I love being surprised by the multi-talented people in CLT.
Everyday I'm treated to a new and fascinating experience that is unique
and uplifting. Yesterday, I happened to come across a rare but
altogether amazing sight: The Windsor Flattes Pose of Excelsior the
Legend. Few understand the power and majesty behind said pose. It
invokes feelings of pride and humility at the same time.

This mighty vision has given me passion to write; only the bravest of
souls will attempt such a dangerous feat. Kudos to you Nick...kudos to
you.

What you cannot see from the photo is that Nick's right foot is
actually about 2 inches off the ground. If executed properly, this
pose, made famous by Excelsior the Legend, will allow momentary flight,
and/or spontaneous laughter. If executed without the necessary
preparation, this maneuver can end with a sore belly and red face.
You've been warned!

We had an in-house Fashion Expo last Thursday that was put on by our Designer, Couture and Salon teams in our Fashion group. They did a great job! There were 15 brands represented and we had the opportunity to learn about their products and plans for next season. We also got sample items and if we got all the vendor boxes marked off on our "passport" we were entered into a drawing for some pretty great prizes!

Here’s a video flyby of the room – I just did a walk through with the camera held high. (Graham M. will be doing a blog post with video of one of the runway shows.)

Here’s a “in good fun” behind the scenes video clip. That’s Brian T. singing away and some of the ladies resting up and prepping for the next runway show.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the “stealth” video but people are starting to figure it out and they act all normal as soon as they see me coming with the camera. Hey, Zappos people are smart and catch on quick!
Guess I’ll have to get one of those concealed cameras. I’m pretty sure some people will “get me back” one day.

Thank you for a lovely event,Fashion Team! Thanks to our Scheduling Group that arranged an orderly flow of people from our CLT team so they could attend the Expo and learn more about some of the brands we sell.

And a BIG thanks to our vendors who came out and spent the day with us! Celine, Christian Lacroix, Cole Haan, Donna Karan, Emilio Pucci, Givenchy, Juicy Couture, Kate Spade, Lacoste, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Mark Nason, Stuart Weitzman, Taryn Rose, Ted Baker, and Vince Camuto.

Up in the sky? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it's firmly on the ground. ZU stands for Zappos University but we're definitely having a lot of fun with the "Zoo" wordplay. Mark, our ZU Director is nicknamed the "ZU Keeper" and the entire team is also called the "ZU Crew."

About a week ago the ZU Crew assembled for their first ever group picture. It will be used in our new Employee Handbook which has a yearbook theme. I think the kids in the foreground are power napping. About a half hour earlier I saw them hammering away on the Dance Dance Revolution in the lobby. Missy had everything under control with our Easter recess visitors. The ZU crew will also be "shepherding" a yearbook for 2008. Yep, club and team pictures, a superlatives list (best/most likely to x, y, z), "letterhumans", a Prom Court, the whole 9 yards.

Now ZU also has a very serious purpose at Zappos. Our culture is not just about having a positive attitude. We know we also need the best possible training so we can develop and maintain top caliber skills. ZU will be rolling out 3 broad, overlapping initiatives soon:

PE - Professional Growth & Enrichment
O&A - Outreach & Assessment
Life Styles – Personal Growth & Enrichment

One of the first classes will be the inaugural session of “ZULE” which stands for Zappos University Leadership Essentials. It will be in the PE category and the first class will have many of our senior managers.
The feedback they give will be incorporated for following classes. We’ll let you know how it goes!

So... this will be my last "Dunk Tank" posting, but I didn't want to let Fred and Mark off the hook, since both Galen and Chris have already been victimized by my Flip Video. Again, as part of "Carnival Day" at Zappos.com, Directors and Managers climbed into a dunk tank to benefit the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation, and here we get to see the artist formerly knows as SVP as well as the ZU Keeper both take the plunge for the kids. Thanks for the "Fun and a little weirdness", boys!

<Dramatic Dunh Dunh Dunh music> All good things must come to an end and Thursday was the last day for our brave band of Las Vegas Encounter adventurers. They visited with both Marketing and Creative Services and then met with our Life Coach, Dr. Vik. Our Marketing team has grown more than most departments at Zappos in the past year. We’ve become much more visible online, in print, and now, on television. We’ve also become much more active on the relatively invisible side of the internet by more closely planning and managing our online presence.

