How TUMI is Designing for World-Class Experiences

Joseph: All right, I am so excited to welcome Victor for joining us today on Radically Personal. I’m actually really excited about the conversation today, Victor, because it actually blends two of my passions, obviously customer experience, but design. It’s such a unique combination to think about those two things together. So, welcome to Radically Personal, Victor.

Victor: I’m excited.

Joseph: Maybe we could start, just maybe a little bit about your role at TUMI, because it’s unique. There’s not a lot of places where the person that runs design also runs customer experience. How did that all come to be?

Victor: I have a bit of tenure here at TUMI and I’ve been able to see the brand continue to grow and grow over the years. Now, I’m the creative director of the brand. I’m overseeing everything from store design, product design, product development. One of the areas that falls and rolls up underneath me is customer experience. The idea was that every touch point that the customer has should have a consistency. There should be this constant flow of communication, of the experience, whether they’re touching a bag, to how they’re being handled at the store and even post-purchase.

This was something that, because of my tenure here, because of the evolution of the brand, it made sense to say, “Hey, let’s have this kind of guardian to it,” and then being able to trickle that down throughout the organization. The nice thing is that we’re not a massive organization, so a lot of the people that are here do have tenure and they do understand the importance of the customer.

For us, that’s always been at the heart of everything we did and do. I’ve been lucky enough to grow through this company. I started out as a young designer and slowly worked my way up through the ranks, developing everything from bags to houses, I’ve gotten to work on cars and electronics– [crosstalk]

Joseph: Wait, wait, wait. Where did you work on cars? I knew about the cameras. You started actually, I think one of your first design jobs was Kodak designing early digital cameras. Where’s the car angle? I want to hear about that.

Victor: I’m a trained industrial designer, and TUMI is a really unique place because it’s like a product design house with this fashion lens on it, which is really interesting. We’re able to design everything from the ground up, whether it’s a zipper puller, to the fabrics, to the materials. A lot of the materials that we use are very technical. They’re using the automotive industry, the aerospace industry.

Because of this connection to materials and innovation, we get approached a lot by these different manufacturers. Sometimes it’ll be a boat manufacturer, a lot of times it’s automotive. We’ve partnered with brands such as Ducati in the past and things like that. I think one of the first partnerships we did was actually with Toyota. We designed the interior of these cars for Toyota and that led to these MINI Coopers. I was able to design these two MINI Coopers.

Joseph: Really?

Victor: Yes, and then that led to Lexus, and we got to work with Lexus and the LFA that launched. That was really this beautiful story that led us to our biggest collaboration that we’ve done with McLaren. I’ve always been a McLaren fan, that’s always been my poster car. It wasn’t the Ferrari, it wasn’t the Lamborghini, it was always the McLaren F1.

I think I had to spend all those years working with these other partners to finally maybe freedom for myself to be even considered in the same conversation with a brand like McLaren. Now we are able to connect with companies at that level. We all speak the same language, which is amazing. The same language that they’re talking about: innovation, material, technology, performance, customer experience. It’s almost like we’re talking to ourselves, in a sense, but they’re designing cars and race teams, and we’re doing bags and products.

Joseph: What’s an example of something you’ve taken from that partnership and applied either to product design or to customer experience? To me, they seem far afield in some ways.

Victor: I’ll start with the product side. From the product side, when we were developing the collection early, early on, we went there and we spent an entire day with the design team and the marketing team and their customer service team and the engineers and the race team, the guys building the cars. We went deep down this rabbit hole.

What we discovered was, as we were talking with the– They have an engineer that only works on carbon fiber, so now we’re geeking out about carbon fiber and how we can utilize their carbon fiber in our bags and vice versa.

Then we got into their interior designer, and he was talking to us about these super fabrics and the attributes and why they use it, it’s awesome. We were able to pull these materials that they’re using for performance and then introduce it into our product for performance.

Joseph: That’s just fascinating.

Victor: Yes, when we started understanding about their customer, they are all about their customer. Giving them the best performance that they can, giving the best experience that they can. It’s not just from the automotive side, also from the racing side. If you follow McLaren in F1, they have the best fans. They’re always trying to put out the best content for them, always trying to get the drivers to interact.

