In a Rare Interview, Genesco CEO Mimi Vaughn Talks the Power of Reinvention as the Company Celebrates 100-Year Milestone
Stephen Garner
Senior Editor
How do you reinvent a 100-year-old footwear powerhouse? It’s no small feat — but Genesco board chair, president and chief executive officer Mimi Vaughn is proving she’s up to the challenge.
In the years following the pandemic, the executive has taken many steps to reinvigorate the company’s business, from refreshing its nearly 175-year-old Johnston & Murphy brand to elevating its Schuh retail business in the U.K. market.
But last year, the company may have encountered its biggest challenge yet with the closure of roughly 100 Journeys stores. The swift action to right-size its fleet and mitigate consumer shifts in the marketplace was coupled with bringing in new leadership to invigorate the teen retailer.
Now, early signs show these efforts may be working. In its most recent earnings report, Genesco said net sales increased to $525 million in the second quarter, driven by a strong start to the back-to-school season. Its retail division posted the biggest gains, with sales rising 4 percent at Journeys and 1 percent at Schuh, while Johnston & Murphy and Genesco Brands Group saw some declines.
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So what’s next? Vaughn, who has been at the helm of the company since February 2020, spoke with FN in a rare interview about Genesco’s track record of evolution.
Founded in 1924 as the Jarman Shoe Company, by James Franklin Jarman and William Wemyss, the company got its start in manufacturing and then quickly found success with specialty retail after opening the first Journeys banner in 1987. Today, it has since recentered its focus on its roots as a footwear company.
Here, Vaughn sits down with FN at the company’s headquarters in Nashville to talk about the importance of reinvention in business and where the firm’s new evolution is headed.
Few footwear companies have reached the 100-year mark. How are you thinking about the milestone?
Mimi Vaughn: “If you think about the last 100 years and how much retail has evolved, our company has survived and thrived through all those eras. And who knows what the next 100 years are going to bring. That’s what’s been so incredible about the 100-year celebration. We’ve had a chance to think about the past and anchor in the past and see how much things have changed and how much is going to change in the future.”
In a fast-changing business, how do you keep up with shifting consumer preferences?
MV: “The last four years since the pandemic have brought such a profound change on the part of the consumer, because it changed how they thought about what they wear. Everybody got a lot more comfortable, got a lot more casual. People got a lot more comfortable with digital, and they changed their shopping habits. We’ve been in reinvention mode for 100 years, but we really kicked it into high gear over the years since the pandemic. You can never stop changing — just think about how much the consumer has evolved. That’s our secret sauce: You must figure out where the consumer is today, how much has the consumer evolved, where are they going, and you just try to meet and then exceed their expectations.”
In the company’s most recent earnings report, Journeys showed some notable progress. What’s your key to driving success?
MV: “We had a very strong team to begin with, but we did bring in some new leaders with some different skills. Part of what we’ve done, and part of what I’ve talked about on the [earnings] calls, is that we have been taking stronger leadership positions across our brands, and we have gotten to a place where there’s a lot more diversification in terms of what our core customer is interested in buying. What we can do in Journeys is, unlike a branded website, we can serve them with a spotlight focus on that teen and younger customer. We’ve also done a lot better storytelling. If you see our website, if you visit our stores, you can see we’ve changed the graphics across our stores to do better storytelling of the Journeys brand. It’s about building Journeys as a brand. And so, it’s a holistic set of activities that is going to take Journeys to a new level.”
When approaching big turnarounds or brand refreshes, what elements do you consider?
MV: “You have to start with the customer — that’s number one, number two, number three, number four and number five. We just did a series of long-range plan conversations that were a culmination of a lot of work that the teams did, and every single one of our discussions started with the customer, because it is really all about the customer. That is the secret to us being around for as long as we’ve been around — we are so focused on the customer and how we serve them.”
After reevaluating your Journeys store portfolio last year, how are you approaching the brick-and-mortar business now?
MV: “There’s been so much change out there in the store universe, so we’re really optimizing for where the consumer is today, and we’re investing against that, too. We’re investing against stores, we’re opening stores. We also have a new store design that we are piloting in 15 locations in the back part of this year with the aspiration to invest in our stores and make our most productive stores even more productive. This is an adjustment to the consumer dynamics right now, and we think about those decisions very carefully. We think about how to make our stores even more productive, and I believe we are going to do even more business through our store channel, but it will just look different than it looked before.”
Johnston & Murphy has undergone an interesting update over the last year with a brand refresh, fresh product and revamped store designs. When do you expect the efforts to show up in the financials?
MV: “There’s always a period of digestion, and it’s a bit like an ‘S’ curve. You get a lot of benefit out of the activities you’ve been doing, and then you’ve got to energize the next wave of growth. We’ve done a lot of work on the product. You’ve seen some of the new marketing, too. We realized that there’s still a real opportunity for greater brand awareness around Johnston & Murphy moving forward.”
Where else do you see untapped opportunity for the company in the coming months?
MV: “We are really excited about this next wave of growth that we’re going to hit on, and we’ve already been able to see that in Schuh and in Genesco Brands. We’ve seen the growth in Johnston & Murphy, and we’re going to build on that. It’s Journeys that we are really investing a lot of time and effort in, and I expect that we’re going to see some of those same increases. We wake up every day thinking about, how can we be distinctively positioned? We wake up every day thinking about, how can we serve the consumer better? I think that’s what’s going to drive our growth.”
