Over Valentine’s Day weekend in 2016, a winter storm wiped out most of New England’s peach crop — a development that left 

In the thick of summer menu planning, the group was forecasting supply for the restaurant chain’s popular peach and goat cheese bowl and coming up short. While other fast-food companies might have opted to truck in less-than-fresh peaches from a far-flung location, Sweetgreen’s team on the ground took a different route.

They swapped out the peaches for locally grown (and unscathed) blueberries and strawberries, whipping up a brand-new menu item that was dubbed the “Patriot Bowl” in an homage to the region. It quickly became one of the most popular orders throughout Sweetgreen’s northeastern restaurants — and is now a prime example of a concept that co-founder and Chief Brand Officer 

“When we started out, you had two choices: food that was either fast, cheap and unhealthy or slow, expensive and fresh. We wanted to create a place where you didn’t have to sacrifice price for flavor or convenience. For us,

 intimacy at scale is about proving that that we can serve healthy, real food at scale, while still making it feel like 

,” he says. “There are all of these cautionary tales about startups or restaurants that grew massively, transforming into slow-moving corporate entities where quality takes a nosedive, products become more bland, customers are no longer at the center, and employees feel less involved and inspired. We’ve been determined to avoid that.”

, started out on a journey to bring this philosophy to life more than 11 years ago, opening up a 500-square-foot restaurant in Washington, D.C. just a few months after graduating from Georgetown. Cozy and decorated with local art, this first location became anchored into the folds of the community, providing a stable foundation for further expansion along the Eastern seaboard. By maintaining a flexible supply chain and crafting a seasonal, curated experience for customers, Sweetgreen has bottled the essence of its humble beginnings as it has scaled, tapping into that familiar-yet-fresh feeling to fuel impressive growth.

The company now boasts more than 3,500 employees and nearly 100 locations in eight states, with plans to double the number of restaurants in the next year. But Sweetgreen has been growing beyond mere physical footprint as well. From launching enterprise office delivery and using blockchain to track ingredients to unlocking unicorn status and raising over $300 million in funding, the company seems to share more DNA strands with tech startups than with their fellow fast-casual competitors. 

In this exclusive interview, Ru draws on his experience scaling Sweetgreen to offer startups a clearer window into how rapidly growing companies can maintain intimacy with customers, partners and employees. He deconstructs the essential strategies for authentically approaching new markets and collaborations, while diving deeper into the tactics Sweetgreen used to infuse intention into its supply chain, mobile app and team building efforts. Founders looking to build a company that can withstand growing pains and stay connected with customers will benefit from Ru’s masterclass on building a brand steeped in community.

TAKE A LEAF FROM THE PLAYBOOK FOR SCALING INTIMACY

As more cooks crowd the kitchen and new locations are spun up, standard operating procedures and efficiencies are introduced to maintain consistency. Soon enough, the culture gets watered down, the products lose flavor and the founding spark of creativity dims as a cookie-cutter approach takes over.

This description could just as easily apply to a scaling tech startup as to a rapidly growing restaurant chain (and as we’ve previously noted, there’s considerable overlap in 

the skillsets of chefs and product managers

 as well). As Ru is quick to point out, companies in both industries face an inherent tension between scale and intimacy.

“Focusing on intimacy is much easier when you're starting out. It’s hard to reverse engineer or revive it once you’ve reached a certain size,” says Ru. “That’s why building the mindset to embrace change and flexibility from the beginning is important. It’s easy to concentrate on sales and growth, but losing the storytelling and emotion of your early days is a recipe for a transactional approach that won’t last.”

For Sweetgreen, scaling intimacy revolves around expanding access to healthy food without compromising on the core, inherently local spirit the company started out with — a guiding light that requires a mindset different from that of their food industry peers. “In our space especially, many food companies obsess over building more restaurants. But we try to think more about deeply about customer-centric metrics, focusing on NPS, frequency by channel, social sentiment and overall loyalty over time,” says Ru. “And we believe we can increase that value by thinking less like a traditional restaurant company and more like a customer subscription business.”

To further unpack the thinking behind scaling intimacy, Ru details the four core principles that have formed the ethos of Sweetgreen’s approach, sharing the mistakes he and his co-founders learned from along the way.

“Like many startups, we started off with a few core values, but it quickly ballooned from there. I think at one point we got up to 20 values and we couldn't even memorize all of them. That was definitely a reflection of us trying to do too much in our early years. Over time we learned the power of saying no and slowing down,” says Ru.

While it’s tempting to grow as fast as you can in every dimension, it’s the decisions that you say no to that define who you are.

“After opening our first restaurant, we immediately thought we could open all over the country in L.A., New York and Miami within the first three years. There’s a lot of pressure for startups and restaurants alike to expand to new markets quickly. But eventually we realized that by saying no to expansion, we could focus on building the brand and 

,” says Ru. “We made the decision to stay in D.C. for the first six years, and honestly, it was one of the best things we ever did.  It allowed us to build a network effect and really learn from our mistakes before we took that blueprint to new markets. Whether it was connecting to the local farmer’s market, building out an entirely local supply chain, scoping out real-estate or working on social impact projects, we incubated every tactic in D.C. first so we could put deliberate and authentic growth at the center.”