To me, this was an amazing touch point because we’re learning so much because it’s beyond just, “Okay, there’s a race team and these race cars.” No, how do you engage the customer back into that world? There was a lot of learnings from there.

Joseph: How do you think about the intersection of design and customer experience? What’s an example of how that intersection occurs.

Victor: For us, what’s really important is always understanding our customer, always understanding what their world has been about. That’s been the focus for us. It’s not just about their world and how they’re operating in it, but what their expectations are of a brand. This is a new way that people should really start thinking about it is, we have a responsibility as designers that we’re creating products. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pen, a microphone, a bag. We’re creating a product that goes into this world.

That product should perform to improve that customer’s life in whichever aspect it is. If something happens when they’re using that product, we should be there to support them to get them back on track. And we’re really focusing on, how do we just keep improving it? TUMI is never a brand just to sit still. I’m just like, “Okay, cool. We have these collections, we’re doing this. That’s our baseline.” It’s never stopping. For us, it’s always about progressing and innovating.

Joseph: You shared this story about designing for failure. I had never really heard anyone talk about that, per se. When I engage with customers, and by the way, thank you for the now almost three-year partnership we’ve had, I always tell the story. I say, “Look, there’s two things that I can guarantee.”

I say, “Number one, something will go wrong, and number two, we’re going to be there when that thing does go wrong.” I haven’t heard other people talk about it, and then you talked a bunch about, actually, you designed the products for failure, and I was like, “What does that mean?” How do you think about failure in design? You always design for perfection.

Victor: Look, the reality is, things happen in life, things break. No matter how well you plan for a trip, no matter how you’re there early, the weather’s great, you got everything locked in, things happen, and then when you hand over your travel gear to someone else, that’s it. That portion of your trip has left you for a moment, and things happen.

For us, what we look at is, “Okay, if something is going to happen–” It’s a miserable experience when you think about if you’re on a trip and your bag breaks, or even if your flight’s late, but how do we get that person back on track so they’re performing at their highest level?

Something as simple as a zipper puller. We design in failure into our zipper pulls, where we want the zipper puller to break before the zipper itself breaks because if the zipper itself breaks, that means that now you’re sending it to a repair center, we’re having to restitch the bag. That could be a week to maybe two weeks to get the whole process done, but by having the zipper puller break, before the zipper breaks, you can go into any store, and we can just put a new one on there in less than a minute. I can say from personal experience, less than a minute, we can have a new zipper puller back on it and you are back on the road.

For us, that’s what’s important to these things, where we’re designing in these points of failure so that your experience can continue seamlessly, same thing with our handles, our wheels, things like that. We have to make sure that you can get back on the road as quickly as possible.

It’s part of what we do, because like I said, things happen. Even when that extreme thing happens, we’re there to fix it. We have a fantastic repair facility down in Vidalia, Georgia. They’re amazing people that are down there that can pretty much fix anything and they pull off miracles. For us, it’s, “Hey, if we can do that in a store for you, let’s do that.” That’s what we do.

Joseph: You have these set of principles: superior quality, design excellence, technical innovation, functional superiority, and the last one, for a long time, was world-class customer service. I think now you’re expanding that and changing it to world-class customer experience.

One of the things that hit me when I was reading about it is this idea that says that when you purchase a TUMI product, you also purchase a promise. That word of promise just really resonated, it’s like, “If something goes wrong, we’re going to fix it.” I loved this next part, which was, if your question starts with, “Can you help–? The answer is always yes. That mindset of like, “Hey, something’s going to wrong, but we’re here for you.” That brand promise is powerful.

I got my first TUMI bag 25 years ago. I remember it was this rite of passage. I was working as a young kid as a product manager at Apple and I was starting to travel and I bought my first rollaboard, and it was the cheapest one that I could get at the time. I didn’t have a lot of money. I would always walk past the TUMI store and see the red logo and be like, “One day.”

