<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.

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.