There has been a pretty big change here at Zappos.com. What was once known as Product Information, Photo and Imaging has now officially made the change to the Content Team. It makes sense when you look at the inner workings of the site.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each area is responsible for:

Product Information (PI) is in charge of all product descriptions on the site. Yes sir, that means every piece of leather, canvas, nubuck or tweed that is on the site must be described by Product Information first. PI is also in charge of creating the brand “about text” which gives the customers a quick rundown of the brand history and what they bring to the table. PI reads every single customer review as well. No simple feat might I add. There is so much more, but Ash touched on that stuff in his past blog here.

The Photo and Imaging teams in Kentucky and Las Vegas have also fallen under the Content Team umbrella. Photo is in charge of all of the product shots that we have on the site. They make sure the customer gets a good idea, visually, of what they are getting. After Photo takes the pictures, the Imaging team makes sure the pictures are in the right places and that the blue you see is blue and the pewter you see is pewter. How many of you guys would order something with out seeing it? It’s important that we all work hand-in-hand, since I would never buy anything without being able to read about it either.

That’s just the quick nuts and bolts of it all. In short, say hello to the Zappos.com Content Team.

LV Content Team

Look out for the KY Content Team coming soon!

A bunch of my team members are back in the office after returning from a 2 week-long trip overseas. Being buyers for brands like Fitzwell and others they regularly visit factories to ensure quality and tend to relationships with various vendors. It was not long ago in fact, that they returned from Brazil... which was preceded by a Germany trip. Italy came shortly before that. On this latest trip they visited Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam. Now they're back in the office and they'll have several thousand E-mails (literally) to reply to, catch up on office gossip, tell war stories, and give me a whole lotta work to do.

Here is buyer Kathryn still badly jet lagged but looking quite refreshed nonetheless. She has boundless puppy-like energy, I don't know how she does it!

Hi! I’m Dena M. and welcome to my first blog! I work in the Product Information/Content team (our name is in the process of changing as I type) for the Performance Specialty team. Specifically, my portfolio consists of all the brands in the Urban Mix.

In a nut shell, the Product Info team spends each day writing descriptions, detailing information into the system, sifting through 100’s of emails, corresponding with reps and co-workers out in KY, and taking as many notes as we can in product meetings for our future descriptions. If you would like a more detailed, yet still shortened, depiction ofwhat we do check out Ash’s Blog from 4/11/08!

I have to say, I think the funnest part about our job is getting the chance to see collections seasons before they are available. We then get the opportunity to be creative and write about them for our Zappos customers to peruse and purchase! So you might be thinking to yourself: What happens when you sit a group of 13 (that’s how many of us are on the Performance Specialty team) creative and detail-oriented people in one row?? A lot of hard work, laughter and some friendly competition.

Product Info, as a whole, rewards us with monthly and quarterly awards. Our monthly“Super Awesome Descriptions” awards are nominated and voted on by our peers- hence the blood bath begins....... Just kidding! How else are you gonna keep it interesting after you have just written 30 descriptions of Sean John button-ups and polos??? So in the spirit of friendly competition I’d like to give a shout out to who I think last weeks winner was, drum roll please...... Miz Vanessa S. and the description she wrote for the Puma Phantom Mini Grip. Check it out...you’re singing, right?!?!?! I knew it! If you are ever in the office and take a tour, check out the Super Awesome Descriptions wall that posts the month’s winners along with stats of how much work has been accomplished by our department.

Since I am getting the chance to write this blog, and in an effort to wrap it up, I thought I would have some fun with it and turn the tables on you, our readers and customers. How do you think we are doing with descriptions? We are always looking for and are open to suggestions on how to improve. And the kicker…Do you think you could do better? Why not give it a try?!?! Check out these two new Urban Mix products (shameless plug) and try to write your own opening tag line.

Pastry Fortune Cookie Product ID 74025969

Evisu Ninja Jean Product ID 7401226

Post ‘em in the comments! You never know, if I like yours more, I may just change it and make it live on Zappos.com!

I work in the Product Information Department at Zappos. The role of this department is sometimes misunderstood. The reality of our role is so varied and that makes it difficult to describe.