A couple of years ago, I got my first TUMI bag and it lasted me like forever. [chuckles] It was this amazing thing. I did have an issue with one bag and the team fixed it, they took care of it. I’m a TUMI customer for life because of that. I think that that brand promise is so powerful when you deliver on it.

Victor: It was really interesting because our five founding principles, they’re the holy pillars of the brand. Then when we looked at that last one, it was like a customer service. I think it was too narrow of a spectrum for what we were trying to offer to our customers.

We said, “Look, customer service is one portion of the customer experience.” We said, “We need to expand this.”

It’s always been there, the customer experience and the customer service has always been there, but we’ve only defined it as customer service where it’s like, “Oh, you have a problem with the bag? Hey, we can help you fix it.” Then you get your bag back and then that was it. That was the nice handshake and you’re on your way. We’ve been doing so much more than just that.

I think our customers, we value them at such a high level that we want to do more for them, not just, “Hey, we fixed your bag,” but figuring out how to improve their journeys, figuring out how to improve their lives, whether it’s the products that we’re giving them or the different services that we can offer them. I’ll tell you a funny story because you shared your first TUMI story. This is a story we didn’t get a chance to touch on, but my first TUMI experience– This is my first TUMI experience.

Joseph: Were you working there at the time or this is before you–?

Victor: I hadn’t even started yet. I got the job at TUMI and I go in to the head of all design at Kodak. He was one of the reasons that I had got my first job in design. This gentleman named Paul Porter, he’s passed now, but I remember I walked into his office and I said, “Paul, I got some news for you. I’m going to be leaving Kodak.”

As most bosses do, he’s like, “What can we do to keep you?” It’s like, “No.” I explained my situation and he asked, “Can I ask where you’re going?” I said, “There’s this small brand. It’s in New Jersey. They make bags and it’s a brand called TUMI.” He just looked at me and he reaches down and he pulls up, from underneath, his TUMI briefcase, pulls out his wallet from the back, puts it on the table, stands up, shakes my hand, and go, “They’re an amazing brand. Congratulations.”

Joseph: So good.

Victor: I had no idea what I was stepping into, but it’s always stuck out to me where you’re resigning from this job, there’s a lot of emotions on both sides. Then here’s your boss that you’re telling them, “Hey, I’m out of here,” and you tell them that, it really made me think and realize that, “This brand’s got something going on when there’s this gentleman at such a high level of design, high level within a huge organization, and he is paying me respects for being able to get into that brand.”

Joseph: Yes, that’s awesome.

Victor: That’s always stuck out to me about this, and that was my first TUMI story from there. Then when I arrived, I understood why. It’s just that continual dedication to our customers, literally every day understanding them more and more and trying to figure out what they need in their life.

Joseph: How has that changed? You’ve been there over a decade. How has that changed and how do you see it changing going forward in terms of the customer experience and design?

Victor: We’ve been able to gather more information about our customers quicker, whether through the data that we’re collecting, to services such as yourselves, or being able to train our associates more, being able to see how our customers are actually living their lives. Social media, that was the floodgate of information at such a granule personal level and seeing how people were actually traveling.

For us, that was a big opportunity for the brand, but also, it allowed us to push ourselves beyond just making bags and luggage. For years and years and years, people just knew us, anytime they mentioned, “You work for TUMI?” It’s like, “Oh, they make the big black box.”

[laughter]

Victor: I love the big black box scenario, but it allowed us to do more and more. We got into outerwear, and we said, “Wow, customers are resonating.” Then we got into accessories. The tablet came out, and then iPhones and everything. Then we started doing eyewear and fragrance, you name it. We started getting into it. Our customers have just been so accepting of it because we haven’t deviated from those core principles.

Joseph: We’ve obviously seen that in the partnership too, just in terms of thinking about the way your customers engage with the brand via digital. The shift that’s happened and how people appreciate this idea of making the experience about them. So many companies design from the inside out, when you really have taken this approach of designing from the outside in. I just think that mindset shift affects everything, whether it’s product design or that customer experience and the customer service team. It’s been really great to see that.

