An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Rather than share the best advice I’ve received, I’d like to share the advice I wish I had received. I spent the first decade of my tenure trying to run the previous senior team’s business and not trying to run the business as I might see it. Perhaps it was because I was young and respected these managers so much. I wish someone had taken me aside and given me the advice: “Run your own business your own way.” Eventually, I came to this conclusion myself — maybe as my experience grew — and that is when the business began the transformation into the different and successful one it is today.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jon Pundyk.
Jon Pundyk is the Chief Executive Officer of Glamorise Foundations. Glamorise is a 101-year-old intimate apparel brand that has been focused on size-inclusivity since its founding in 1921. Glamorise currently offers bras in sizes 30 to 58, and cups B to K — more sizes than any other bra brand.
During Jon’s 30+ year tenure, Glamorise transitioned from a semi-branded manufacturer to a 100% brand and marketing-driven company. Glamorise has developed expertise in performance marketing with best-in-class proprietary technology that combines data analytics, game theory and merchandising strategy.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
After getting an MBA I started my career at Procter & Gamble in their brand marketing program. From P&G, I went to Booz-Allen and worked in their strategy consulting group focused on retail growth strategies. I originally came to Glamorise as a way to combine my interest in product-based brand marketing and corporate strategy.
What I didn’t fully understand until I got here is that Glamorise is not just another company. Glamorise is likely the country’s first size-inclusive brand — focusing on curvy women since 1921. A century-long focus on inclusivity brings a mission to the company that I had not expected. Glamorise is obsessively focused on making our consumers’ lives better in a small but important way. The fact that we have been doing this for so long gives us all a genuine sense of purpose. It may sound like a small thing but making a great bra in a full size range is really hard to do. There are no shortcuts, and it takes real skill and experience. As a team, we all live this dedication every day. This energy is not something that comes from a mission statement or a snappy tagline — it comes from a century-long tradition that we all carry forward today.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Glamorise is a 101-year-old bra company that has one of the few design centers still located in NYC.
In the same space, Glamorise has a world-class data analytics and ad-tech team that creates proprietary performance marketing optimization techniques that measurably outperforms our competition, and outside agencies.
Glamorise competes successfully against global billion-dollar companies and sells to massive global retailers who command great market power. While Glamorise makes great bras as reflected in our 100’s of thousands of online reviews, making great products is not enough in today’s world. The challenge is to reach our consumer despite the cacophony of marketing noise from both competitors and retailers. We are not mass marketers; we are signal-based marketers. We try to find the right consumer at the right time with the perfect product. Our proprietary techniques respond to consumer signals (especially purchase search behavior) to try to find this moment. The fascinating thing about our algorithms is that to a large degree they are optimizing a path to consumer happiness. We are only successful if the consumer is happy at the end of the process. While it is our simple neural network doing the work, the outcome should be the same as if someone walked into a super-responsive local shop.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I have been involved with model fitting sessions since my first day at Glamorise. In those earliest days I was extremely uncomfortable working with our fit models. As a young man in a room with scantily dressed fit models, I was as awkward as a person could be. Super respectful, but super awkward. In retrospect, I would have been best to tell the models I was a rookie, which likely would have helped a lot.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
When I came to Glamorise there were a crew of executives who had already been at the company for decades. Their level of experience was amazing. One key mentor was our president who was first and foremost a great salesman. I remember traveling with him once, and we were having a bad run of meetings at that time. I’m sure my disappointment was starting to show. He saw this and gave me what can only be called a confidence transplant. He told me we needed to always carry ourselves with confidence, never blink, and always show the other side we knew what we were doing. He did more for me in those two minutes than two years of business school. I carry that advice with me to this day.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
There has been a wave of disruption in the business model for making bras. I’m sure everyone can recall a new bra company — especially in the DTC space. Much of what these disruptors have brought to the market is new, valuable and indeed positive disruption. But for many of these companies, the idea of being a disruptor does not allow the embrace of many hard-won techniques central to making great bras. Yes, using globally distributed resources is a great way to get into business quickly and save money. This business model often has designers, merchandisers, and sewing rooms on different continents and working via Zoom and FedEx to perfect designs. While this seems an efficient and disruptive model, it pales in comparison to working with a design team, an engineering team, professional fit models, and a sample team colocated in a single location. Glamorise has one of the last live design centers in NYC. Our design team can collaborate to iterate design changes in a single session while the distributed design teams may take weeks to do the same thing, if they can do it at all.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey?
