Ron Johnson on Letting the Best Ideas Win

Creative Effort

Ron Johnson joins the show to reflect on his transformative career in retail, from elevating Target's design aesthetic to co-creating the revolutionary

Key takeaways

• Ron Johnson was inspired to revolutionize Target after seeing a $150 Michael Graves tea kettle in London, leading to the highly successful 'Decade of Design' initiative that made high-end aesthetics affordable.
• Steve Jobs hired Ron despite his follow-up email reading like a traditional business case study, preferring instead to build the Apple Store together through hands-on prototyping and debate.

Main topics

• Retail design philosophy and accessibility
• Apple Store creation and customer experience

Notable quotes

"Stores aren't about products. Stores are about relationships."

Conclusion

The episode offers a masterclass in balancing bold creative vision with

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Welcome to Creative Effort. Ron Johnson spent his career answering a simple question. What does it take to create something that changes the way people experience the world? At Target, he helped transform the retailer by making great design accessible to everyone. And then Steve Jobs recruited him to Apple, where he created the Apple Store, one of the most successful and influential retail concepts ever. But Ron's story isn't just about success. After Apple, he became CEO of JCPenney, where an ambitious attempt to reinvent the department store failed spectacularly. And he's remarkably candid about what that experience taught him. Ron has a new book called Shop Different. And in this conversation, we talk about how he and Steve Jobs designed the Apple store, where the Genius Bar came from, why great creative work requires taste and collaboration, and perhaps most importantly, why sometimes the biggest lesson is knowing when to slow down. Speaker 1 (0:56) Ron Johnson, thank you very much for joining me. How are you doing? I Speaker 2 (1:00) am doing great. It's great. I'm in New York this week. Yeah. Doing something I've never done before. I'm actually launching a book. Yes. Called Shop Different. And it kind of details one of the big parts of my career, which is creating the Apple Store. Yeah. And it's been fun. It's different launching a book than launching a store or a product like the iPhone. You don't have a lot of people lined up outside wanting to meet you and give you high fives, but it's very gratifying. So it's a, it's a big creative effort and it was fun to write. And I look forward to getting people a chance to read it. Speaker 1 (1:37) Yes. I have read not a pretty hardbound version like that. I have a pages document here now that I have read through. It's not quite as much fun to read a book that way, but I'm really glad that they sent it to me so I could read through it before we. had a conversation and yeah the book it's great it's it's uh i think that one of the things i found most interesting is yeah the story of how the apple store got started is not a new story but we've never really heard it told like this which is which is very fun and i will get to it in a couple minutes but i really like the idea of the importance of sort of the human experience in an age where that has become less and less and so we'll kind of dig into that. Why don't you start, you talked about what you're doing right now, but why don't you just give us kind of the 90 second overview of who is Ron Johnson? Yeah, Speaker 2 (2:23) I'm just a kid who grew up in Minneapolis and outside of, in a suburb called Edina, went to public high school. I guess it was interesting. I grew up two miles, a little bike ride from the first enclosed shopping mall in the world. Speaker 2 (2:43) And my mom loves stores and I grew to love stores. And so after, I guess, playing soccer at Stanford in college and going to Harvard Business School, rather than going to work on Wall Street, I had offers from Goldman to join their M &A group and Salomon Brothers. I decided I wanted to try to be a retailer. So I left Harvard and went to unload trucks at a store in Southern California and worked my way up. And eventually, I had an opportunity to create the Apple stores about 15 years after I started my retail career. So I'm a lifelong retail guy. I've had a lot of success in retail, both at Target and Apple. And I've had failure. I went to be the CEO of JCPenney, trying to transform the department store. And that was, Speaker 1 (3:32) by Speaker 2 (3:33) most accounts, very unsuccessful. And so I've learned from success. I learned from failure. and I guess today you could call me an author, but I don't know if that's true. I've written one book that just came out yesterday, so I think I'm a wannabe author, but I enjoyed writing the book. Speaker 1 (3:52) Well, I mean, there are a lot of wannabe authors, and you have one thing going for you, which is that you've actually published a book, which is a big deal, a very, Speaker 2 (3:59) very big deal. That's true. Speaker 1 (4:01) You know, as I was doing some of my research, the Target, you know, we're a big Target family, but the thing that I found out that I would have, been a little bit too young to really have experienced this firsthand but target one of the things that happened while you were there was this big bet on lego right like there was this yeah and i i have a lot i have a lot of friends at the lego group i've been to bill end i've seen their their they've invited me there a couple times and so when i started when i started to dig into that i thought this is like There's a connection there for me. I have a lot of passion for Lego. But talk to me about, so at Target, kind of just walk us through what are some of the things that you were doing that then would later prepare you for what, I mean, most people know you, would have been your biggest job, which is starting from scratch a retail business for Apple. Speaker 2 (4:49) Yeah. Well, obviously Steve hired me because I was a retail guy. Speaker 1 (4:54) Yeah. Speaker 2 (4:54) But he loved the fact that I had done things at Target. which made that brand really amplified the idea of Target. A place that, you know, people could love, not just a place they could shop. And it was because in my retail career, I kept learning more and more that the way you win in retail is to do something that's never been done before. That will make people want to come to the store and not just buy something because they functionally need to buy it, because it's going to improve their life. And most famously, you know, I'll tell you a story because I know your podcast really appeals to creative people. You know, how do you find that next big idea? I had after a long career in toys and running children's and different things, I was given a chance to take over the home area target in the kind of mid to late 90s. And home was trending, you know, in the 80s, especially stores were all about like the gap and the limited. We're