Further embodying that philosophy of taking things slow, the Sweetgreen team takes its time before entering a new market, knowing that the exact same launch playbook won’t work in every location.

“Unlocking intimacy and the ability to resonate with customers hinges on doing the legwork to understand them. You have to connect with each community differently. At least a year before we enter in a new market, we’re introducing ourselves to the community and taking the time to understand its unique culture so we can so that we can show up in a more meaningful way,” says Ru.

“We’re students first, analyzing each community before every new market launch. For example, we’ve been immersed in Houston now for over a year, meeting with the largest farmer’s market, combing through real estate options, working with local artists and architects, learning about what people who live in that area like to do and eat, and looking at historical data for everything from traffic patterns to demographics,” he says. “We’ve also created our own mindset model that we overlay on different ZIP Codes to gauge how well we would perform in certain regions. So in the case of Houston, our diligence has led us to apply new tactics, such as introducing heartier food plates, serving beer and wine, and adding in more seating to cater to the culture of driving.”

In Ru’s eyes, Sweetgreen’s earliest stumble was underestimating how fast the world was changing. “When we first started expanding outside of D.C., we were essentially building the same version of the Sweetgreen restaurant over and over again, focusing purely on adding more locations, instead of lasering in on the expectations of the customer” he says. “Over time, we’ve discovered the power of modularity, designing our restaurants to embrace change. Just as a fashion retailer changes merchandise by season, our locations have the flexibility to change menus, ambiance and decor, feature local artists and different playlists.”

And with Sweetgreen’s ambition to become the “Starbucks of real food” that flexibility could come in handy. “It gives us room to grow if we want to go international. Imagine what Sweetgreen would look like, say in Japan,” says Ru. “We’ve intentionally held the space in our brand to allow for Sweetgreen to fit in many different environments.”

Sweetgreen has also explored another dimension of modularity: addressing the recent explosion of delivery apps and online ordering. “We had to figure out how we could provide Sweetgreen anytime, anywhere. We built our own app, but we've also introduced 

, a shelf-based free Sweetgreen delivery to offices. It’s not our traditional storefront and it’s not typical delivery either," Ru says. "You have to tinker with different formats that span across physical and digital to rethink how you’re serving customers.”

You have to design products and experiences for modularity because everything changes so quickly. Don’t just focus on the today’s functionality — peer into the future and start thinking about how you can show up in unexpected ways.

To tap into community specific microcosms, reach out to customers in new ways and inject flavor into the brand, Sweetgreen has utilized unexpected collaborations from the start. From a 

 “Beets Don’t Kale My Vibe” campaign in 2015 to a recent 

partnership that delivers salads directly to WeWork locations

, the company has dabbled across an incredibly diverse range of domains.

But one of Ru’s personal favorites was the recent partnership with Michelin-starred chef 

“Everyone says ‘farm to table’ these days, but we wanted to try ‘seed to restaurant,’” he says. “Dan has a seed company that breeds new strains of vegetables to maximize flavor, so we bought 100,000 seeds of a brand-new squash he invented and we planted them in six farms across the country. They all came out in completely different shapes and sizes. It had never been produced in mass quantities and obviously no customer had ever heard of the Koginut squash before, but we put it on the fall menu at every location. That’s not something most fast-food companies would do, but for us, it’s about showing our customers a different side of food and making sure purpose permeates throughout our brand,” says Ru.

When considering partnerships, Ru advises early-stage teams to go with what feels like a natural fit, not a forced extension. “The relationships that have been the biggest successes for us have always been the ones where the brainstorming and execution were seamless,” he says.

Even at scale, you can still find ways to experiment with bold, wild card ideas and look for partnership opportunities that bring out a different side of your brand.

To fill in more color beneath these four strategic pillars, in the following sections Ru goes on to reveal the tactical threads of how intimacy at scale has been woven into Sweetgreen’s supply chain, tech platforms, brand building efforts and internal company culture.

LOCAL LOGISTICS TO SCALE SUPPLY FROM THE GROUND UP

Although centralized sourcing and distribution has been the operational bedrock of fast-food for decades, Sweetgreen has upended convention from the very beginning. By going straight to the farmers themselves (including more innovative suppliers such as Barber’s 

,) Ru and his co-founders are dedicated to instilling intimacy and avoiding a typical conglomerate supply chain mentality at every turn.

“We want to show people that fast-food can be good for you and also taste different in different places. Our kale in Philadelphia tastes different than it does in Palo Alto, and our goal is to make that completely normal in the fast-food world,” says Ru.

While most startups aren’t struggling to figure out the logistics of planting a new strain of squash or distinguishing different kale varieties , early-stage consumer-facing companies often rely heavily on operations and suppliers — and stand to learn a few things from how Sweetgreen has set it all up.

Today the company has seven separate supply chains that involve over 150 local farmers across the country so menus can be designed around the regions and the seasons. “Our supply chain is incredibly complex — but it’s also our moat,” Ru says.

If you're willing to do the upfront work of setting up different supply chains or upending traditional operating models, you can reinvent the business you're in.

