George Zimmer has one word to describe his culture at The Men’s Wearhouse Inc.: trust.
“That’s not to say every single person in our organization trusts the organization,” he says. “We have 17,000 overall employees. But the critical mass of our company does believe in the organization, trusts the organization, and in fact, the organization trusts its employees, and we both trust our customers. I think that’s where it starts.”
When Zimmer talks about trust, he doesn’t want to sound new age, because the word has a business application to it. One of the significant expenses in the retail business is called shrinkage, which includes theft by employees. Yet, the difference between shrinkage at Men’s Wearhouse and one other major retailer is 200 basis points a year.
“That’s a lot of money,” says the founder, chairman and CEO of the retailer, which posted $1.97 billion in 2008 sales. “So, trust is a significant leverage in your economic model.”
Because Zimmer was a child of the ’60s, he brought ideas from that generation with him to Men’s Wearhouse, including respecting people regardless of their position in a company.
“There can only be one manager of a store, but nonetheless, the manager has to have a relationship with the other people,” he says. “I think it was that type of thought that created the original foundations.”
Those foundations helped Men’s Wearhouse and its more than 1,200 stores again be named to Fortune magazine’s 2009 “100 Best Companies to Work For” list.
Aside from accolades, the culture helps Zimmer retain employees, but he hopes it will also help the company through this tough economy.
“Customer loyalty is harder to measure,” he says. “As we are in this recession, one way to measure this is that I believe when the recession ends, Men’s Wearhouse will have a higher market share than when the recession began. That will be because of our corporate culture, which will be the glue that holds the customer and the employee and the organization, the shareholder, holds it all together.”
