what age you are. Stanley has to create products and experiences and messaging that meet the need that everybody has, regardless of gender. >> What are you most excited about for Stanley 1913 going forward? >> I'm very excited about the opportunity for us to grow in international markets and what it's going to take for us to be relevant globally. Uh we've invested so heavily in relationships with athletes and celebrities, brands in North America, and we see the real-time value of having that credibility, that authentic connection. Um because we're good at storytelling. It's not a not a pay-to-play kind of model, but we're really good at storytelling. And um I'm excited about the partnerships that we can develop in other parts of the world. I would give the example of um our growth in Europe. Uh we have so much opportunity there because our brand awareness is a bit lower, but we have so much opportunity to tap into different cultures, different subcultures, and we've chosen to do that through European football. And the Premier League football in different parts of Europe. So, we launched a partnership with Arsenal as an example, and the the level of attention they have to their fans and their community is something that we have partnered really strongly with them. And I would say that's what I'm really I'm really excited about doing more of that in different parts of the world and getting like really granular on how to tell stories in different communities. What about you, Brian? What are you excited about? >> I'll tell you this. If you think about Stanley, we've gone from being a work brand to be an outdoor brand, and we were a hydration brand. All of that's predicated on food and beverage culture. And food and beverage culture is absolutely freaking amazing. It's absolutely amazing. It like all of us here are bonded by food and beverage culture. All of us here are sustained by food and beverage culture. All of us here are fueled by food and beverage culture. And what food and beverage culture does, it gives us an an opportunity to be much more surgical, much more intentional about solutions. So, a good example would be, "Hey, okay. So, what about lunch? What about lunch right now? How many people across America and across our world are having to prep, store, carry, and then eat lunch every single day, whether it's at college, whether it's at school, whether it's at work? Where are the great lunch solutions? Not quite sure. I do know they're in Stanley 1913 dot com product creation pipeline right now. Here's another thing. What about the world of coolers? The world of coolers is a great world, really interesting world. I think if you like large rectangular coolers that were designed for fishing. I think that great for that. But, if you are looking to go to a friend's house on a Thursday evening for some charcuterie and a nice glass of wine and something else, they're not really that portable. They don't really do a great job for you. I'm excited about that as well. The more I think we can be surgical, the more we can celebrate, the more we can absolutely take inspiration from an innovation from the world of food and beverage culture, the chances are we'll develop the right product, service, and experiences for the next 100 years of Stanley. >> Yeah. Yeah, agree. Thank you for listening to our public therapy session about our relationship in the executive team. Something to think about, invest in your relationships. I feel it's been an absolute privilege for me to transcend just a normal work relationship and put that chemistry into true growth and true value for our brand and for Stanley 1913. Thank Thank you, Graham. >> That was a conversation recorded live at an Adweek event. You can find more coverage, analysis, and interviews from across the marketing and media world at adweek.com. Thanks for listening to Ad Speak. If you like the show, be sure to follow or