“Some ingredients are procured nationally, such as wild rice or olive oil, but most of it is sourced locally. We also change our menu five times a year, and each one involves more than 3,000 hours of research. There’s also last-mile coordination and a value-chain coordination in each supply chain, which includes managing relationships, checking quality and helping farmers with purchasing power,” he says. “The biggest challenge is understanding forecasting and making sure that we set the right expectations with farmers and the right volumes. It’s much harder to do all of that in seven separate areas at once, but for us, it pays off in spades. Our food tastes better, we can be more transparent on where it’s coming from and we’re able to support local food economies, all of which comes together to build a fresh take on fast-food.”

Here are two tactics Sweetgreen relies on to power this process:

Go deep to build supplier relationships that last.

 Before Sweetgreen moves in on a new market, the first task is to make sure it can be supported by a local supply chain. “We always say that we meet farmers before we meet landlords,” Ru says. “Our second restaurant in D.C. was actually in the parking lot of the biggest farmer's market, which enabled us to connect with every vendor. That meant going to their farms, seeing what they do and figuring out how we could start working together and then scale that further,” he says. “We still use this tactic today. 

Don’t just view your partners or suppliers as inputs or cogs in your operations; take a long-run view and think of each one as an opportunity to build a real relationship that can grown wildly beyond where you first started. 

We partnered with our goat cheese provider in the D.C. region, Firefly Farms, back when we were both really small. 11 years later, we still work with them and their business has grown alongside ours.”

 Out of a desire to improve food safety (and avoid the tainted tribulations of competitors such as Chipotle), Sweetgreen has started using blockchain to track ingredients from seed to store. “We know exactly where our food came from, when it was picked and how it got to us,” says Ru. “We 

 to tag ingredients, put sensors in the ground and map the full journey of food by looking at variables in soil, microclimate and timestamps. It maximizes transparency and traceability, as the blockchain-based public ledger will allow any customers to see what’s going on. But it also enabled us to really dig into and quantify taste,” he says. “We’ve been conducting taste profile projects on heirloom cherry tomatoes in Boston and goat cheese in Chicago to validate our thesis that local, sustainably grown ingredients are better than grocery store ones from an unknown source. For example, through using blockchain and running customer taste tests, we could pinpoint that peak flavor occurs more than five days after a tomato is harvested.”

Transparency is an unbelievably powerful tool for startups looking to shake things up in their industry. Open up and demystify your operating practices as much as possible to forge connections with your customers.

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BOWL AND APP: INTIMACY AS AN INGREDIENT IN TECH

While Sweetgreen is known for the snaking lunch lines and fast-moving assembly stations of the physical realm, the company has been steadily dialing up its digital presence as well.

Nearly 50% of orders in the last year came through its mobile app, which has more than a million users. Given that Sweetgreen can count only 90 physical locations, these figures stand out.

“We’re a food company first and tech company second. For us, it’s always going to be important that the food is flavorful and delicious, but we also want to make sure we’re meeting our customers where they are, so along with head chefs and line cooks, we have developers and product designers,” says Ru. “We want to own that relationship with customers and bring a deliberate authenticity to every touchpoint, which is why we’re also prepping for our own delivery launch this year.”

Tech needs to enhance the human experience, not replace it.

Ru shares a behind-the-scenes look at how the company built its order-ahead app and internal operating system in a quest to deliver digital offerings with Sweetgreen’s signature streak of intimacy:

(Mobile) ordering with the eyes and Spotify for salads.

Sweetgreen was an early mover as one of the first in its category to release an app.

“Food ordering and delivery apps have since exploded, but when we were first designing our mobile app back in 2011, there wasn't anything that represented the experience that you felt in a restaurant. It was a mixed bag of radio buttons and dropdown menus, but we wanted to create an app that was as good as ordering in our restaurants,” says Ru. “We spent two years developing it and when it launched in 2013, mobile ordering only made up 5% of the business. But now only five years later, its nearly half of our volume. And we’ll expand on this even further by exploring new functionality such as text, voice or even Slack ordering in the future.”

Here are two goals Ru kept the team focused on during the design process:

We had this mantra of ‘ordering with your eyes.’ At our restaurants, you walk down a front line and you choose what you want to go into your bowl based on what you see. We wanted that experience to come through in our app, so we invested heavily in content descriptions and photography of every bowl and every ingredient to create really 

rich, storytelling experiences around food

. “Navigating through dropdowns or grids of standard menu options is tedious and we wanted to reduce the cognitive load of ordering food online. We incorporated everything from dietary restrictions to order history to create the most customized experience possible. It could be adjusting the heaviness of the dressing, specifying if you want the salad mixed or using the ‘save to favorites’ button so you can quickly re-order your custom creations,” says Ru. “Eventually this will evolve to using this data to present you with a completely personalized, curated menu based off your preferences, more similar to Spotify than a salad chain.”

Early on, the Sweetgreen team recognized the importance of back-of-house functionality. “Many focus on what our website or mobile app looks like, but we’ve invested a lot of time in redesigning our kitchen space. Because the pace of online ordering was overwhelming the front assembly line, we had to make some operational changes,” says Ru. “Today, every single Sweetgreen restaurant has a secondary make line to handle online orders. Some of our New York locations actually have four assembly lines to meet mobile demand.”

For Sweetgreen, thinking through the configurations of the behind-the-scenes kitchen operations is also about making it easier for store teams to execute real food from scratch, as everything from the dressings to the roasted steelhead trout is prepared fresh at every restaurant, every day.

