Zappos has formally unveiled a dedicated department focused on spreading happiness and celebrating the good in people, Zappos For Good. Building on its reputation for exceptional customer service and purpose-driven mission to “deliver happiness,” the online retailer announced a series of new and ongoing programs and partnerships including the North Shore Animal League America, GIVE, Pawlidayz and Friends On Us Fridays — covering all qualifying adoption fees for select shelters each Friday, for both dogs and cats.
Show us your furry friends! Submit a vid showing how we helped find your rescue that rescued you! #pawlidayz https://t.co/MphLzgCJ6m pic.twitter.com/GfdtKzlNNm
— Zappos.com (@Zappos) October 25, 2017
Zappos For Good is headed by Steven Bautista, who commented, “Our goal is to deliver happiness. We work to achieve this through out of this world customer service and by enriching our communities. While we’ve done a ton of work to date that we are very proud of, the official launch of Zappos for Good will allow us to continue our existing initiatives while extending our efforts to deliver happiness where it’s most needed. Zappos for Good is our way of spreading happiness, and nurturing and celebrating the good in everyone.”
Zappos founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn, launched online as a shoe and clothing shop in June 1999 under the domain name “ShoeSite.com,” with a $2 million investment from Tony Hsieh and Alfred Lin’s firm Venture Frogs. By 2000, the company, renamed Zappos (a variation of “zapatos,” the Spanish word for “shoes”) brought in $1.6 million in revenue and Hsieh was co-CEO with Swinmurn. In July 2009, the company was acquired by Amazon in a deal worth about $1.2 billion.
Zappos employees handle roughly 5,000 calls a month and 1,200 e-mails from customers a week, except in the holiday season, when frequency increases significantly. There are no scripts for call center employees to follow and no limit on call times. The longest call reported is 10 hours 29 minutes.
That’s the ethos and core values that inform the Zappos brand and led to its charitable efforts being now branded under the Zappos For Good umbrella. While Zappos has been doing philanthropic work since launch, it now has a clear identity—one that has moved from cause marketing to the human relations department.
Below, we found out more from Bautista, who also oversees volunteer initiatives at the company. One recent example: his team rallied employees and donations during last month’s shooting incident in Las Vegas, and even paid funeral costs for every single victim. His title, by the way: Karma Kommando.
Steven, why launch this initiative now?
We decided to “officially” launch Zappos for Good because we have some exciting and large-scale initiatives coming in 2018. There are two big initiatives we can share right now: one is the launch of our mobile giving vehicle and the other is our community volunteer app. These two initiatives, in addition to others which are currently in the planning phases, will help us deliver a new level of giving by engaging the community at large in a new way.
For the last six years we have been working hard to find our charitable passion and discover our authentic way of being a patron to the community. We hope to inspire others through our giving efforts and make the community a better place.
Charitable Donations, Animal Advocacy and Adoption, Sustainability and Environment: Why did you choose these three areas for your initial focus?
We chose these three areas as our initial starting point to drive give us direction. Charitable contributions are a great way for us to show support and hopefully accelerate the work they do. It also allows us to engage employees and let them take the wheel to tell us what they are passionate about supporting.
When it comes to shelter pets, what’s not to love? Our employees are passionate about their children “shelter pets” and we have even created an on-site doggy day care vs. a child day care at our offices. We as a company researched and found out that roughly 9,000 shelter pets are euthanized daily (in the US). So a few years ago we decided to spend the money we would have spent on a Black Friday campaign to instead do something positive for animals. It may not have resulted in increased sales but we did help adopt roughly 7,000 animals the first year and 11,000 shelter pets the second year.
GA, find your peach! Friends on Us Fridays is coming! Adopt a furry friend and get costs covered! #ZapposForPets https://t.co/cqxEapTXRa pic.twitter.com/WlkPdhWPsc
— Zappos.com (@Zappos) October 26, 2017
When it comes to sustainability and the environment it’s relatively new but important to our future. We started with the focus on how our new campus was renovated. We focused on qualifying for LEED certification to ensure that our actions matched our words. In the coming year we pushed to become carbon-neutral in areas like employee travel as we offset our footprint and succeeded. Additionally, we have also added gas and hybrid vehicles to our fleet of Zappos shuttles. In the coming years we look to lead the way in further offsetting our footprint and finding ways to engage the community with recycling events & cleanups. These three areas are just the start of what we envision for the good Zappos can help accomplish.
How will you scale and deliver on ‘celebrating the good in everyone’ and what are your metrics for success?
We have been afforded the ability to due this work because of our loyal customers and employees and we owe it to them and the community to do the right thing. We want to make Zappos for Good that feel good place the community can turn to and feel inspired by all that is good in the world. And at this point we really don’t have metrics because we don’t want Zappos for Good to be about chasing a number.
We instead are putting our focus on doing the right thing even if it is more expensive, less efficient and off the beaten path. We want to be open to any charitable possibilities and the great thing is Tony and the leadership team at Zappos are very supportive on making sure all good giving initiative of interest by the employees are at least explored.
How does this connect to your speaker series?
The speaker series is another way for us to do good and bring additional value to the community. Our speaker series is a ticketed event where we offer unique speakers to share their story with all proceeds going to a charity of the speaker’s choice. It’s a win for the community and a win for the charity/charities.
We soft-launched it with Berne Brown and Jewel in late 2016 and Cesar Milan and Lisa Vanderpump in 2017. We are looking to hold two events in 2018. We hope to bring inspiring speakers that can help the community grow as a whole while also giving back in the process.
Any advice to brands looking to create and scale philanthropic efforts that spread positivism?
Engage your employees, find the areas of giving back that you organization is passionate about, and be authentic by doing it for the good it can accomplish versus the marketing value it could bring. This is the reason Zappos moved the charity work from the marketing department to the HR department—we wanted a strong focus on the people versus self-serving metrics.
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