Rather than share the best advice I’ve received, I’d like to share the advice I wish I had received. I spent the first decade of my tenure trying to run the previous senior team’s business and not trying to run the business as I might see it. Perhaps it was because I was young and respected these managers so much. I wish someone had taken me aside and given me the advice: “Run your own business your own way.” Eventually, I came to this conclusion myself — maybe as my experience grew — and that is when the business began the transformation into the different and successful one it is today.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Glamorise is two companies: the world’s first size-inclusive bra company, and a state-of-the-art signal-based marketing company. Our next challenge is to integrate these two core functions by allowing data to help us design our products. While we have long used consumer feedback, consumer reviews and consumer research to help us evaluate our products, we have only just started to integrate data science into the design process itself. Currently, we are using some basic AI analytics to review millions of consumer search terms to help us better understand unmet consumer needs. While this has been helpful, we are only scratching the surface. Glamorise is uniquely positioned to make progress here, and it will be fun to see how it develops over time.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Perhaps because of my past as a consultant, I read a lot of writing on strategy from the major consulting firms. Even though they write with Fortune 500 companies in mind, these papers tend to be data driven and very thoughtful. One such article was from a McKinsey Quarterly piece on what made some CPG companies outperform their peers. There were many reasons cited, but one particularly resonated. The article noted that overperformers were best at moving resources to where they could have the biggest impact regardless of organization or other boundaries. I looked at Glamorise, and rather than thinking about departments or divisions as a Fortune 500 company might, I reconsidered my team. I asked the question “Is every person working against the issues where they might have the biggest impact?” Because of this reset, I realized we had a few mismatches. Fixing these issues meant changing how we organized ourselves relative to international borders, but the results were dramatic. This fundamental question from the McKinsey article is one I try to revisit from time to time.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I like to think that decision-making is deciding what mistake we are willing to make. All important decision-making is making choices under uncertainty. In an outcome analysis, we need to decide which bad outcomes or mistakes we think are most tolerable. Decision-making writers call this a regret minimization framework, but I think the idea is broader than that. For example, as managers we often have the choice of giving too much latitude or not enough. While there are measurable risks and rewards of each, there are also longer-term cultural risks and rewards. How we frame these decisions builds the organization and its values. So when I ask the question “What mistake do I want to make?” I am really asking not only about that decision itself but also about the cultural legacy that decision makes and its impact on the long-term performance of the company.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I’m not sure I am a person of great influence but the area where I feel somewhat qualified to offer some advice is in managing people and organizations. Historically, Glamorise has virtually zero turnover. There are likely many reasons for this, but one of them is among the simplest and one I rarely hear mentioned in management writing. I encourage everyone to rely on that most empathetic of guidelines, the Golden Rule. At Glamorise, we try to treat people how we would like to be treated ourselves. You would be amazed how many seemingly complex HR problems have clearer answers when one just tries to treat everyone as they would like to be treated. I know it sounds oversimplified, but it is actually super powerful. Such things as giving people the benefit of the doubt, not second-guessing people’s motives, and considering how executing a decision might hurt someone’s sense of self all are byproducts of this ethos. I find it works, and it also helps engender a culture of trust.
How can our readers follow you online?
I am on LinkedIn and always find time to talk with fellow entrepreneurs. I am especially interested in sharing my experience with folks who face my challenge: How do you steer a long-standing business in an ever-changing world?
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Glamorise CEO Jon Pundyk On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