Our Creative Services team has also grown a fair amount, both here in Las Vegas and in Kentucky.
As the number of items we carry increases, the number of photographs taken and the number of web pages, complete with fresh graphical elements, also increases. These Zappos blogs were a recent project for Creative Services with help from Marketing, Development and System Administration. A huge commitment is our website renovation project. That’s a fine balancing act right there – too little change and what’s the point – too much change too fast and that’s not good either.

And of course no trip to Zappos in Las Vegas is complete without a visit with Dr.Vik, our fulltime, onsite Life Coach. Besides the bestowing of paper crowns and pictures sitting on the throne, everyone is encouraged to speak their mind, about good or bad, personal or public, to Dr. Vik. He’s an essential element to keeping our culture just right!

Next, we took some group pictures at the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. Here’s the group on the backside of the sign. They are spelling out "LVE KY" with their bodies.

Hey, World! My name's Jesse and I wanted to introduce the Customer Loyalty Team (CLT) to everyone. We are a fun and weird (core value #3) crew consisting of people from all walks of life.

Our hobbies include playing music, memorizing every episode of Golden Girls, making good choices, repairing vans, winning jackpots, listening to Savage Garden, healing winter borne injuries, staying at home, flying to distant countries, singing in the musical group The M-52s, sweet mustaches, and many many more activities. Actually, these are some of the hobbies of the Email Team, the team of which I hail from.

If you don't already know me or the rest of the email team, we are located right by the Copier of Doom on the east side of CLT. Yes, the copier that has a mind of it's own...but that's a topic for another blog. Until then, I will see you later.

P.S. My favorite shoe company in the world is Globe, and I may refer to them cryptically when necessary Excelsior!

More “Dunk Tank” high-jinks! More Chris! What can I say? The man practically forces my hand! Again, as part of "Carnival Day" at Zappos.com, benefiting the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation, Chris let’s his entire team take a shot… all at the same time. Apparently it takes a lot of balls to bring Chris down!

TENNIS BALLS! I’m talking about tennis balls.

As part of "Carnival Day" at Zappos.com, Directors and Managers climbed into a dunk tank to benefit the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation. Here, Nikki W., a member of Zappos' Customer Loyalty Team takes down Director of Casual Lifestyle and Performance Galen H. Galen's my boss, and I love the guy, but he's my boss, so if you listen carefully to the video, you'll hear me coaching Nikki on her dunk tank strategy. Sorry, boss!

A few weeks ago we posted this, a quick look at what our upcoming VIP site may look like. Well the time seemed about right to present another peek at the new site. Below we have a pic of what part of the home page may look like. Of course there is a lot ot tweaking still to be had and it will evolve over time, but we thought we'd share it with ya!

In the previous post regarding the new site I briefly touched on how many people are working on this back at the zoffice, well, there are still tons of people contributing. We are making some good progress lately and watching it all come together has been crazy fun. I am so proud to be a part of the team, while I am not quite as involved as many others are in the creation of the new site I feel an emotional connection to this. I can only imagine how everyone else must feel...those who are coding, programming, skinning, categorizing, designing, etc, truly deserve a massive pat on the back for their hard work. I guess the hard part is deciding if that pat on the back should be really hard, or if it should be a massive hand gently patting on the back? However you interpret massive pat on the back, well, they deserve it!

Hey there readers! We've teamed up with the folks who do likeness quizzes on Facebook and created a quiz! You can play with it here on Facebook.

If you are anything like myself or the 1,600 coworkers here at Zappos you will do anything to distract yourself from the daily grind and have some fun, I mean, added fun from your wonderful job This likeness quiz may help, enjoy!

Also, we've added out TV Commercial to our page on Facebook, you can view it here.
Sorry so short! TTYL, OMG, LOL! WTF!! ROFL!

Yesterday from 11 to 2 we took Zappos Idol - our inhouse Karaoke event - up another notch with our giant backdrop and other new and improved decorative elements. Here’s Joseph mugging it up for a dramatic rendition of “I will Survive.”



We’ll be alternating Zappos Idol on one month and then the popular video game Rock Band on the following month. And in between performances, we have our trusty newfangled jukebox. I’ll try to get some stealth video of people dancing to the music!