“In the restaurant business there aren’t many technical tools to help make the job easier,” says Ru. “That’s why we developed Sweetgreen OS, which we like to think of as the turn-by-turn directions an Uber or Lyft driver gets. It takes in the inputs of sales forecasting, weather and historical performance to help the team know how much food to make, when to make it and what steps to follow.”

It’s tempting to focus only on externally-facing platforms, but don’t neglect back-of-house operations. Don’t be afraid to spend the time custom-building the tools that your team needs to work more effectively.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SALAD: SERVING UP PASSION AND ASSEMBLING A COMMUNITY-DRIVEN BRAND

When Ru and his co-founders first started Sweetgreen, they were dismayed that the food companies with the best marketing were the most unhealthy options: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Red Bull.

“Our thesis was, ‘How can we use similar marketing tactics to tell the story of real, healthy food, and make it a bigger part of the conversation?’” says Ru. “Simply telling people to eat their vegetables wasn’t going to work. We had to connect it to lifestyle and culture while making it feel different and fresh. Similar to Nike and 

 drops or new Netflix originals, we see the white space to create hype around healthy food through our five seasonal menu launches, which is why we partner with noted chefs such as 

Outside of menu launches, Sweetgreen seeks other ways to weave food, music, art and social impact into its brand. “For example, when we hosted our big Sweetlife music festival in D.C., you could eat quinoa and watch Kendrick Lamar at the same time,” says Ru. “But even that’s a great example of how scale results in a loss of intimacy. We’ve since pared things back and are now focusing on smaller, local block parties or having musicians play at an event hosted at 

For Sweetgreen, this search for connection has led the team to find ways to contribute in the communities they operate in that have nothing to do with restaurants. “

Our mantra is to leave people better than we found them.

 It’s easy to apply that thinking to the way we treat our customers or our teammates, but as students of the community, we need to extend it to our broader environment,” says Ru.

As we get bigger, we need to act smaller. There’s no such thing as a successful business in an unsuccessful community.

The team has invested heavily in social impact projects, including partnering with an urban farm to renovate an old bus to help serve the ‘food desert’ of Southside Chicago and turning a local corner liquor store in L.A. into a real food destination complete with a point-of-sale system and access to Sweetgreen’s local supply chain.

“In every city where there’s a Sweetgreen, the team seeks out a partner that inspires them to brainstorm ways to solve a real problem. They donate ongoing resources to support this partner, including opening day proceeds. It could be acting small, such as 

 on a recent weekend to federal workers affected by the government shutdown in the D.C. area,” Ru says. “But we’re also focused on scale. For example, 

 started as a homegrown program in 2010 as a one-week food and health curriculum in D.C., and we’ve grown it into a series of wellness workshops involving more than 5,000 students.”

COOKING UP A CONNECTED CULTURE THAT SCALES

As companies grow and new locations open, managing an ever-expanding team, maintaining hiring standards, inspiring large groups and reducing turnover are converted into instant challenges. So it makes sense that the final ingredient in Sweetgreen’s approach is bringing intimacy to the employee experience. The main goal? To prevent the unique company culture and customer-centric focus from wilting as the company has grown from three college friends to over 3,500 employees.

“As leaders, we’re focused on two things: retaining our employees by supporting them with a great environment and building a team that can both embrace and get excited about the constant change. Our hourly team members in our restaurants and our ‘head coaches’ or general managers, are all on the frontlines of customer experience. They are the ones that deliver great service daily,” says Ru. “And the reality is that 

working in the restaurants is really hard. My co-founders and I make sure to take a store shift with every menu change

, so we know firsthand the current challenges they face. As important as it is to create innovative products and launch trendy initiatives, it’s just as important, if not more, to serve those who work with you,” he says.

Here are four tactics Ru and his co-founders rely on to nurture the seeds of Sweetgreen’s culture:

 Across every single restaurant, each morning general managers lead a session called ‘

.’ This ritual is a huddle, a pep talk — and a key team building tool. “It can be a forum to recognize great talent, or to share best practices from corporate or other restaurants. It’s 15 minutes of inspiration, ideas and recognition, every day, and it’s my favorite part of visiting our restaurants,” says Ru. “Whether or not you have multiple physical locations, every startup has sub-teams that need a dash of inspiration to kick start their mornings and feel connected to the bigger picture. Using stand-ups, sending out a quick note or holding huddles are powerful opportunities to reinforce that every day.”

 Each year, Sweetgreen holds an offsite for every head coach and corporate team member to get together. But one of the retreat sessions stands out more than others — and it proves that the best ideas can come from anywhere. “We create a mock ‘Shark Tank’ where team members get to pitch their next big idea. It’s almost like the food world version of a hackathon,” says Ru. “The winners two years ago came up with this idea called ‘Sweet Plate,’ which was an attempt to solve the problem of getting more customers in at dinner. They pitched a heartier offering that was warmer, but the best part was that it was inspired by a secret menu hack restaurant workers had started making for themselves after their shifts. ‘Warm Bowls’ launched two years ago and are now almost 30% of the menu mix company-wide,” he says. “

When you’re an early-stage startup, anyone can toss an idea out and bring it to life. The trick is encouraging those seeds when your team grows to hundreds or even thousands of people.

