Richard Thalheimer: Sharper Image Success: Business Lessons from America's Gadget Guy

Transcript

[0:00:18] DA: Whether you're starting a new business or a seasoned entrepreneur, or you’re working your way up the corporate ladder, Richard Thalheimer’s new book, Sharper Image Success, is worth your time and attention. The book is about getting a true glimpse into the complex and active mind of a successful entrepreneur who shares stories about creating his visions, taking risks, sharing rewards, cultivating generosity and showing respect, as well as knowing there’s always a way to solve every problem. Ultimately, Richard teaches us that our originality and our relationships are the most important attributes of success. He shares his techniques for connecting with others, even in conflict, especially in negotiation and collaboration. Hey listeners, my name is Drew Applebaum and I’m excited to be here today with Richard Thalheimer, author of Sharper Image Success: Business Lessons from America’s Gadget Guy. Richard, thank you for joining, welcome to the Author Hour podcast.

[0:01:10] Richard Thalheimer: Hey Drew, thank you.

[0:01:12] DA: Let’s kick this off. Can you give us a rundown of your professional background?

[0:01:17] Richard Thalheimer: My professional background, well this is easy. I grew up in Littlerock Arkansas, went to public high school, then I applied and got into Yale College because they have to take somebody from Arkansas every year. So I got in. When I got out of Yale College, I went out to San Francisco with a friend who told me it was a great city. Loved it and I started a business and that business became, within one year, the Sharper Image. I was 23 years old at the time and it grew from knocking on doors in the financial district of San Francisco to a 4,000 employee, retail store chain with 200 stores, a catalog and a thriving internet business. I did that my entire life until I retired from it in 2006. And that’s my professional life.

[0:02:08] DA: Now, what’s different in this book than in your previous book, Creating Your Own Sharper Image, which came out in 2004?

[0:02:15] Richard Thalheimer: Great question. As I read the 2004 book, I realized that it was written at the time for the time. It just didn’t quite make sense for 16 years later, in terms of I can’t say this year we did this, without dating it. So I went back and I corrected everything to make you understand the timeframe it was in and I added the extra thoughts of what happened from 2004 on because it was a dramatic ending in 2006. I left the Sharper Image, still owning 20% of the public company. But I left against my will, literally was pushed out, quite a story and so I detailed that in the book.

[0:03:00] DA: Now, why was now the time to write this book? Did you have inspiration, did you just have some time because of COVID?

[0:03:07] Richard Thalheimer: You know, honestly and truthfully, I just wanted to make sure that everything that happened was sort of documented and recorded, partly because it was sort of a controversial ending and partly to celebrate the Sharper Image. People that work there loved working, they loved working at the Sharper Image and for them it was sort of like a closure to get the whole thing written down so I wanted to do it a little better than I did it in 2004.

[0:03:33] DA: Did you have any learnings or major breakthroughs during the writing of this book? Maybe from the introspective journey of looking back at your past or just by doing some research?

[0:03:42] Richard Thalheimer: Good question Drew. The only thing that really stuck in my mind as I looked at it was how much I loved doing what I did and that applies to everyone’s career to find something you really are passionate about, how much I love doing what I’m doing. Secondly, to me, what came out of rewriting, relooking is the concept that you want to treat your suppliers, your workers, your employees if you want to call them that. Treat everyone with an amount of respect so that the karma comes back to you and that comes through loud and clear on this book.

[0:04:15] DA: Now, who is this book for? Is this a business book, is this for business leaders or is this for the everyman?

[0:04:23] Richard Thalheimer: Well, it certainly not for the 23 year old tech billionaire who just sold his app for three billion dollars. I wanted to be that person but I’m not and it’s not for that person. It is for somebody who has a business of their own or even who works in a business and who wants to learn, maybe they’re in their 20s and they want to learn, “How does business really sort of work in terms of me getting ahead? What principles or philosophies might help?”

[0:04:52] DA: Yeah, you begin the book talking about the origins of what became the Sharper Image which is such a fun and organic story. So I have to ask, do you still attend CES today and are you still thinking around and looking at cool gadgets that are out there?

[0:05:07] Richard Thalheimer: That’s great you should ask. CES of course is the Consumer Electronic Show and it’s still held every January though I suspect this year it might be virtual. I went as recently as last January, had a great time walking around and seeing new things. I think my favorite gadget there was bigger than a gadget, it was a five person drone, that literally holds five people, it has those four sort of wind building blades in the corners and it’s the drone that takes off and carries five people over to the next meeting and I just thought, what a cool, cool product.

[0:05:48] DA: Now, you sold the business, as you said, got kicked out of the business a while ago, it’s almost 15 years and you did start – you started the Sharper Fund which is a super successful investment company but do you miss not only finding the products like we just talked about, but part of the book talks about your interesting ways you found to market them. Do you still have that love for marketing a cool, innovative product?