Victor: Absolutely. The other part is that we’re a global brand and our customers, they’re just traveling. One day you’re in New York. the next day you’re in Tokyo, then you’re flying back and you’re in Vidalia and you’re in South America. It’s like, how do you ensure that if something happens in any of those places that they’re receiving that same service? That’s the other part. We have an amazing global team that ensure that we have that consistency.

I know we share all that data and the information internally to make sure that if you’re going to be in Asia and you have your bag registered, okay, hey, we know this bag was just fixed two days ago. We can say, “Hey, let’s make sure that that is working, that everything’s good. If there is a problem, we can take care of them at the nearest store.

Joseph: I don’t know if you know this story actually. I remember it was in the first, I think, six months of when we went live, that exact scenario because prior, there was different systems in Europe and Asia, et cetera. This idea with Gladly is, it’s a single lifelong conversation centered around people. There was this experience where this customer was traveling in Europe and their bag had broke and they were dealing with a repair, I think, but they were based in the us.

The customer was shocked that the conversation was seamless as they continued that conversation working from Europe and then coming back to the US, but that’s what people expect. They don’t think of you as TUMI Europe or TUMI France. They just think about you as TUMI and, “I have a relationship with you.” It’s just so great to see how you guys execute on that.

Victor: I think that was a big step for us also because from the customer’s perspective, it should be seamless.

We talked a little bit about a brand where that customer experience part really showcased for me. I purchased a pair of shoes and they sent me the completely wrong pair. Then they had sold out instantly and I was livid. I really wanted them and I couldn’t get them. I called up their customer service department and I was ready to lay into them.

Victor: I got on the phone because I’d put in my phone number, they already knew who I was, they were like, “Mr. Sands, how can we help you?” I was like, “I ordered these shoes and you guys sent me the wrong pair and now they’re all sold out.” It’s like, “Oh my gosh. We can’t believe this has happened. We’re so sorry. We do see that as the pair that you had, that you had ordered.” They went through the whole thing.

They went and they found me the right pair of shoes from another store that they had and they apologized tremendously. It’s like, “Your shoes in the right size are heading your way.” They’re like, “You know what? Please keep the shoes that we sent you. You can gift them.” This is all in a matter of two to three minutes.

I just remember sitting there being like, “Wow, I came in so hot, just expecting the worst to be like, “Hey, what can you do?” Return them and that’s it, but that customer experience and that idea that they actually cared about how I was feeling, they cared about the fact that, “Wow, this person is loyal to us because they really wanted that item from us. Let’s make it right.”

That’s always stuck out to me because it’s made me loyal to that brand. It’s made me say, “Hey, if I have a choice, at the end of the day, between buying between this brand and the other brand, I’m going to go with that brand, just because of that customer experience.”

Joseph: Part of that shift is, you got this team in Vidalia, Georgia, which they’re amazing and they work super hard, but Vidalia, Georgia is three hours away from most anything. Very different than the Rodeo Drive TUMI store. How do you see those things becoming more like one another, though?

Victor: Part of it is like a cultural shift, where, as your brand grows and you have people that are being with the brand, it’s bringing everyone along at the same time. It’s like, we’re lucky enough, the studio is here in Manhattan, and it’s this crazy city, and it’s never stopping or moving at this crazy pace. We’re evolving the brand very quickly, but it’s also about evolving your workforce and evolving the individuals that you have for them to understand the brand. The sales person on the floor at Rodeo Drive should have the same type of interaction as our Vidalia, Georgia customer service.

At the end of the day, we should be able to swap both of them and they should be in that same environment with that same level of confidence, and that same level of precision, and empathy for the customer that may have a problem or that person that’s searching for that perfect Mother’s Day or Father’s Day gift. They’re like, “I don’t know where to go.”

How do we get everyone to think about the customer as they’re the most precious thing we have. Think about this, you have a great experience with a brand, you’re going to tell your five friends, “Hey, if you’re ever in need, this is the brand to go to.”

It’s your future revenue and your driver. It’s not just about the now, it’s about the future. That’s a big part of it.

Joseph: How do you go about the internal side and getting people to understand those cultural values? How do you recruit for that? How do you train for that? How does that happen at TUMI? How do you get that TUMI indoctrination? How do you guys do that?

