Checking Out: Lee Peterson

Lee Peterson
Newly retired from WD Partners, the former EVP of Thought Leadership reflects on personal reinvention, on what’s next and on the ongoing Amazon retail world.

So retiring from all this? What brought it on?
I’ve spent more than 40 years in this industry. The Limited for 12 years. Owned and ran my own store for eight years. With WD Partners for 24 years. Store manager, district manager, store owner, designer, merchandiser, consultant, product developer, brand developer, business developer. About time to move onto other things.

How do you know when that right time is?
I saw Robert Redford on TV, talking about his journey from art student in Europe to stage actor to movie actor to directing and producing, to running the Sundance Film Festival. He said, ‘Whenever you get the opportunity to reinvent yourself, you should take it.’ I’ve reinvented myself several times. Time to do it again.

PHOTO: ISTOCKPHOTO

And that’s “Do it for the People”?
As a general rule, words and thoughts to live by. But it’s also a screaming plea to retailers, especially now, to keep your focus right where it needs to be – on the consumer. I’ll be doing a lot of speaking and writing.

Will you be speaking about Amazon?
Sure, that’s still the reality for our industry. A few years ago, I developed this presentation – at IRDC and NRF – called ‘Amazon Can’t Do That.’ Figure out how you can remain viable by figuring out what you can do better than Amazon can. Retailers kept proclaiming, ‘We believe in stores.’ But I had touched a nerve. If retailers didn’t understand that Amazon was coming for their business, they were living under a rock. Unfortunately, there was at the same time a proliferation of investors taking over retail and it was being run more and more by the CFOs. So they were cutting costs and closing stores instead of figuring out how to rebrand themselves. They didn’t seem to grasp how much the consumer was changing. Maybe they’d never shopped in a store.

Lee Peterson shared his insights during VMSD’s International Retail Design Conference over the years. Here he is presenting on retail trends at IRDC 2016 in Montréal. PHOTO: RICHARD CADAN

Limited Education

You and I have often talked about The Limited’s influence on you.
Yes, grueling, demanding, inspiring. [Management] was laser-focused only on growth and scale. We had a team of buyers that went all over the world sourcing products for our stores. The first question was always, ‘What did you pay for that?’ [Les] wasn’t interested unless you could put 1000 blouses out there and sell 500 in the first week … any 40-year career will have a number of strong influencers, I imagine.

Yes, I’ve been lucky. And a particular shout out to Chris Doerschlag, the CEO at WD. I got so much help from him. I couldn’t have done half the stuff I did in the last 24 years without his help.

So Amazon is the future of retail. What’s the future of Lee Peterson?
I’ve written a few screenplays, based on my experiences as a person who pitched a thousand companies, The Limited lessons, life in general.

“Pitched a thousand companies.” Retail consulting in a nutshell.
Yeah. When I started at WD Partners, Lee Carpenter (then at Design Forum, now running ChangeUp) told me there are only three things that matter in the design firm business. ‘Get the work. Get the work. And get the f***ing work.’ I asked, ‘Don’t quality and talent matter?’ He said, ‘Not if you don’t get the work!’