[0:06:13] Richard Thalheimer: Well, I totally do and in fact, I love it so much, you may not realize this, when I left Sharper Image in 2006, within two months, I started a new company online called richardsolo.com. It’s a play on Richard alone, it’s called richardsolo.com and it’s an online website for gadgets and I’m still running it. However, what I learned since 2006, now it’s been 14 years. What I learned is that in today’s world, unless you have the volume of what we have at Sharper Image, where you can make your own proprietary products from scratch which was what we did, we made the molds, we made the electronics, we made the circuit boards. Unless you have the volume to do that, you cannot compete because everything that’s already been made, even if I private label it [inaudible], it’s already on Amazon. I’ve been Amazoned like a lot of other businesses. So Richard Solo exists but it’s not thriving, it’s a fun hobby and I devote all my time to the Sharper Fund which has done fabulously.

[0:07:20] DA: Now, you do have a lot of business tips in the book. I’d love to know what you would say to a retailer who thinks just having great products is enough to conquer the market and how important is something like even the name of your product or company to a business?

[0:07:34] Richard Thalheimer: Right, you just covered right there, three chapters that I’ve mentioned in the book. You got to have original products, you can’t have products that are copied and sold on Amazon for less. You got to have a catchy name and it’s not just enough to have a great product, you also have a way to sell that product and I mention it in the book, so many times in my lifetimes, people would come up to me, maybe a cocktail party and say, “Oh I thought of a good product idea once, I could have been the Sharper Image.” Well, my thought process in response to that is, “No, actually, coming up with a good product idea is part of it but getting it sold, getting it marketed, getting it out there, that’s really the hardest part.”

[0:08:13] DA: Do you feel like people aren’t willing to put that sweat equity in these days? You go on to mention the book, having a good idea is only the beginning.

[0:08:23] Richard Thalheimer: Well, it comes back to this dichotomy which is always in the top of my mind because I’m so jealous of that 23 year old who just sold his business for three billion dollars. But for the rest of us, we’re out there working so hard, especially people that own restaurants or small businesses that are not a nap, they’re actually in business and they work so hard and I appreciate them so much and that is actually one of the first lines in one of the chapters is Thomas Edison, the famous inventor said, “Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” And that comes from one of the world’s greatest inventors. So yeah, you got to put in that sweat equity.

[0:09:02] DA: Parts of the book that I love is when you open up and really talk about some of your personal moments. Including in the early days, when you were that door to door office supply salesman, you’d often sit in the tub for long periods of time and that’s where you found the time to let your mind relax and you could start thinking about your future. How important is being able to take the time to visualize your success, for young entrepreneurs?

[0:09:26] Richard Thalheimer: Okay, this is key, Drew. There’s like two important concepts’ here. One is, you have to have a vision for where you want to be six months from now or a year from now or five years from now. You got to have some vision. If you don’t have that vision, you don’t really have a path to greater success. But having formulated that vision, now you have to do the most important thing for today which is, break it down into smaller and smaller steps until you get to a small enough step that you can actually go do it today. Maybe that small step is as simple as picking up the phone or going online and googling something. Maybe that’s how small a step it is. It doesn’t matter. You have to find something that’s small enough to do it today and then, go on to the next step, so that’s the plan.

[0:10:24] DA: Now, not even counting 2020, the sales world has changed so much since the Sharper Image. In your experience, how are companies doing with customer experience these days and do you see anything out there that you think needs to be changed?

[0:10:41] Richard Thalheimer: Well, one of the tenets, one of the principles of my little business, richardsolo.com is superb customer service and the Sharper Image was built on superb customer service. I’ll just give you a real-life example. My wife was looking for a roofer for a house that we have that needs a roof. She pointed out to me how some people get back to her within 15 minutes, some people get back to her in two or three days and so it is still a core principle that customer service is key to so many things. You know, I buy from Amazon a lot and the reason I do is because their customer service is so exceptional. If you want to return something, it’s easy. I had a different experience a few weeks ago when I wanted to make a return and I had to email the company, they asked me to email them back the order number that I wanted to return and I thought, this is like the dark ages. They’re supposed to know from my email address, everything. I have to email them the order number now to get a return authorization. That’s so different for example, from Amazon or Richard Solo. Anyway, to make the point, customer service still is most important, yes.

[0:11:58] DA: Can you tell us the mindset you had when you were pricing new goods? Because you went out and you found cool products, you learned how to market them, you made them appealing on a page but the price point is really where folks usually decide if the value is there and if they are going to pull the trigger. So how did you create the pricing for your products?

[0:12:17] Richard Thalheimer: Well, let’s assume for a moment that we are not competing with products on Amazon because that were true we’d have to be price [inaudible] to them. Let’s assume we’ve got something original. Maybe it is a service that hasn’t existed before, a unique catering type of product. I don’t know what it is but it is unique. It doesn’t exist anywhere. How are you going to price it? I think a lot of people jump to the thought, what they’d like to get but let’s turn that around and use a principle that I used my entire life, let’s look at it from the customer side. In other words, what does the customer want to pay for it? And how do you find that out? You talk to people. You don’t get a fancy firm to survey, you don’t pay a fee. You talk to your friends and you tell them what the product is and ask them, “What do you think you’d pay for this?” People tend to be a little low or cheap sometimes. So you can mark it up a little bit higher than that but let’s start with the principle. What does it look like from the customer’s side?