Victor: We actually have a couple of individuals that head up, they’re part of that customer experience team. We have an individual, Jamie Webb, she’s been with the brand for many, many years. She bleeds TUMI red. She spends a lot of time training and creating these training assets for our sales associates, creating training assets for our teams down in Vidalia. It’s that shared communication of information. That’s the other big part.

Joseph: She does both the retail store associates and the customer experience team in Vidalia, Georgia. She’s responsible for training both of them. That’s so awesome because you’re not thinking about them as different things. It’s all the same. It’s so great. That’s pretty unique, by the way.

Victor: We’re learning from them. These individuals that are in our repair center, we talk to them, and we say, “Hey, what do you guys see? What are the issues that we’re having so we can improve the product, we can improve the experience coming through?” It’s a constant conversation going back and forth.

If a customer has a problem, we’ll hear it. Even if it’s one complaint, I think about this as a brand. If there’s one complaint about one product, we’ll all circle the wagons to examine what that is. It’s like, “Hey, this situation came up, how do we handle it? Okay, we don’t have a process in place yet, let’s figure that out.”

We put those steps into place. Just in case it happens again or just in case something like it comes up, we’ll know how best to address it. It’s been kind of a newer endeavor, deep diving at that kind of granular level, but we’re seeing that it’s definitely paying back, we’re seeing that it’s only reinforcing the loyalty to the brand.

Joseph: It seems like we are seeing some light at the end of the tunnel on the pandemic and COVID. Obviously, travel was one of the places that was hit really hard. What do you see as the near-term future and the longer-term future of both TUMI, travel, and lifestyle? What are you thinking about?

Victor: I think people are going to value travel much more than they did in the past. I think now that people have had this hiatus, this kind of forced freeze on travel, I think that they’re going to spend more time appreciating the locations they go to, trying to ensure that, “Hey, if I’m going to be in a city for four days for work, let me tack on those two personal days for me to really deep dive into what’s happening in that culture.”

I’m looking forward to my first trip. I haven’t flown in a year and a half, maybe 17 months, something like that. I went from traveling 90 plus days in a year to zero, I think there’s definitely been much more of like, “Hey, even when I travel, I’m going to have to be on more virtual calls. What does that mean? What does that mean when you’re in the airport and now you’re consuming power on your digital device because you’re on a Zoom call?” Well, there’s probably going to be some power aspects incorporated into travel going forward.

Joseph: You shared a story that I think it’s just a really interesting lesson about taking chances.

Victor: I think I remember this story. It’s stuck with me for a while. This is the way I remember it because I think it stirred me for a bit. I was hired as a young designer to come in. At the time, the design department was just a total of two, so I made it three and they were like, “Hey, we want you to design a collection for this kind of younger consumer, and it should be more modern, more edgy.” I was like, “Okay, cool.” Then they just left me there for three months in my cubicle, just designing away. I designed this collection. I get it and I’m sampling it up, and now it’s time to showcase it to the founder, the man, Charlie Clifford.

He founded the company, he was the head of the company. I go, and the head of designs is like, “Yes, go ahead and present your designs.” The colors that I’d chosen, because everything was black at the time, I was like, “All right, let’s change things up.” I made this ice gray backpack and this, like, it was this blue and this green-colored backpack.

One of the styles was a black with red. I go in and present and explaining how this bag does this, this bag does that. He looks at me and he was like, “Do you know who we are?” He’s like, “What are all these colors? What is this?” He’s like, “We’re TUMI.” He’s like, “TUMI is black, what are you telling me all these things for? You have no idea who we are as a brand.” I was just like, “Oh my God, don’t unpack.” That’s where my head was going.

I just got through it or it ended pretty quickly. The day went on, and I remember Charlie coming, finding me later on that day and he was like, “Hey, look, let me apologize about that.” “We brought you here to do something new and fresh.” He told me, he’s like, “I may not understand it, but that’s why we have you here. That’s why you’re the one that needs to bring things that are different to continue to push this brand forward.” It made me realize that, part of what TUMI is about is taking those risks and always pushing into that next realm, even if it feels uncomfortable at the time, even if it feels uncertain.

