Turnaround Leadership with Matt Baer, CEO of Stitch Fix

Jonathan Kirschner (0:15)

Welcome to A Podcast About Leadership brought to you by AIIR Consulting. I'm your host, Jonathan Kirschner. Each episode, we sit down with leaders and leadership experts to explore what it really takes to lead well. Let's dive in. Welcome to A Podcast About Leadership. This is Jonathan Kirschner. I'm your host today, and I have two incredible people on the podcast. Jamie, who is becoming like a regular, is probably confused right now because usually I'm coming in on this podcast with a nice sport coat and a plain vanilla shirt. Here I am. It is summer, but if you know my personality, there are seashells and palm trees on this shirt. This is atypical, uncharacteristic. One might ask, why am I wearing such a shirt?

Here's the deal. Basically, I'm going on a summer vacation. There's some fashion demands made on me, and I'm like, how do I make this happen? I don't have time to go shopping right now. It's crazy busy. And then it occurs to me, I've got a podcast in three weeks with Matt Baer, CEO of Stitch Fix. How about I try out the product itself? How about I go on Stitch Fix? I'm a new customer. I'm a very happy customer. This came from my personal shopper after going through the AI and you know, sort of like personal information. The fit was incredible. And I'm delighted to have Matt and Jamie on the show today. This is not a podcast where we just like pontificate about leadership abstractly or try to like, you know, infuse leadership theory. This is about leadership applied. It's in the trenches. What is it like to lead whether, you know, we're trying to scale something, whether we're trying to maintain something, whether we're trying to turn something around.

Leadership has its various strategic contexts. And today we're going to dig in to a really, really compelling strategic context at Stitch Fix. And so let me introduce you both and let's, let's, let's dive right in. So Matt's the, as I mentioned, the CEO and Stitch Fix is a leading, it, I, to me, it's like the best personal styling service.

It's leveraging incredible insights and knowledge about its customer. And it's doing that through a combination of human and AI, which is just like incredible that everybody who listens to me knows I love hybrid intelligence. So it's really, really an incredible example of that. And Matt, Matt became CEO in June 2023 The company was actually in a bit of a dip, if you will. And he has been very, very focused on leading a transformation that has now returned the business to growth. So that is just awesome.

It's funny, like you could talk about that as like a business school professor, a case study. I happen to be a CEO, Jamie happens to be a CEO. We know what that actually feels like. So congratulations to you, Matt. And I know transformation, it has a beginning. I don't know if it has an end. It'll be great to talk and hear about your perspective on that. But you're certainly on the journey. And Matt came to Stitch Fix from Macy's, where he's Chief Customer Officer and Digital Officer, leading the digital strategy for Macy's and Bloomingdale's, while driving initiatives focused on deepening customer relationships. And then prior to that, he was VP of e-commerce at Walmart and played a key role in their transformation of the digital business. So clearly, retail is in Matt's DNA. And actually growing up, you actually worked in your family business, which was a furniture business.

So really in the DNA there.

Jamie, he is our CEO, coach extraordinaire and author of one of my favorite books, Let's Go.

Jamie himself has led a turnaround and a transformation as CEO of an automotive parts company and is actually Matt's coach. So it'll be great to actually learn more about how that's going. Matt, I mean, as I mentioned, you kind of just like grew up in retail. You were sort of born into it and the family's furniture store in Florida, family business started by your great grandfather. Yeah.

Matt Baer (5:23)

Yeah. Great grandfather, 1945 Unbelievable.

Jonathan Kirschner (5:27)

That's incredible.

That's really incredible. So my first question to you is growing up in that world, what did you learn from seeing your family and from being in the store and connecting with customers? What did you learn about leadership and what did you learn about the customer?

Matt Baer (5:52)

Yeah. I appreciate you starting there. I love talking about that and the unique opportunity I had growing up immersed in a family retail business. But also just want to appreciate the opportunity to be on here today, and I appreciate the really kind introduction as well as the fact that you're now a Stitch Fix client and did a phenomenal job selling the exceptional service that we can provide everyone. I'll also vouch that Jamie is definitively an extraordinary coach and feel lucky to have that relationship with him and excited for the conversation today.