One of my memorable meetings so far at Interbike this year was my meeting with Zac Daab, founder of Cascade Bicycle Studio. It was a great meetings for a lot of reasons--Zac is smart, thoughtful, hardworking, creative, driven, and an all around very sincere person--so every conversation I have with him yields interesting outcomes. In the case of our meeting at Interbike, the projects on which we are working--more on that in another post--reminded me of one of the main reasons I love working with Zac: his seeming implicit and explicit trust in Seven.
Zac and Seven are working on some big, complex, unique, and dare I say, innovative projects. Most retailers see these types projects as, at best, too risky or too mentally challenging to develop and implement. And, at worst, as some sort of ploy by Seven to get leverage on the retailer.
Fortunately for Seven, Zac knows that whatever ideas we develop together have Zac's best interests at center. He knows that our interest is to help his business reach its goals. We have no ulterior motive. To the extent he is successful, Seven is successful.
Not to speak for Zac, but we know that he wants to continue to grow his business, increase his exposure and reputation, and--I believe--have his studio takes its rightful place as one of the best in the world. Seven is committed to doing everything we can to help him achieve his business aspirations.
Before Zac started his studio he worked at Seven Cycles for over five years. In fact, I believe one of the reasons he started his Studio is because of his experience working at Seven and the way in which he saw that we work with retailers. And the opportunity he saw, on a daily basis, for any retailer that really got behind the Seven business model.
Because Zac worked at Seven for so long, he knows Seven's shortcomings better than most; he knows we don't have all the answers--sometimes none of the right answers, we make mistakes, and we can't do everything we hope to. Conversely, Zac also knows that we work our rear ends off to do right by our retailers and that we are always up for experimenting in order to help our retailers be successful.
In just three years he has become one of Seven's largest selling retailers. He's done this by doing a lot of hard work, being creative, being flexible, taking big risks, and by trusting Seven.
So I realized, as Zac and I were discussing a minute detail on one of our projects, that the conversation--and many of the projects on which we are working--would not be happening if he did not have implicit trust in Seven.
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