Practically the entire company has completed this training program. In this class, we get a general safety overview and then a more detailed presentation about bloodborne pathogens and how to avoid and protect yourself from them. Here’s one of our new Safety Coordinators, Jamie the Hacker, after he taught about 10 classes, each an hour long, in a row. Looks like he could use a six pack and some time off!



We’ve just started a Safety Department at Zappos and it is led and staffed by our Kentucky team. We’re trying to qualify for the OSHA SHARP classification and this class is one step toward that goal.

Another awareness initiative is our very own HOOPLA acronym and motto that Jamie tacked together. Here’s what it stands for:

H – Healthy Work Habits

O – Observing the Core Values with Safety

O – Organization that Empowers Individuals

P – Personal Protective Equipment

L – Learning about Safety is Fun

A – Awareness is the Key to Success

Seriously, safety is serious business and at Zappos we’re committed to creating Fun, a Little Weirdness and a Lot of Safety. I’ll be interviewing Leah, our new Risk & Safety Manager and will share more info with you about our new Safety programs. And we’ll meet Crystal and Edward from Safety.

So if you are one of my 5 loyal readers (I am that popular) you'll know that I host an unhealthy obsession with argyle. But the best part about this is that I have learned there are others more obsessed than I am here at Zappos. Awesome! The pic below is the second of this repeat argyle offender, and from what I was told by her is that there will be 50 separate argyle pieces to come over the coming months. 50? That is a lot, I suggest argyle therapy for her! If you are interested in jumping on the argyle bandwagon we can help ya out with some argyle pieces here at Zappos.com! Hopefully we'll carry more soon!! If so I would be our biggest customer!

Today, as part of Spirit Week, our WOW committee held a mini carnival out in front of our main building. We had a real cotton candy machine, a live fortune teller, a dunk tank filled with "cool, cool water," a “pick some plastic eggs with Zollars inside” wagon , an “honor” jail and even some Hula Dancers as the closing event. All the money collected, $1172, is going to the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation.

Here’s a picture of Galen, our Director of Casual Lifestyle and Performance in the duct tape “honor” jail. Even though he just finished a shift on/in the dunk tank, Galen is, as always, appropriately attired. It cracks me up that he is smoking – in direct disregard of the “No Smoking” sign. In his defense, I guess he can’t see the sign. (I'm pretty sure he can read!)



The WOW committee is part of the Customer Loyalty Team department and they put on a regular series of events to both recognize and create “WOW” in the entire company. Their energy, enthusiasm, organization and execution are very impressive.

We recently created a new TV commercial!! Thought it may be cool if you all got to check it out!


Unfortunately the quality of the post is not too superb, we're working on it! But, if you are interested in watching it show on TV stay tuned to some of the below networks/shows! But you can see the HI-RES by clicking here!

ABC Family: Wednesday ? 9:09 PM ? The Parent Trap (Movie)
Comedy Central: Wednesday ? 11:38 PM ? The Colbert Report
Game Show: Thursday ? 9:44 PM ? Family Feud, 11:15 PM
Game Show: Friday ? 7:32 PM ? The Weakest Link
VH1: Thursday ? 10:47 AM ? Fresh New Music
VH1: Friday ? 3:53 PM ? Celebrity Fit Club
MTV: Thursday - 7:18 AM
SciFi: Thursday - 9:45 AM, 11:15 AM, 12:18 PM, 4:22 PM

And so much more, more than I can list!!! We hope you like it!!!

The first stop today for our LVE group was in Merchandising. This department is responsible for selecting the brands, styles, colors, sizes and quantities for what you see for sale on our site. Merchandising tries to maximize "Service & Selection" for our customers by having the best combination of brands, seasonality, color and size size size! This is summed up in their motto “Right Product, Right Time, Right Quantity.”

To accomplish this they use a combination of "Science and Art." The "Science" comes from outside market research, trends from inhouse sales plans and comparisons to similar models. The "Art" part comes from predicting trends and “going with your gut.”

In this picture Noel, our eyewear and watch buyer, gets some help from Vanessa the Visionary on what to order for next season.


Good vendor relations is an important part of the Zappos Merchandising culture. Two tenets are “Open and Honest” and “Create Long-lasting Partnerships.” Perhaps the key way we do this is simply by treating our vendors how we’d like to be treated – a rather universal truth yes? Another way is via the “Extranet”
which makes communications with our vendors much easier and accurate. I’ll be attending our Extranet class tomorrow and will report back with what I learned!