 Look for ways to source ideas from all over the company, especially your front-line employees — they’ll almost always be the best ones.”

 To shore up employee retention, Sweetgreen

. By enlisting analytics, economic research and people ops expertise from Google, Humu provides Ru and his co-founders with another tool to help improve the team experience of working at Sweetgreen. “After the assessment from Humu, we found that while employees were pretty happy, career advancement was a spot we need to work on. The software sends ‘nudges’ to remind head coaches of more specific topics to address in this realm, which could be covered in a Sweet Talk or by holding one-on-one conversations with the restaurant team members,” says Ru.

 For many founders, remaining connected to a growing business is a full-time job in and of itself. “In the beginning, everything was bootstrapped — we waited until we opened three stores before hiring any corporate staff. Since it was just the three of us for a while, we’ve each probably done every job in the company,” says Ru. “But as the organization grows and your role becomes more focused on one certain area, it’s important to not to lose curiosity. 

Great founders, regardless of company stage or functional expertise, are really well-versed in all parts of the business

,” he says. “Today, I manage marketing, creative and design but I’ve maintained my curiosity about everything from our supply chain to our CX team. I also focus on a different a market every quarter, making site visits and working to understand the nuances. All of this makes it easier for me to connect the dots and help solve problems in my own role, whether it's a national campaign or a product design hurdle.”

In the early days as a founder, you wear all the hats, but over time your role narrows in on a specific function. Don’t lose your curiosity — staying well-versed in all aspects of the business will make you stronger as a functional leader.

Conventional wisdom suggests that rapid hypergrowth and expansion necessitates a sacrifice of intimacy and familiarity. Sooner or later, “a way of doing things” develops, customers and employees feel less connected, and ideas go stale as companies struggle to escape the consistent, slow-moving trappings of predictability that accompany scale.

To avoid this fate, focus on getting stronger and saying no, not just on getting bigger and growing faster. Before entering new markets, avoid a templatized feel by studying the community to custom-tailor your approach and experiment with how you serve customers. Tap into collaborations to show up in unexpected places. Don’t be afraid to invest in unconventional operational models or custom, in-house tools that’ll make your team stronger and moat wider. Take a wider lens view of your brand’s purpose by making time for social impact projects that make a difference. Source new ideas from employees and implement them, introducing new forums and tools for keeping the team connected amid the growth.

“There isn’t a blueprint for achieving intimacy at scale, but the biggest lesson I’ve learned along the way is making it a reality comes down to building meaningful connections and relationships with your internal and external customers. It’s easy for founders to be heads-down and focused on building the business, and often we forget that this is a muscle we always need to work on,” says Ru.

“On a personal level, it’s about the smallest touches, such as a handwritten thank-you card. As a manager, it may mean taking the time to inspire and appreciate your team. For the new community, it’s taking that step back to spend the time doing your homework before plunging in and prescribing a solution. From an industry standpoint, it’s about changing the narrative and finding unorthodox channels to reach new audiences,” he says. “‘Leaving people better than you found them,’ is the motor driving intimacy at scale forward. We’re going to leave our customers, our community, our employees and our suppliers better than we found them — and we’re going to feed the world healthy food and have some fun along the way.”

. All other photos courtesy of Sweetgreen.

Sweetgreen scaling.jpg

Co-founder Nathaniel Ru draws on his experience scaling Sweetgreen to offer startups a clearer window into how rapidly growing companies can stay connected with customers, partners and employees.

What Sweetgreen Can Teach Startups About Scaling Intimacy

Imagine an online shopping experience where you aren’t left to sift through thousands of products on your own, but rather are personally guided by an incredibly thoughtful customer service rep who anticipates your every need. She connects with you in an unbelievably authentic way, forging a real connection and leaving such a strong impression that years later, she’s on the invite list — for your wedding.

, an online outdoor gear and clothing company, this intensely personal and relationship-driven experience isn’t a fantasy, but rather a hallmark of their approach to serving customers and building the business.

 (the affectionate moniker for their reps) have been invited to their customers’ weddings. They also regularly meet up with their customers in real life to go on rides, ski trips or climbs out in the wild. Some high-level executives have flown out to Backcountry’s Park City office just to meet their Gearhead in person. In one case, a group of Backcountry customers got together to surprise their Gearhead with a Telluride ski trip planned solely in her honor.

In the age of one-click shipping, automated chatbots and long holds on customer support phone lines, these deep ties and offline connections are impressive. And much of the credit for the Gearhead program goes to 

, Backcountry’s VP of Sales and Customer Service.

Purkey first set foot in a contact center at the age of 17, after landing a job working the phones for 

. Although he didn’t know it at the time, this launched a nearly two decades long career centered around connecting with customers in speciality retail. After moving up the ladder to run contact centers that grew from 120 to over 700 reps, he went on to head up training, development and online sales for the music retailer before joining Backcountry.

In that time, Purkey witnessed a veritable sea change in the retail world, from the fall of mail-order catalogs to the rise of digital giants such as Amazon. Against this backdrop of shifting industry winds and increasingly impersonal internet transactions, he’s managed to carve out a differentiated and highly personal customer service experience that helps Backcountry stand out in the crowd.