redefining them all. Now it was stores like Crate and Barrel and Williams-Sonoma and Pottery Barn. They were kind of the cool place to shop. And Target had a home department, but we carry, you know, $10 tea kettles and $15 toasters. And they're very functional. You could come to the store and find a box on a shelf filled with boxes and busy packages and take home a toaster. And on my first buying trip, Right after I started, I flew to London one day, and it was a Sunday morning. It was overcast, and I took this walk from Chelsea, and it just started to pour as I was in South Kensington on Brompton Road. And I ducked into a little boutique. And I saw a tea kettle. And I couldn't take my eyes off it. It was the most beautiful tea kettle I'd ever seen. Stainless steel, triangle shape, highly polished, this beautiful pattern around the edge. It had a blue handle, which I was sitting there because it was pouring outside. That must indicate cool. It had a red eagle on the front where the water would come out and the steam would come out. That was because it was hot, you know, hot. That's where the steam was. Speaker 1 (7:14) And I thought, wow, someone's really thought about this. Speaker 2 (7:17) And then I saw next to it a little placard. It said Michael Graves, esteemed architect, Princeton School of Architecture, had designed this tea kettle. And I was just intrigued. And I looked at the price tag. It was Speaker 1 (7:31) $150. Speaker 2 (7:34) And I thought, the question I asked myself was, why does good design have to be so expensive? Speaker 2 (7:42) And I couldn't shake it. And as I went for the next two weeks throughout Europe, walking through stores, going through trade shows, all I saw everywhere was good design. I'd see it in the bathrooms. There was this one toilet bowl brush, the Excalibur that had been designed by Philippe Starck, I found out a week later, that was in every hip restaurant's bathroom throughout London. And I just had this idea, what if Target could win on design? So I fly back from London before email, and I'm going through about 50 voicemails, catching up, writing down who's called. Speaker 1 (8:20) And Speaker 2 (8:21) I got one from a marketing guy and said, hey, next week, Michael Graves is coming over to the department stores because Target owned Dayton's and Hudson's at the time, Marshall Fields. And he said he's going to talk to them about tea kettles. Would you like to meet him? Speaker 1 (8:37) And Speaker 2 (8:37) I thought, that's the guy whose tea kettle I saw in London. I ran over, it was actually the next week or the next day even, and I met Michael and I just said, what are you here for? He said, well, they want to carry my tea kettle here at the department store, so I came to sell it. And I said, oh, you have to sell to us? Yeah, I hate doing it, but I will do it. And I said, well, I came to me because I wondered if you'd want to design a tea kettle for Target. and some more products. And he said, you'd really let me do that? I said, yeah. And I said, when do you leave? He said, two days. I said, well, why don't tomorrow we meet at a Target store, I'll bring some yellow Post-its, and you can put a Post-it on every product you think you'd like to design you can make better. Speaker 1 (9:23) And he said, Ron, you Speaker 2 (9:25) couldn't bring enough Post-its, Speaker 1 (9:26) which Speaker 2 (9:27) was really great. But that led to the idea of how do you win on design? And I thought a target customer, instead of just trying to get people to compete with Walmart, how do we get that customers buying their home goods at Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn or at the shopping mall or Dayton's on their target run to discover they could get something even better at an unbelievable price? And we ended up launching the Michael Grace collection with 140 items. It was a runaway success. It was part of the decade of design, which the 90s are now referred to because at the exact same time, Steve and Johnny were creating a product as Steve came back to Apple called the iMac, that translucent eggshell designed iMac that was a cult hit that made the cover of Time magazine. but didn't change the game for Apple. And so Steve decided, even though online shopping was the rage and stores weren't going to exist by many people's belief, he wanted to open his own stores to control the customer experience. And he called me because of the design work I did at Target and said, do you want to come out and chat for a few hours about retail? And I went out and met him and the rest is kind of history. I joined Apple and... you know, had the privilege of creating the stores. Speaker 1 (10:54) So you kind of explained that there was a point, you walked through kind of like the process of having an interview and that he asked you to kind of write down your idea for retail. And it's like this throwaway line. He's like, he didn't really like it, but he hired you anyway. Was it kind of like the way you framed it? And so my first question is, what did you write down for him that he didn't love necessarily, but hired you anyway? Speaker 2 (11:19) Well, it wasn't that he didn't like because it's actually I wrote about it. What happened is even funnier than that. At toward the end of this three hour interview when I met Steve for the first time, and I knew a little about him, he said, Hey, Ron, I've enjoyed this conversation. If I were to give you this job and based on what we talked about, a lot of which I like. Could you just send me an email over the next two weeks before I was coming back in two weeks? Just share your thoughts. Speaker 2 (11:47) I said, I don't have a computer. Speaker 1 (11:51) And Speaker 2 (11:51) I said, we don't use email at Target. And he said, well, I can solve that. I can send you a computer. I said, okay. And he goes, if you need help, I'll send someone to set it up. And I Speaker 1 (12:01) said, Speaker 2 (12:01) well, if I need that much help, you don't want to hire me. I can probably figure it out. So he sent me a computer. I sent him an email. When I got back, I was really curious. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I said, what do you think of the write-up? And he said, It wasn't really what I was looking for. And he said, but I'm going to offer you the job anyway. because I really would love to create the stores together. And so I had met Steve for three hours and he offered me the job to lead the stores. I think he loved what was in the email. It's just Steve. Yeah. Steve had a way of, he wore his feelings on his sleeve. Speaker 1 (12:45) And Speaker 2 (12:45) I had written that thing a little more like, probably like my business school days. Here's the industry. Here's Apple's position. Here's why stores would make sense. Here's the customer. I think he was looking for something a little more freeform creative, maybe like a script to a Pixar movie Speaker 1 (13:03) than Speaker 2 (13:04) a business case study because he wasn't a big fan of