Technology suits Jana Eggers to a T (shirt)
By Helen Graves / Feature
Monday, September 1, 2008
Jana Eggers, global CEO of online T-shirt company Spreadshirt, loves nothing more than getting people excited about technology.
A real-time exchange illustrates her ease at drawing people in. A hotel bellman compliments Eggers on her T-shirt, which says, “Laughter, the shortest distance between two people.” It’s fitted, organic cotton – nothing cheap or cheesy.
Eggers says, “Thanks, I made it myself.” The bellman says, “That’s too bad,” and she says, “No, no, you can make one yourself.”
Eggers describes how he can just go to spreadshirt.com. He asks, “How many do I have to order?” She says, “One.” “Well,” he says, skeptical, “how expensive is that?” She tells him her shirt was $20.
“People don’t expect that,” Eggers says. “They don’t think they can go in, type in something that means something to them, get the shirt and, here’s the bonus – get it within 48 hours.”
Eggers has been with Germany-headquartered Spreadshirt since November 2006, when it seriously began operations in this country. Beginning as U.S. CEO in the Boston headquarters, she also served on the German version of the executive committee, participating as “mom,” she says, to help structure the company.
Once the company founder realized what leading Spreadshirt to the next level would entail, he asked Eggers to take the global CEO role. That was in February 2007. After a six-month transition, Eggers took over the reins a year ago August.
What attracted her to Spreadshirt were the core values the founder intended for the company, things like cultural onboarding – “here’s how we want you to feel and if you don’t feel this way, tell us,” Eggers describes. The problem was, she says, instilling the values went as far as the poster on the wall vs. visibly living the values.
“What excited me was that I wasn’t going to have to bring in this idea of core values in the first place,” she says.
What also appealed to Eggers was the fact that she would be working with a tangible product. Until then, her career was focused on software or content.
In 1990, Eggers began her career in research at national laboratory Los Alamos as a computational chemistry specialist, working on super computers. “I went the real geek route,” she says. Two years later, she went to grad school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but, no longer interested in research, left after a year.
Moving to Boston, Eggers worked at Princeton Transportation Consulting Group, a software company for major trucking companies that used the same algorithms for determining freight flow as she used to determine how electrons transferred in polymers.
Here, Eggers got her first taste of sales, and it is here, too, that she learned about her love of talking technology, especially when explaining the routing benefits to managers who had never touched a computer mouse.
And here Eggers dated and then married one of the founders. Finding the company too small, even at 70 people, for this new development, she joined another small company, Lycos, when, in 1996, it employed 40 people.
In charge of business development first and then appointed director of engineering, Eggers was with Lycos as it grew from 40 to 800. “It was the high time of the Internet. It was a total blast,” she says.
Eggers left Lycos when her husband’s company was bought by Sabre and the couple was asked to move to Germany to be onsite for the Volkswagen account. After a few years, the company was spun out and the couple came home.
Joining another start-up that was soon sold to Intuit, Eggers opted to work at another small start-up until Intuit asked her to start and lead its corporate innovation lab. Next, Spreadshirt called.
Although she was happy at Intuit, Eggers had mused to her husband that in her next role, she’d like a physical product. Her grandfather was in groceries and her mother was a department store manager. She was thinking of opening a restaurant.
“I never really thought about something that combined technology in this way and had a physical component,” Eggers says of the Spreadshirt opportunity. “It’s not e-commerce but something much more personal. It’s using technology to enable people to do something that they didn’t think they could do before and they didn’t know how to do it.”
Even though Eggers was enamored with Spreadshirt, she initially wasn’t sure she wanted the global CEO responsibility of leading a 300-plus person company operating in four countries – the huge commitment and all the travel that has her calling her return home a game of tag.
“There was a part of me looking forward to this management consultant role,” she says, laughing. “But I love the company and the people. I’m a total sucker.”
Eggers has brought about change at the company by bringing up ideas with the executive committee and letting them work through them. She also coaches staff to empower them vs. tells them what to do. As a result, revenue growth is back to meeting Egger’s high expectations and is continuing on its upwards trajectory.
One of the first changes was to drop all of the products Spreadshirt offered to customize, the mugs, lanyards and such, and simply focus on high quality T-shirts that can range from a $10 lightweight T-shirt to a $60 bamboo hoodie with a silk feel.
The company also focused on personalization vs. customization, helping people faced with a “blank sheet” to envision their product. “It’s all about how we approach the problem. Our technology didn’t change. It’s how we set expectations and how we start to get people into the product that changed,” Eggers says.
The overall business model spins on the concept of ordering one T-shirt at a minimum, whether buying directly from Spreadshirt or opening up a shop. It’s a thought adjustment to switch out of the bulk buy (Spreadshirt will do that, too) to the individual purchase.
For the direct buy, customers can order a personalized shirt, such as “I (heart) Nana” or one of their own design or choose from offered designs.
The shop concept can apply to the individual organizing T-shirts for a 50th birthday, when partygoers can order their shirts on their own with their own sayings through the shop.
Corporations like CNN, Coca-Cola – even chucknorrisfacts.com – go the shop route. CNN.com offers T-shirts of headlines, powered by Spreadshirt. Bands can offer 200 designs instead of the usual one or two for a concert tour. Eggers has two Chuck Norris T-shirts, in geek of course: “Chuck Norris knows the last digit of pi” and “Chuck Norris counted to infinity – twice.”
What excites Eggers most, besides her T-shirts, are recent survey results that show 36 percent of people wear their Spreadshirt every time it’s clean – “my goal is 75 percent” – and 68 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. alone do not know about Spreadshirt.
“We have so much opportunity,” Eggers says. “We changed our tagline from ‘You think it, we print it’ to ‘Your own label.’ It’s promoting the idea that you can express yourself. I’ve been with people who have created their shirt and they’re so much more proud of that shirt when people comment on it. That’s the vision we have. It’s fashion and people expressing something about themselves, and that makes them feel great.”
SOURCE: BOSTON HERALD.COM SPREADSHIRT BLOG AMERICA
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