Eric Ryan
Adam Burns:
You’ve described Method as a belief brand,
one that sells a philosophy and a culture, how did you first create that
culture?
Eric Ryan:
So,
ironically when we first created the culture, we didn’t. It just happened naturally because when you
start a company, and there’s just a few of you in a room, the innovative culture just kind
of resonates from your natural personality, who you are, and who those first
hires are. So, it just forms organically
in the beginning and then over time once you start to become on multiple
floors, multiple offices, not everybody is in the same meeting all the time,
there did come a point that we realized, okay we need to formalize the culture
in order to be able to continue to enhance it. In the beginning, it was just like, God, it’s
who we are and what we believe in.
Adam Burns:
Absolutely,
and now you call it in several occasions a culture of weird. How do you effectively manage weird?
Eric Ryan:
I
guess weird is one of those things you just can’t manage; you have to be,
right? What we work very hard at is
helping people understand what do we mean by weird, and why do we want to be
weird? So, when you look at our business
challenge, we are taking on several big, goliath competitors who have immense
resources compared to us. Our only
chance of success is to be radically different from them, and of course,
different things that have come into the world have come from different people
who are typically weird.
What we try to
do is reinforce this idea of being weird by – it’s our little wink to ourselves
to always be different. To be different
takes courage, right? To really put
yourself out there and do something that hasn’t been done before; not only do
you have to be a little weird, but you’ve gotta be self-assured and just have
great confidence in yourself to do that.
So, it’s our way of continually trying to push people to have the
courage to be different.