One of the areas visited by our Las Vegas Encounter group today was our Order Verification Team. I’d like to say all of the orders placed with Zappos comes from honest, reasonable, fun loving, literate people such as yourselves. But the truth is enough people try to use fake or fraudulent credit cards and so we have the Order Verification Team. OV is a part of the 440 strong Customer Loyalty Team. We currently have 16 CLT Reps in OV and their Lead Jim C. They use a variety of tools (sorry can’t talk about it) to confirm or deny the validity of
people, places and things. They have a very good success rate and we are very proud of how well they “Wow and Protect” both you and us.

This picture is actually not in OV because they all have to stay anonymous! (I’m warming up for April 1 baby!) However the very observant reader will be able to figure out which group our LVErs are actually visiting.

Today is Sports Jersey Day for Spirit week. We had the full spectrum – football (including Powder Puff!), baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, NASCAR, and even fishing! Check out how Janelle blocks John D. out of the picture with her patented overhead stretch. Oh well, John D. was wearing a drinking team shirt. (high 5 my man)

It's dangerous for me to pick favorites but Peter's ump outfit with chest pad and shin guards gets my vote. Our Scheduling group lined up a bunch of people for the photo in record time. (Thanks Kay!)

Big doings tomorrow for Spirit week, complete with water feature!

Sounds kind of est-ish doesn’t it? This is the somewhat mysterious name for our orientation and awareness program on Las Vegas operations for our Kentucky Fulfillment Center staff. Groups of around 5-8 people will
come out to Las Vegas for a 3 ½ day visit.

After this program they’ll actually have a more complete understanding of Zappos Las Vegas than many people who work here. Most of the departments will give them a brief presentation and then give them a shadowing
session with experienced people. They also meet most of our senior management, catch up with old friends and make new ones.

So of course it is not all just presentations and staring at computer screens. This is Zappos afterall. One of the freeform activities is “Building Bingo” where they have to roam the building, locate certain people and get questions answered. And after hours there’s the wonderfully wide world of Las Vegas entertainment.

Here’s a picture of this week’s group of 7 in the HR Kissing Booth.

Our Customer Loyalty Team is holding Spirit Week starting today. Monday is Pajama Day so there was a lot of flannel, some spandex and a bit of lace in the building. PJ Day is just laidback, casual comfortable fun. And it gives you a chance to share your funny slipper collection with others. Ah, after all our Core Value #3 is “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness.”

Also one of the CLT managers had a birthday today so someone whipped up a bunch of “face signs” - basically you print out pictures of that person’s face and attach them to wooden tongue depressors. This picture has both a PJ assortment and a nice array of face signs. Happy Birthday Rob!


Tomorrow is Sports Day so I’ll be on the prowl for a nice multi-team picture.

Let’s see - most of us have heard of the word metropolitan, metro as in subway, and relatively recently, metrosexual. But what about a MetroNap? When I first saw these out on the loading dock wrapped in plastic, I did a double take and thought “what *Z*any thing are we getting now?” I did another double take (triple take?) when I saw 3 of these things set up in our quiet lounge only about an hour later.

So here’s the bean spill – the MetroNap Energy Pod is a reclining, isolation nap pod – no joke – it is not April 1st – yet. These are pretty cool – they have mood lighting, white noise, adjustable recline and a vibrating wake up timer. For some reason they remind me of the movies Cocoon, 2001: a space odyssey and of course, Sleeper by Woody Allen.

We’ve got 4 of them onsite for an evaluation period and by the looks of things, they’ve been very popular. I regularly see 3 pairs of feet sticking out of the pods in my building. Here’s Zak just after he’s opened the pod bay door – it’s a spherical shell that rotates to cover you and give you darkness and sound isolation. He's looking pretty happy and energetic!



And for the record – we’re not MetroNapping on the job – it’s only for break times.

Zappos, POWERED by ZZZZs!

It was a perfect Spring Sunday out at Lake Las Vegas where the Nevada Childhood Cancer Foundation held a fund raising Easter egg hunt. NCCF provides "comfort and support while empowering and educating families” with children who have a “life threatening or critical illness.”

Zappos had some volunteers at the event to help with event registration, egg distribution, or just answering questions for people. There were hundreds of children just raring to go and I am sure the handful of minutes before each hourly egg hunt must h