Tom Fritz has worked for Dow Chemical; Clorox, managing such brands as Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing and other new product initiatives; Spreckels Sugar Company as Director of Marketing; Nestle Beverage as Business Director, Nestea; Yes! Entertainment as EVP Marketing & Product Development (toys); and Marmot Mountain LLC as VP of Marketing since 1998, when annual revenues were $35 million.
During his tenure, Marmot opened five U.S. flagship stores, three partnership stores, and provided support for international retail partner stores in Chile, Russia, Germany and Asia. He’s been married to wife Joan for 33 years. They have three boys, two of whom are firefighters with economics degrees from UC Davis and one is a sophomore at University of Oregon. Fritz has coached youth baseball, basketball and soccer for 18 years – more than 65 teams. He’s a lifelong outdoorsman with a passion for mountain biking, road cycling, backpacking, kayaking, SUP, skiing and climbing.
What has it been like to be with a brand for so long during such a period of growth? While I’ve been with Marmot for 17 years the world, the company and the industry have changed massively in that time. Marmot was acquired in 2004 by K2 Inc., and then by Jarden in 2007. We went from being a small company that was employee and investor owned to a small part of a huge publicly held multi-national corporation. Everything changed as the Internet came along, then social media. Widely varying weather patterns over the last decade have made it a complex task to estimate consumer demand for outdoor clothing and equipment. Through all of this Marmot and I have evolved to be stronger, more dynamic and nimble.
What’s your advice to young people forging their own way in the outdoor industry?
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Work harder than everyone else. Hard work is noticed and appreciated.
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Work smarter every day. Learn from your mistakes and adapt.
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You have a lot to offer but a lot more to learn. You need to earn respect every day.
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Shut up and listen. Remember the saying, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
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Let people help you. It makes us feel good to bring people up through the ranks successfully.
What has your experience as a coach brought to your professional life? Coaching youth baseball, basketball and soccer was invaluable in shaping me as a person, manager and leader. While I coached 65 teams comprised 5-to-16-year-old boys (and occasional girls), my wife filmed every team’s season, and I edited a video that made every team look like the best team ever and gave a copy to every player and parent. Understanding your audience and their motivation will help you help them achieve their goals. If you can achieve your goals by helping those who work for you to achieve theirs, that’s what success looks like. A strong leader can forge success from the weakest member of the team.
How important are the Marmot flagship stores and what is the future of Direct-to-Consumer? Marmot flagship stores and Marmot.com are both important components of Marmot’s DTC strategy. While we expect to continue to invest in providing the consumer with the full brand experience in our digital and physical stores, first and foremost our primary business remains wholesale. Our goal is to continue to provide the most innovative products to our wholesale customers, as well as the highest levels of service and support. We will continue to invest in our wholesale customer’s online and offline Marmot brand sell-through initiatives as well as our own global brand awareness building initiatives.
How do you find the inspiration to innovate? Constant re-invention leads to continued inspiration. I continue to add new things to my repertoire as I age. Whether it’s learning new aspects of business or taking up slack lining or fending off road traffic in Santa Rosa while cycling to work, I enjoy changing things up to stay fresh. As far as Marmot goes, inspiration is rooted in the desire to engineer and build the highest performing products possible for all people to wear and use both outside and indoors, every day of the week. Marmot product innovations are all about improving the consumer experience, no matter what the conditions. We innovate by making things simpler, easier to use, higher performing, more eco-friendly, and affordable.
“I Am… SGB” is a recurring column in SGB magazine featuring many of the top executives and managers from across the active lifestyle industry. To recommend someone to be featured in this column, email sgbmedia@sportsonesource.com.