Where it concerns product, we sort of have our hands in a little bit of everything. In the buying and merchandising phase, we research and learn about the products being purchased by the buyers for sale on our site. Merchandisers have meetings with various vendors that we attend, and we often accompany them to trade shows to see the new lines of merchandise.

We then work with merchandising in loading our software systems with all the products that they wanna buy. One important step here is the loading of product UPCs into our system which are usually provided by the vendors and transmitted to us in different ways, from electronically to faxed! Fast forward a bit, to once the items are shipped by land, sea, and air (mostly by boat) and received by our warehouse, and have been photographed, it's up to us to write their descriptions and do a final check to ensure everything looks good for the customer. After this sequence, that can take 6 months or more, below is what you get! This is a shoe description I wrote today and approved to go 'live' - rsvp pump.

Now that’s an oversimplification because there’s a few other things we have our hand in and some things you might not expect. Because we’re‘product people’ it falls on us to address the multitude of issues that pop up with the almost 3 million products we sell. Issues range from product questions customers have that can’t immediately be answered.

Also our great warehouse team may have questions for us concerning shoes that were damaged in shipping that require some resolution, or boxes that came in without labels.
And the merchandising team itself may have special requests to have product photographed a certain way or to communicate with the warehouse that they need to prepare for receiving everything from jewelry to MP3 players! So it’s up to us to relay a lot of these questions and requests. We go through hundreds of E-mails in a day!

But that’s not all. We help Zappos and our thousand-plus brands communicate via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI – electronic transmission of purchase orders, and invoices). We help Accounting and Merchandising enter information into certain SAP (a German based business software and consulting company) programs as a way to manage our various databases.

We also help in training employees on our various programs since we use them so much and know them well. We even help make those customer reviews go ‘live’. Right now we are becoming more involved in doing our part to optimize the way Zappos is searched for on search engines like Google. And there are yet more duties we have taken on.

Safe to say, if the task or issue involves a product we sell, it will invariably involve one or more of our 50 team members.

Let’s play a quick game of word association with the operative word being princess. For me, the following things come to mind: princess cut diamonds, my new title when Prince Harry decides to marry me, glitzy tiaras, etc. Others may think of Disney princesses and go-to Halloween costumes for the Infant/Toddler crowd. However, on rare occasions events take place which require us to reevaluate our internal definitions of given words.



A pivotal event took place here at Zappos.com in March that forever changed our idea of what we associate with the word princess. During the first ever Kids Expo, an event put together where brand reps from a given category commence at Zappos to enhance brand awareness among our Customer Loyalty Team (or CLT if you will), a couple members of the Kids team decided to redefine what it means to be a princess.

I present to you Matt and Stephen from Kid’s Product Information…

Ohhh how they dazzle in pastels!! Thanks for the memories guys! Matt and Stephen are available for hire on a
case-by-case basis. I know for certain they accept bribes in the form of Zollars and Grey Goose for anyone that is interested!

On Thursday afternoon I had the privilege of attending our Product Information (aka PI) Group's monthly team building event. PI is responsible for researching, writing and updating the descriptions for all the products on our sites - currently 1164 brands, almost 154,000 different styles and growing all the time. They have just over 50 people and like so many departments here at Zappos, they've had gangbuster growth in the past year. So these team building events are vital to preserving our company culture - this not only makes Zappos a super fun place to work but also one with effective business execution.

This was the largest explicit team building event I've attended at Zappos and I was curious to see how it would be conducted. Well color me *P*retty *I*mpressed! Rico and Nick had the grills going by the time most of us arrived at the local park and the adult beverages were flowing freely. In case you were wondering, alcohol is allowed in most parks - it is Vegas after all.

After a bit of lubrication, the group formed 2 parallel lines with everyone looking inward. Then a communal question was announced and every facing pair discussed their answers. Then one of the pairs were called out to share what they had learned. Some questions were serious "like what are your medium term work goals" and others were fun like "what is your favorite brand" or "Reality Shows - pro or con."

After each question, the person at the end of one line moved to the opposite end and everyone else in that line moved down one spot so now everyone was facing a new person. What a brilliant, elegant, efficient and fun way to do this!

Of course no picnic is complete without great food and our grill masters certainly delivered. We had wings, beer can chicken, tri tip, corn on the cob, sausage with onions and peppers, salads and ice cream cake! Great Job PI!