From Trunk Club to Alinea — 3 Lessons to Run a World Class Business
With restaurant week wrapping up here in Chicago where Trunk Club HQ is, it only seems proper to write about THE restaurant of Chicago — Alinea. Alinea has always been famous for being one of the best. It has won countless awards, from 3 Michelin Stars to the James Beard Foundation Award. It has ranked globally on World’s 50 best restaurants, not to mention topping TripAdvisor’s list of fine dining restaurants.
So, what really goes into making a restaurant world class, and how can we learn from it? Beyond culinary skill (this is a given), a mixture of vision, culture, and values all serve to come together to propel Alinea to global fame and customer renown. Netflix’s Chef’s Table serves to give a behind-the-scenes insight into three key lessons. These lessons are not limited to just the restaurant industry and can be applied across to board to all industries — they are even being implemented at Trunk Club today!
Lesson 1: Customer Obsession
Many companies are customer focused. Alinea is customer obsessed. They think “When a customer comes to Alinea, what are they coming for? Is it the food? Is the customer paying hundreds of dollars JUST to eat at Alinea?”. The answer is obvious — no.
Customers are coming to Alinea to have a culinary experience. They want to be wowed, to have something so unique that it’ll be a memory for years down the road. To have something special to remember the occasion. To meet these standards, Alinea cleverly focuses on building experiences that their customers never expect, but will love. They rely not on just customer input and feedback (customer focus), but on developing experiences based on a customer’s behaviors, needs, and goals (customer obsession). They are meeting needs and wants that customers didn’t know they had by playing with customer expectations to specifically curate an experience. This ranges from walking into Alinea (an optical illusion where the hallway seems longer than reality), to eating dessert off a tablecloth (when one expects to eat out of a plate or a bowl).
Lesson 2: Constant Innovation
A big part of being successful is staying successful. The innovator’s dilemma ultimately hits on this point. Once a company hits a certain level of success, it is easy to just be happy and maintain status quo — which is fine for a while, until stagnation occurs. To consistently stay successful, constant innovation is a must. If one is not building disruptive features or things then eventually, they will be the ones getting disrupted (by players who are low cost and can afford to take a high amount of risk).
How does Alinea approach this then? They constantly challenge norms, and question “Is this the best way it could exist, or is there a better version?” Mr Achatz says “Rules? There are no rules. Do whatever you want.” From floating dishes, to meals with scented pillows Alinea is constantly ideating, brainstorming, prototyping, and testing their ideas to bring innovative food dishes to their customers. They are never satisfied with “Just OK”, and continue to challenge themselves. In fact, Alinea even closed themselves for a period time just to reinvent themselves. This constant innovation has allowed Alinea to maintain its success, where so many others couldn’t. Alinea pushes themselves to such an extent, that by the time this article has been read, it’s possible they have already swapped a menu for newer, better one. Innovation at its finest.
Lesson 3: Empower your people
Last but not least, a key tenant of any company should be empowering employees. For Alinea, this means that Mr. Achatz trusts his employees to prepare and properly cook the food. It was not always this way. However, after going through some health concerns where he lost his sense of taste for a while, Mr. Achatz was hit with a realization. He says “I realized, to make a world class restaurant, you can’t do it yourself.” He now doesn’t micromanage, and understands that he has to focus on his own roles and responsibilities, while also trusting his own employees to do the same. He empowers his employees to try out new ideas, test them, and make their own creations. In return, his employees thrive in this environment. They are granted ownership of things, gain recognition, and can really focus on their own roles and responsibilities. For example, Alinea’s famous “Balloon” dish was created by Chef Mike, who was empowered to design, create, and build this dish from scratch. Upon completion of the dish, Mike was asked by Mr. Achatz if he wanted it to be an Alinea dish, or a dish for his own repertoire (another case of valuing employees, their ideas, and their work). Empowering your employees can lead to surprises, innovation, and an overall better work culture.
How do we do this at Trunk Club?
At Trunk Club, we take these 3 lessons to heart and implement them into the very fabric of our culture.
For Customer Obsession, we do a mix of customer research, user experience, concept testing, and design sprints to really identify what our customers need, even if they haven’t expressed it. A prime example of this is Style Swipes. We realized that fashion and style is hard. What one person defines as “workwear” could mean something completely different than what another person defines it as. How then, can we help customers express their sense of style to us? Style swipes lets a customer view hundreds of pictures and swipe left or right on it, giving them a visual element to express their style, rather than using words. Customers ended up loving this feature, and it was another way to engage with TrunkClub. By focusing on enabling key needs and wants of the customers, we were able to design something that wasn’t suggested by customers, but loved all the same.
For constant innovation, Trunk Club is consistently developing new features to improve the customer experience, and questioning ourselves on how to make things better. One example of this is the Caring for Clothing feature. Looking through items and their description was standard functionality that existed across the board for Trunk Club. There was no reason to make any changes to this, since it was working properly, and our customers were happy to use it.
We kept thinking about how to improve the experience, however, and realized we could leverage content guides to go along with different items. This would allow a customer to know exactly how to take care of their premium denim when they were purchasing it. The customer could also reference these guides after purchasing. This would make looking at items more interesting, and allow customers to feel safe purchasing, knowing they were always equipped with the proper instructions to care for that specific, special item they purchased.
For empowering our people, at Trunk Club, we love to give our product engineering team ownership. Anyone is free to bring up ideas and build a case for it. Assuming it makes sense, the product engineering team will run with it and implement it. There is implicit trust that what’s being built is better for the business; allowing Trunk Club to develop features in an agile manner, and leverage alphas and betas to drive increasing business value over time. While not every feature may always have immediate measurable business outcomes, Trunk Club lets employees take chances, and iterating over time to improve. The diversity and culture at Trunk Club allows us to foster a hub of ideas and innovation — essentially creating an environment where we can empower our employees to build, ship, and test their ideas.
Ultimately, regardless of company size or industry, these lessons from Alinea can be applied today to help run a world class business. You’ve seen how we do it at Trunk Club. Now let’s see how you can do it within your organization.
Note: Don’t just take my word for it, check out the episode yourself for inspiration!
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