I remember that moment where Charlie was one to say, “I don’t get it, but I’m not supposed to get it. I’m the guy that carries the black ballistic bag. You didn’t design that for me.” He was like, “You designed it for you and for that next TUMI customer.”

Then we got talking about design and it was all there. The TUMI DNA was there, the functionality, the quality, the durability, pushing the limits of design and all this. That was one of those moments that made me realize, just keep pushing. You may walk into these meetings and things may not seem exactly the way everyone’s expecting it, but you have to keep pushing those limits.

And Charlie still brings up that story. He’s like, “I remember when you showed me that He’s like, “I had no idea.”
[crosstalk]
Joseph: It turned out to be very successful.

Victor: Yes, that collection ran for 11 years. I still see it on the street, and I’m like, “Oh, my God. I’d never designed a bag before– [crosstalk]

Joseph: “That’s the bag I almost got fired for.” [laughs]

Victor: There’s been many stories like that and on both sides. Just because it was done that way, doesn’t mean that’s the way we keep doing it. This is why I love working with brands like you guys and so many more, because, at our core, we’re doing different services. We’re creating bags, we’re creating experiences, but when we speak, we’re speaking that same language.

Joseph: It’s about the way people are going to do it for the next 10 years, it’s not about the way people did it the last …

Victor: Absolutely. We look at it as, any time we design a product, we’re like, “What’s this going to look like in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years?” Because, like your first story, that first TUMI bag you have, that first TUMI bag that was someone’s dad’s bag or mom’s bag, that became their son’s first TUMI bag or their daughter’s first TUMI bag. There was always a story associated with it.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve talked to people and they’re like, “Oh, my God, I remember my first TUMI bag. My mom gave it to me because she had gotten it as a gift when she graduated law school, and she gave it to me when I graduated law school. It’s been in our family.” It’s like, “Wow” There’s such an emotional connection to those pieces, which I’ve always found so intriguing about this place and TUMI because people just really love– There’s this connection that happens with the product. It’s not just like, “Oh, it’s a bag, and then when I’m done with it, I toss it.”

We’ve had people that, their bags were 35 years old and they needed it repaired. I’m like, “Well, it’s really going to take a lot to get this bag back–” They’re like, “We don’t care. Whatever it takes, I want it fixed.” Our customer service team down there sometimes have remade entire bags from scratch.

Joseph: That’s amazing.

Victor: To get that bag back in their hands. It’s crazy.

Joseph: The name of the podcast is Radically Personal, so I always ask everyone a question, which is to ask you, what’s something radically personal about Victor that most people don’t know?

Victor: When I was a kid, one of the things that I wanted to be was a bullfighter. That was like–[crosstalk]

Joseph: A legit bullfighter?

Victor: The red cape. My parents are both from Spain. I’m first-generation American. As a young kid, I’m like, “What would be the coolest job?” If someone ever asked you, “What do you do for a living?”

Joseph: I’m a bullfighter.

Victor: How would you top bullfighting? It’s like I’m an astronaut. In my head, that would just be the coolest job ever. Only a few people know that, only a few people know that.

Joseph: Not anymore. [laughs]

Victor: Then slowly, that evolved into this idea that I really started pursuing the arts and wanted to be an artist. I think that was a big influence of, again, still that Spanish upbringing and growing up always being told about Picasso and all these things.

Then, that slowly evolved into thinking, “Okay, well, how can I get my art into as many people’s hands as possible?” And discovering industrial design and that evolving into this career that I’ve been on. It started out as me wanting to be a bullfighter. I just had this imagination of like, if a girl asks you, “What do you do for a living?” “Bullfighter.” All the guys in the room would be like, “I’m out, I’m out.”

Joseph: “I can’t compete with that. He’s going head-to-head with the bull, I’m good.” Well, that’s good.

Joseph: Victor I can’t thank you enough for being an early believer in Gladly and such a great partner.

I can speak the entire team when I say we are so proud to be your partner in helping TUMI deliver radically personal customer service.

I’m Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of Gladly.

If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or visit us at radicallypersonal.com. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks for listening.