In this exclusive interview, Purkey digs deeper into the philosophy behind the Gearhead model, walking through the training, tools and indicators that add up to an approach that strongly resonates with their customers. He details the steps startups need to take in order to provide high-level concierge service in an incredibly human way, offering a different path to success for those unable to match the scale of the more established competition.

THE GEARHEAD WAY: THE JOURNEY TO BEATING SCALE WITH SPECIALITY

While Gearheads were important threads woven into Backcountry’s fabric right from the start, the program has morphed significantly under Purkey’s direction.

The Gearhead label stems from Backcountry’s early days, when the founders started selling avalanche gear out of their garage in 1996 and hired fellow gear enthusiasts to help out. Since then, Gearheads have always been all-around experts in the products Backcountry sells; some are former pro-athletes or even Olympians, but all are passionate about getting outdoors, whether it’s hitting the trails in Utah’s national parks or skiing a hundred plus days a year.

But before Purkey joined Backcountry five years ago, the Gearhead program was not much different than any other customer service department. With a team that peaked around 200 people during busy season, reps simply reacted to incoming phone calls and chats, handling nearly 600,000 customer contacts a year and making up about 13% of the company’s revenue.

Thanks to Purkey’s efforts, Backcountry has since blended service and selling by pivoting to a model of proactively building meaningful connections — and it’s paid off. The team is now 500 strong at its busiest and is on track to contribute to roughly 30% of the company’s revenue after handling north of 

with each Gearhead managing up to 4,000 dedicated customer relationships

But what sparked this evolution to a more proactive and personal approach? As Purkey tells it, it’s a story that’s not unfamiliar to Silicon Valley startups: a small, scrappy and mission-oriented operation struggling to beat out a behemoth.

“Whether you’re just starting out or you’re established but really niche, competing with some of these giants is a daunting and scary notion,” says Purkey. “In my world of retail, it’s Amazon. They’re just eating everybody's shorts right now. They win by reinvesting all of their excess capital and leveraging tremendous scale to have low costs, low prices and massive selection, which is just unbeatable. So we couldn’t compete in that way — to win and fulfill our mission of connecting people with their passions, we had to build a completely different experience.”

For Backcountry, that meant revisiting some fundamental principles.

“In the early 2000s, many online retailers, us included, had this hypothesis that if they could create a flawless and convenient shopping experience, then they would barely need to talk to customers at all. But for us, that’s proven to be a faulty premise. At Backcountry we saw this gap: brick and mortar was outdated, inconvenient and transactional, but shopping online fell down too,” says Purkey. “The impersonal and overwhelming experience of wading through thousands of products leads to a paralysis of choice. The takeaway for us was that in today’s age, convenience and speed are table stakes. 

What customers really crave is a human connection and a personalized experience

 — that’s where there’s plenty of room to shine,” he says.

“We already knew that our repeat customers used Gearheads to shop, but the catalyst was realizing that we're uniquely capable of offering interactions driven by personal passions in a way that places like Amazon are not. When you put together a complete pack for a multi-week backcountry trek, it’s an emotional and complicated purchase. So expert guidance and curation from advocates with similar passions is our secret weapon,” Purkey says.

You’re not going to beat a company like Amazon at their own game. Beat down your own path to win via speciality and authentic service, not scale.

“Whether it’s through brand storytelling, discovery-driven buying, or personalized, white glove service, there are plenty of ways to uplevel the customer experience. The next step for us was figuring out how to leverage the Gearhead’s unique expertise and translate that both online and offline. Our executive team knew that there was something more to be figured out and it was my job to go out and do it,” he says.

As Purkey looked to retool and expand the program, he honed in on the idea of forging unparalleled one-to-one relationships between Gearheads and customers on a larger scale. Startups looking to replicate his approach should rely on these core pillars:

 “We have a heavily customized CRM tool so Gearheads are able to proactively identify and manage thousands of customer relationships over time,” says Purkey. “Those relationships can start in lots of different places, from a courtesy phone call on a first-time order to meeting at an industry event to connecting with people out on the trail. However you can imagine it, start developing relationships and seek out any opportunity to spark a connection with a customer.”

 Gearheads serve as advocates to not only support their customers’ needs, but to anticipate them. “They’ll leave you a voicemail to find out how those shoes worked out. They’ll proactively give you gift recommendations because they remember that it's your significant other's birthday next month. A Gearhead will even just check in to see how your recovery after knee surgery is going,” says Purkey. “Look for authentic touchpoints to follow-up, add value and have a meaningful engagement, not just make a sale.”

 Gearheads don’t get invited to their customers weddings by merely providing adequate levels of service or proactively reaching out. “Gearheads have hand-delivered orders to customers to make sure they get it on time. One Gearhead sent her very own helmet to a customer who broke hers while out climbing. Sometimes we've had to go find the inventory that a customer needs elsewhere — 

I’ve taken out my own credit card to buy a pair of pants on a competitor’s site before because we were out

,” says Purkey. “The long-term value of enabling our customers to get outside and pursue their goal or enjoy their trip is the most important thing. If we fail at that, then we’ve failed them as a business.”

There's no such thing as no. Do whatever it takes to fulfill the customer's experience.

