Big Think Interview with Jeff Swartz | Big Think

Big Think Interview with Jeff Swartz

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A conversation with the CEO of Timberland.

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Jeffrey Swartz:

Jeffrey Swartz has been Timberland's President and Chief Executive Officer since June 1998. Jeffrey Swartz is the son of Sidney Swartz. Jeffrey Swartz serves as a director of Limited Brands Inc., a publicly traded specialty retailer of women's intimate apparel, beauty and personal care products and accessories.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How did Timberland get its start?

Jeff Swartz: My grandfather was an immigrant to America at the turn of the last century. He was a cobbler back in the old country in Russia. He fled Russia because the czar was conscripting people for the Army and if you’re a Jew and you got conscripted in the Army it was sort of a servant until you die thing and my grandfather wasn’t into that and so courageous kind of entrepreneurial kind of crazy stuff. He ended up in Hamburg, Germany from the south of Russia. On the first day he ever saw an ocean he climbed inside the belly of a ship and he sailed across to New York. He didn’t stop in New York because he knew that was where the Yankees were from. He headed up to Boston and there was some family connection of some sort and he went to work in the shoe factories because Boston at the time had shoe factories and he was a craftsman and he made his living with his hands, but he… And I don’t understand this particular passion, but he had to have his own business, so he started. It failed. He started a second business. It failed. He was 55 years-old. I’m about to be 50. He was 55 years-old on the streets of Boston. The good news was he wasn’t formally educated, so if you said chapter 11 he would have said it’s a book too long to read anyways, so he started… He borrowed 500 bucks and he started this third company which was the predecessor company to Timberland.

Question: Was Timberland always focused on shoes?

Jeff Swartz: My grandfather he never met a shoe he wouldn’t like to make and he had to do it. He was a very practical man. He just wanted to feed his children, so they made women’s dress shoes back in the days and then they made shoes for the Navy, so men’s kind of dumb-dumb shoes and the factory in New Market, New Hampshire, which is where we sort of became I guess that was the first step to being a real company in that sense was owned by another company that went out of business on Friday and they were making work boots and so they heard this was going out of business. There was a trained workforce that makes shoes. We make shoes. They have a workforce. We’re out of luck here in Boston and so they went up the Pike. They went to New Hampshire and Monday they were in the work boot business. That’s strategy Swartz family style. It’s you take it as you find it. Over time they… it made sense. We were in crappy weather in Southern New Hampshire and so work boots and waterproof and tinkering around and that sort of stuff, so necessity, ingenuity born of necessity is kind of the hallmark of how we built our business, but there was no abiding passion for someday we’ll grow up and make work boots. It’s just the way we found ourselves.

Question: What are the challenges to running a family business?

Jeff Swartz: Family business calls to question just literally every single day what is the definition of a family and how are you going to function as a family and so whether it’s horizontally within siblings or cousins, if it’s an extended family. And then vertically it calls the question of mortality and it calls the question of how generations relate to each other with respect and love, but challenge too. It’s an overlay which I have only my narrow experience of meaning we battled through all of those things. My father and uncle set of challenges. My father and uncle and their father and when my dad made me the CEO that was… And then there is my brother and my sister, neither of whom are involved in the business now. That’s a… The math on… You understand why businesses don’t pass the second or third generations because maybe the business idea wasn’t so good or actually more likely the business idea is probably pretty good, but it’s really hard. Thanksgiving or whatever, you’re family celebrations it’s hard because all the things that are natural factors or natural stresses in the family become exasperated on the question of money or on the question of power and the question of prestige and our kids are at the age where our two oldest kids are pretty clear that this isn’t something ...

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