Federica Marchionni: Recognizing Skills and Weaknesses

We are all born with an aptitude, and we have certain skills that are our strengths. Those skills are the ones that you want to leverage, and you want to get stronger from those skills. But at the same time, you need to recognize your weakness. The moment you start to recognize your weakness and exercise what you don't have in your strength is the moment that really you can grow more. So I can tell you that this was one of the things that I always try to do personally and professionally. Going to, to Lands' End when I started, I immediately recognized that there were few skills that this company maybe had but did not even realize that they have because they never exercised that. One was being nimble, and so gather a bigger sense of speed. So we had a project, and the project was to open in only 6 weeks, which is a record for our industry, a huge store, flagship store in New York Fifth Avenue. So we were facing the world with that store. We could incredibly fail. But instead, we succeed to open a pop-up store, which was a huge success. Not just for the fact that the customer loved that store, but most importantly, our organization got a sense of positiveness by knowing that, yes, they could have— they are nimble and they are fast. They could move so quickly that in 6 weeks, for whoever does this business, they know it's really tough to build out a store and to put the merchandise in there, to train, to find a team, to train the team in 9,000 square feet. So that was one example.