Todd: We have spent so much time and energy paying attention to our culture. When you have someone upsetting that balance, you really have to adjust what that is, whether through coaching or whatever it takes. But protecting that culture where people are cared for and people enjoy coming to work—it’s wonderful to see and experience. That’s not an easy balance to strike, but I feel like, over the course of 20 years, we’ve gotten there. Even in New York, the shop is so new and we’ve hired a ton of people and haven’t had the opportunity to work with them a lot, but Amy came back after spending a couple days and was like, ‘The culture is totally intact there.’ The same culture we’ve built in LA is being communicated and is palpable, and I think that’s part of it.
When building out the New York shop, I heard you brought in a feng shui expert. Is this common on all your projects?
Todd: No, this sort of presented itself in New York and was actually super valuable. Part of it is the luxury of being able to have consultants, but it’s also being willing to listen to them. When we were building out the downstairs, we had initially planned a shipping storage room [in the entry]. The feng shui person came in and her immediate response to that was, ‘Absolutely not. This is one of the most important areas of the shop, and it’s your feminine energy. It has to be retail.’ And we were like, great, we’re totally changing the floor plan. And this tiny little square footage of the entry is now the highest-performing area in the entire shop.
Amy: There was a time when we couldn’t afford anybody but us there, so having her there and really listening to her was interesting to me. But she also had some recommendations where I was just like, no, that just isn’t going to work. We had a little backbone-to-backbone energy.
