Ryan Napierski Of Nu Skin On The Future Of Retail Over The Next Few Years
Be honest about where you’re falling short.
Brands that can take an honest look in the mirror and address where they may be falling short have the power to make changes and improve quickly. As times change, so must companies — so it’s important to be open to trying new things and making adjustments where needed.
As part of our series about the future of retail, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ryan Napierski.
Ryan Napierski is Nu Skin’s chief executive officer and president and is a member of the company’s board of directors. Prior to his current appointment, he served as Nu Skin president, president of global sales and operations, president of Nu Skin’s North Asia region, and president of Nu Skin Japan.
Since joining the company in 1995, Ryan has served in multiple positions for Nu Skin including vice president of global business development, general manager for the UK , vice president of European business development, key account manager for U.S.executives, vice president of business development, and chief operating officer for the North Asia region.
Ryan holds a bachelor’s degree in business, a master’s degree in business administration from Duke University and a master’s degree in international business from Goethe Universität in Germany.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
As a young adult, I spent two very inspirational years living in South Korea. During that time, I became fascinated with the country’s culture, fashion and wide variety of consumer products. After I moved back to the U.S., I connected with someone who worked for Nu Skin, who provided an opportunity to return to South Korea with the Nu Skin team.
While working in South Korea during the early ’90s, I saw firsthand the growth of brand globalization. The growing connectivity of the global economy and the way that brands could reach across cultures and geographies fascinated me and inspired my career path. Today, Nu Skin has customers across nearly 50 markets worldwide, and I feel lucky to engage with and serve people all across the world.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
In the early 2000s, I was on track to open a new global market for Nu Skin, one that was set to be the company’s biggest market yet. I spent months preparing for the move, and to say I was invested in and excited for the role would have been an understatement. But two weeks before I was set to leave, my boss called me to his office and said he wanted me to manage the UK business instead. This happened to be a significantly smaller business than the one I had planned to launch, so I felt both perplexed and a bit dejected about the decision at the time. I’ll never forget my boss’s next words, “Ryan, trust me. It will be the best thing for your career.”
He knew something that I didn’t: The UK opportunity would allow me to gain experience running an entire business — from sales and marketing, to operations and beyond — instead of just a piece of the business. That position gave me the experience needed for my subsequent roles with the company, including head of our Eastern European expansion followed by a decade-long stint as president of Nu Skin Japan. That unexpected change early on was the best thing to happen to my career. It also taught me to trust my mentors, as they had my best interest in mind and could see farther down the path than I could.
Are you working on any new exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?
The beauty and wellness space is at an incredible inflection point. We’re reaching a new era of personalization where brands can provide consumers with insights about their unique needs and offer customized products and treatments. The opportunity created by the personalization of beauty and wellness is exciting, and it is something that will help us develop deeper connections with our customers.
Also, digital connectivity is rapidly taking over almost every sector. Even in the automobile industry, most brands now build connectivity into their cars as a standard feature. The beauty and wellness industry is just beginning this digital journey. We’ve been investing in this space for years and are at the forefront of helping customers gain important insights into their personal beauty and wellness needs. We will continue to build on this foundation to explore how connected devices in the beauty and wellness sector can help personalize the customer experience.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful, who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My first real mentor was my grandfather. He was a go-getter who achieved a lot professionally by a young age, including being the youngest VP at his company. He shared with me one of his experiences where he reached a breaking point that caused him to quit his job, and it ended up having a huge impact on me when I reached a similar inflection point.
When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, I was living in Tokyo and running Nu Skin’s business in the country. In addition to the devastation that struck across the country, I found myself in a challenging position. We watched months of progress crumble in front of us as the business in the region completely reset. It was at this moment — when I felt deep anxiety and heightened levels of work stress — that I thought back to my grandfather’s experience. I knew I had a choice to make — to step away from the work entirely, or pull myself up and work through it. I learned the important lesson of disassociating the results of the business with my personal worth. Before, I would conflate the two; if the business results were down by 8 percent, so was my personal worth.
I learned from my grandfather that in order to help Nu Skin recover, I needed to break my cycle of internalizing the business, freeing myself to focus on the long-term objective and make decisions to help move forward toward that target.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Nu Skin’s mission is to be a global force for good by empowering people to improve their lives, and I have taken this mission to heart. I have been fortunate to have strong mentors in my life, and this has inspired me to focus on helping people realize their potential and achieve their goals. I believe by building a strong team around myself, providing the necessary resources and giving them the freedom to act, we can accelerate our growth and build stronger leaders. In addition, I feel the more success we have, the more opportunity it gives us to have an impact in the lives of others. Again, Nu Skin has provided me with many great examples of doing good for others that I can pattern in my own life.
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. The Pandemic has changed many aspects of all of our lives. One of them is the fact that so many of us have gotten used to shopping almost exclusively online. Can you share a few examples of different ideas that large retail outlets are implementing to adapt to the new realities created by the Pandemic?
The pandemic forced nearly all companies, especially those with a retail component, to re-evaluate their business model and how they connect with customers. As things start to normalize, business leaders are trying to decide if they should go back to the way it was before COVID or lean into the future. Right now we are seeing that a lot of large retail brands are trying to do both — which is causing their profitability to drop significantly, due in part to the expensive infrastructure costs associated with maintaining multiple sales channels. This is going to force another evolution where businesses will have to answer the question, “What do you want to be?”