For Purkey, these principles represent a significant investment in brand, experiences and relationships to draw people in to participate in Backcountry’s space — and he’s seeing the results.

“The outdoor market is not growing at a significant rate — if anything, it's shrinking somewhat — but our share of our customers’ wallets is continually growing at pretty tremendous rates,” he says. “And we’re online retailers, not manufacturers or vendors, but hundreds of thousands of people across the country have our goat logo sticker on their vehicle or plastered on their boards and helmets. One customer even got it 

 on his back. I don’t really see that same passion for those bigger companies. I think it’s because we're creating an expectation that otherwise didn't exist. People truly want advocacy. They want to be heard and looked after,” Purkey says.

No one’s going to get Amazon’s logo tattooed on their back. Lead with relationships and you’ll be amazed at how your customers reward you for surpassing expectations that didn’t even exist.

THE NUTS AND BOLTS: THE BLUEPRINT FOR BUILDING AN INCREDIBLY PERSONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE PROGRAM

To dive deeper into how the Gearhead program was overhauled, Purkey shares four strategies that helped reshape Backcountry’s customer experience: building a pilot program, refining hiring and onboarding practices, developing robust in-house training and customizing the tools behind the scenes.

1) Start small and experiment with tactics to build your own playbook.

Of course, this approach wasn’t an overnight success. For Purkey, laying the groundwork and establishing a solid footing was critical.

“During my first year at Backcountry, all I did was implement best practices. We onboarded a workforce management software, implemented variable scheduling and introduced a new contact center platform to get more efficient,” he says. “With that in place, in year two I was given the keys to build a pilot program to improve the model. When you’re just starting, you won’t know what the workflow looks like or what customers to engage with, so experimenting with a small group is really helpful.”

Through trial and error, Gearheads spent months iterating to uncover the tactics that resonated with customers. “We started with 10 Gearheads, Google docs, spreadsheets and a list of 250,000 customers, with a goal of figuring out how to build relationships with them,” says Purkey.

From that initial pilot program, he and his team developed a set of guiding principles that have formed the backbone of the Gearhead approach ever since:

. “We found that when Gearheads shared their passion for getting outside with every customer, it really worked. We call this ‘spreading the stoke,’” says Purkey. “Share in your customers’ emotional energy and literally get excited with them through tone, language and intent.”

 “When speaking with customers, the Gearheads who asked questions that uncovered ambitions, needs and aspirations were more successful. It could be getting to the root of why they need new hiking shoes or figuring out what their dream summit is,” he says. “Focus not just on selling them something, but rather on bringing their goals to life.”

Offer trusted and contextualized guidance

. “During the pilot, the Gearheads that shared their experiences, offering advice and connecting people to products, drove a higher customer spend. It’s essentially about making the complex simple. A Gearhead is going to recommend the 

 tent you need based on the terrain, weather, your experience and the number of people you're going with, all while leaving you out of the weeds,” says Purkey. “That guidance can take the form of a product review, a blog post, or a chat or phone conversation with a customer; whatever the medium, it’s about infusing your expertise in a relatable, straightforward manner.”

. “Our customers are either new to an activity and don’t know what they don't know, or they’re in a rush and may not remember everything. For the group of friends planning a glacier ski trip, the Gearhead takes the time to evaluate their pack list and make sure they didn’t forget that extra toe piece for their bindings or a pair of camp booties to keep their feet warm when their boots are drying. A lack of thoroughness and advocacy can make or break these moments,” says Purkey. “To take the customer's experience from good to great, you need to make sure you're recommending the right products. 

The bottom line is that sales reps shouldn’t be cash registers.

 Dig deeper to understand the customer’s intent to ensure they get 

 “We quickly found that cold-calling customers without a unique reason for talking to them didn’t work. We had to lead with relationships and find out how to be valuable to the customer in a really human way,” says Purkey. “If a customer is training for an ultra, the Gearhead will check in a week before to see how they are feeling about their race or even afterwards on how they did. Or it might be just sending words of encouragement ahead of a big job interview or calling to say happy birthday,” he says. “Extend your definition of customer outreach to support ‘life moments,’ whether they relate to your business or not. It’s about discovering the right reasons to continue conversations.”

. Bring your value proposition to life by showing your customers what you can do for them. “For us, this means ‘Don't talk about it. Be about it.’ Being active yourself and actually going the distance for your customers instead of just talking about how the company values them is what matters. That’s what’s going to drive repeat purchases or word-of-mouth recommendations,” he says.

Don’t lead with sales or an agenda. Lead with what will help you build an authentic connection to the customer.

2) Put passions and customers at the center of hiring and onboarding.

After solidifying the tactics that would make the Backcountry customer experience sing, Purkey set out to replicate the pilot program’s initial successes by stepping up hiring and fine-tuning training.

Backcountry flexes up and down the Gearhead program throughout the year, but it never compromises on the quality of its hires.

“We'll hire, roughly, 200 additional Gearheads through the months of October to March to meet our seasonal demands. Over the years, we’ve found that our ideal candidate is conversational, organized, enthusiastic, empathetic and above all, passionate about the outdoors,” says Purkey. “We actually baked that last one into our requirements — Gearheads 

need to be experts in two of the categories of gear we sell, ideally in summer and winter

 to balance out the seasonality of our business. To create a truly differentiated experience, you can’t have just anyone selling your products and serving your customers.”