I think retail companies that are willing to make tough tradeoffs are the ones to watch right now. Many giant brands like Nike and Amazon are making hard business decisions such as pulling away from third parties and adjusting brick and mortar store strategies because they realize they can’t be all things to all people.
The supply chain crisis is another outgrowth of the pandemic. Can you share a few examples of what retailers are doing to pivot because of the bottlenecks caused by the supply chain crisis?
Having the agility to pivot is crucial right now, and pairing that with flexibility is giving some retailers an edge. There’s one thing we know to be true: consumers will consume. With this in mind, retailers can expand their portfolios by carrying new types of products or going deeper with certain brands, as they monitor what’s available. You’ll see that some of the big-box stores are giving certain brands more vertical shelf space, which is a great example of exercising flexibility amid the supply chain crisis.
How do you think we should reimagine our supply chain to prevent this from happening again in the future?
There’s so much happening in the world out of a business leader’s control, but that can have a massive impact on the health of their organization. Vertical integration, although counter to some of today’s business school teachings, is a way to take back some of this control. Nu Skin put the wheels in motion for this business model when we acquired personal care and nutrition manufacturers, as well as a packaging company, in 2017 and 2018. When the pandemic hit and the supply chain shut down, we were fortunate because we had control over much of our own supply chain. Knowing that the future is unpredictable, at both the micro and macro level, brands need to consider shoring up their own supply chain. Vertical integration helps create confidence in your business projections and minimize the impact that external factors have on results.
In your opinion, will retail stores or malls continue to exist? How would you articulate the role of physical retail spaces at a time when online commerce platforms like Amazon Prime or Instacart can deliver the same day or the next day?
I believe human beings are experience driven, and this is especially true of Millennials and GenZ who spend much of their disposable income on travel. The experience economy and the desire to socialize will ensure that retail always has a place, but I do expect that it will look and feel different than it has in the past. The way that people relate to retailers is changing, and we’ll continue to see an evolution toward an omni-channel approach. This may look like people shopping online and picking up in stores, or trying things on in a store but buying their size online.
In addition to the evolution driven by online commerce and same-day delivery, I think we’ll see another dimension added in the metaverse. Building storefronts in the metaverse today feels a bit like when Dubai was first under development. What started as a remote desert is now a top tourist destination, proving that if you build it, they will come.
The so-called “Retail Apocalypse” has been going on for about a decade. While many retailers are struggling, some retailers, like Lululemon, Kroger, and Costco are quite profitable. Can you share a few lessons that other retailers can learn from the success of profitable retailers?
The most successful retailers in today’s environment are connecting with their customers on a more personal level and creating an integrated brand experience for customers.
Let’s look at Alo and Lululemon, for example, two popular athletic brands. Alo started as a yoga brand with significant YouTube content. As a consumer, you can take their classes and engage with the brand in a more integrated, meaningful way. Lululemon, while it has been successful, is losing market share to Alo because the company continues to invest only in the retail experience.
There’s a lot to learn from companies that are targeting a holistic customer experience to build more meaningful, longer lasting relationships. Customers crave experiences, and retailers that provide a unique experience are more likely to create loyal customers, which is crucial in our current retail environment.
Amazon is going to exert pressure on all of retail for the foreseeable future. New Direct-To-Consumer companies based in China are emerging that offer prices that are much cheaper than US and European brands. What would you advise to retail companies and e-commerce companies, for them to be successful in the face of such strong competition?
To stay competitive in an increasingly challenging market, brands need to focus on integrating influencer marketing into their overall strategy. Influencers can build an important bridge between customers and brands that can be difficult to achieve through traditional marketing strategies and ultimately be extremely impactful on purchasing decisions.
One emerging avenue of influencer marketing is social commerce, where brands can partner directly with influencers to sell products through their social platforms. This is an area that’s ripe for massive growth and I would recommend that brands jump in sooner rather than later.
Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a fantastic retail experience that keeps bringing customers back for more? Please share a story or an example for each.
1. Create a unique experience
It may sound obvious, but brands that can create a unique brand experience, one that’s hard to replicate, become memorable. Memorable brands can inspire customers to come back time and time again.
2. Build meaningful relationships with customers
Brands that connect with customers in a meaningful way can become a bigger part of their customers’ lives and in turn, secure more meaning and value. Meaningful relationships can create loyal customers who may then influence others to support a brand.
3. Leverage influencers to tell your story
Influencer marketing, especially micro- and nano-influencers, can help build customer trust by influencers sharing their honest opinions and feedback about their favorite products. Brands should focus on engaging with influencers at these levels to turn their followers into customers, and customers into brand ambassadors.
4. Embrace new trends and technologies
During the past two decades, the world has undergone massive changes, especially with technology. The brands that embrace change and view new tech trends not as hurdles to overcome, but as opportunities to improve business practices and customer experiences, will continue to thrive in shifting environments.
5. Be honest about where you’re falling short
Brands that can take an honest look in the mirror and address where they may be falling short have the power to make changes and improve quickly. As times change, so must companies — so it’s important to be open to trying new things and making adjustments where needed.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start 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. :-)
Empowerment. I view empowerment as providing people with the ability to live the lives they want to live. We’re seeing that play out with the rise of the gig economy and in the retail space through platforms like Shopify, and it’s a philosophy we are passionate about at Nu Skin. We believe that when people look and feel their best they become a better version of themselves. I’d like to help people see new opportunities so they can truly be who they want to be and live the lives they’ve always imagined.
How can our readers further follow your work?
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