Here are a handful of interview questions Purkey relies on to sniff out the characteristics that make a good Gearhead:

•What categories that we sell are you most knowledgeable about?

•What was the last great service experience you received and what made it great? What about the last one you provided?

•Tell me about a time when a customer tested your patience and how you reacted to it and turned that situation around.

•What was the last trip or adventure you went on? What should I know if I were to go on the same trip?

•What is your favorite piece of gear? Why? (They should be able to articulate the benefits and features of that product, as well as use scenarios)

•How have you handled customer price objections in the past?

Once hired, Gearheads go through a three-week onboarding process with a dedicated theme for every week:

 “The first week is very systems-oriented. We're training them on our order management system, teaching them how to do returns and getting them going on our CRM tool because there’s a lot of customizations to learn,” he says.

 “The next week is centered around teaching Gearheads how to strategically build and service a customer base. It’s focused on soft skills, communications and relationship building rather than pure sales tactics,” says Purkey.

 “The final week of onboarding is what we call a ‘nesting environment.’ The new Gearheads are live and taking customer interactions, but they have a dedicated team of trainers who are there to support them and guide them through those conversations. After that, they’re effectively are handed off to their sales manager.”

Be as thoughtful and rigorous when hiring your customer service and sales reps as you are when you’re hiring engineers.

3) Go deep with in-house — and ongoing — training.

But Gearhead training doesn’t stop after the third week because Backcountry has taken the unique approach of putting together a full-time, in-house training and development team.

“As we grew, we realized we had to create the training ourselves because it didn’t exist off-the-shelf. So we hired a head of training and now there’s a team of dedicated trainers who are focused on different functions. Over the years, different cohorts of Gearheads have experienced drastically different forms of training content as our team experimented to build a playbook that works,” says Purkey.

“We made a lot of mistakes along the way. At one point, we shifted our entire training focus to selling and selling alone, really trying to create a pure sales organization and nothing else. It contributed to a slew of problems and regrettable customer interactions. Using our training team to create a hardcore sales environment didn’t work out well,” he says. “

We're still a sales org, of course, but from a training perspective, we spend a lot more time on empathy and collaboration with customers, rather than just teaching people how to be truly effective salespeople

“For example, our team developed a training session on identifying the customers who might resonate most with the Gearhead relationship. Some still prefer to be self-served instead. So it’s about getting better at quickly identifying those people and not trying to serve them with something that they don't want,” says Purkey.

Here are three additional Backcountry training practices that stand out:

 “Onboarding a learning management system (LMS) has been one of the best investments we've made in the training,” says Purkey. “We spend a lot of time thinking through how we balance digital learning with hands-on interactive support. Every quarter, we release a new series of modules that are focused on products, systems, process or policies for Gearheads to spend time on.”

As a gear company, it's important that our employees have access to that gear. So we built a gear closet, a 4,000-square-foot retail-like space that’s fully stocked with the latest equipment. Gearheads can go touch, feel and try on products. They can also actually check them out for use in the field for up to two weeks at a time,” says Purkey. “When they come back from using it, they've got an intimate knowledge of the gear, and they're able to translate that back to their customers in a much more meaningful way. They also write reviews or take photos and videos of them using the product, so it’s doubling as a bigger content strategy,” he says. “

You don’t need physical products to adopt this approach either. Get creative.

 You could send your reps to shadow customers or sit with the engineers building the product. It’s about bringing another dimension to the sales and customer service toolkit.”

 “We give every Gearhead one hour of education a week. We also frequently pull the team together to do weekly sessions or workshops, either getting them up to speed on new tactics or refreshing skills,” says Purkey. “For example, a recent workshop was on value prop. It focused on how to communicate the Gearhead value prop to a customer and how to demonstrate it over the first 30 to 60 days, with the objective that, every customer that you connect with knows what you can bring to the table. We'd been testing different processes and structured approaches and put together the best practices to share with the group.”

4) Get the right tools, building them if you have to.

Another cog that powers Backcountry’s personal customer experience is their heavily customized CRM tool.

“There was no off-the-shelf tool that did exactly what we needed. We chose 

 as our partner, because they got us closest to where we need to go, and we’ve built on that with custom features over time in a very iterative approach,” says Purkey. “

Without our customized connection manager tool, I think Gearheads would max out at managing 200 to 300 customers, but they can handle up to 4,000 now.

 My advice to any company, regardless of size, is to select the tool that will not only meet the foundational and stability elements you need right now, but also allow you to grow beyond that.”

With their customized tool at work, Gearheads are able to:

 “Our tool gives Gearheads a 360-degree view of each customer. We can pull in their size and fit preferences, wish list, order history and activity in our community into the tool. Every indirect or direct action from a customer is a ‘

’ — and we want to know about it. With the alerts we’ve set up in our CRM, if a customer is connected with a Gearhead and they do anything with our brand, the Gearhead is notified," says Purkey. "If you ask a question in the community, if you write a review, if you abandon a product in your cart, if you do a self-service return, then the Gearhead knows about it. Of course, they aren’t going to respond to every single action — it’s about being your advocate, making sure that you’ve had a fulfilling experience.”

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