[0:13:17] DA: Now, your final days for you at Sharper Image are very frustrating as a fan of the brand. Can you talk about your feelings and takeaways after being essentially pushed out of the company you built and then watching others tank it in such a small time period?

[0:13:35] Richard Thalheimer: Okay, well let’s do the executive summary. In 2006, I still owned 21% but I allowed a hedge fund who owned 12% of the public company to take one third of our board seats. I did that to avoid an expensive proxy fight. I was happy to do it because I had two thirds control of the board and I am the founder, chairman and CEO. So of course, no one would ever want to run the business without me. So my position was secure. However, they turned against me which surprised me, and wanted to push me out and persuaded the other board members to do so. So that was a traumatic experience, very traumatic and I had difficulty recovering from the thought for a few weeks but I was cheered, I was really thrilled I had joined one of the most exclusive clubs in the country because my favorite person, Steve Jobs, was also fired from Apple Computer. So I thought if this club is good enough for Steve Jobs it is good enough for me. Anyway, so they pushed me out. Now our endings were slightly different. Steve Jobs came back to Apple and made it into the world’s most successful company. I didn’t do that. However, after 36 years I was sort of ready to take a break and I had some money that they insisted I sell my stock to them if I wanted to get out of my stock. So I sold it to them. So all of a sudden I had millions and millions of dollars to invest and it started me in my new career of being an investor, which has turned out to be a very, very, very successful venture. Not as well-known as Sharper Image obviously because it is a private fund but in terms of profitability, it’s almost better for me. So this has been a great ending. Now I am 72 at the time we are recording this and it’s just becoming a great period doing this. So I am loving my life and it was a great run at Sharper Image to do that. What an experience.

[0:15:38] DA: Now, the end of the book has stories from former Shaper Image employees and they talk about their experiences with the company and on a personal note, it is really great to see a CEO look back and admire the employees he was working with along the way. If you can recall, can you talk about which employee excerpt was maybe the most meaningful or surprising to you?

[0:16:00] Richard Thalheimer: Ah, well I don’t want to play favorites because they were all meaningful but I made a real effort even though we had 4,000 people, I made a real effort to get to know a lot of them personally by first name of course and inquire what is going on in their life a little bit when I am walking around the office or I tried to visit all of our stores every year and we could make a quick digression there to point out there is the way to use a corporate jet, go to four or five cities in one day and say hello to the 10 people that work in each store. I think the meaningful part of the story without mentioning anyone in particular, is just that they cared a lot about the Sharper Image. It was a passion for a lot of them and it was for me and so I think we had a family feeling. It was very special and other companies have that I suppose but ours definitely had it. It was really meaningful to all of us.

[0:16:53] DA: Are you still in touch with many of the employees or is there some sort of Sharper Image alumni group out there that stays in touch?

[0:17:00] Richard Thalheimer: There is, there is a Facebook and an alumni group and last summer, a year ago today I hosted a Sharper Image reunion in my house in Sonoma, California and we had about a hundred people show up for a lovely cocktail party and dinner on the most perfect, perfect summer night imaginable. It was a great experience.

[0:17:21] DA: You mentioned in the book that they actually made a YouTube channel featuring all of your old advertisements and all things Sharper Image. How did that feel bringing those memories back into the fold and knowing that there’s people out there that still love them?

[0:17:34] Richard Thalheimer: Okay, so this is so fun Drew and thank you for asking. If you go to YouTube and search for, “The Legend of Sharper Image,” there is a tremendous collection of old videos and it combines in-house stuff like manager’s meetings, product training, in house product communiqués on video and it combines that with videos of me doing media interviews and I had so many fun experiences being on live interviews with Joan Rivers, with Jay Leno and Mark Griffin, with David Letterman, with Neil Cavuto, there must be a 100 different videos and they are so fun and it is nice to look young again.

[0:18:23] DA: I have to mention as well, you have so many photos in the book of your journey along the way and what was it like going through those old photos? Why did you pick the ones you chose for the book and are there any that you maybe regret that you didn’t put in there?

[0:18:42] Richard Thalheimer: No regrets at all. My favorite by far is the one with Steve Jobs because when he was fired from Apple, he started NeXT Computer. NeXT was a hardware company at first then became a software company and Steve and I launched the online Sharper Image catalog using NeXT software. So he came to our store in San Francisco, we had a press conference to announce that. He was thrilled because NeXT software was struggling and trying to make a name for itself. And we were thrilled to be one of the first retailers to be online and I so well remember, my own board of directors telling me, “No one will ever spend money on the internet.” Let’s laugh about that for a second, “No one will ever spend money on the internet.” Well in the meantime, 20 years had gone by and Jeff Bezos has become the richest person in the world with people spending money on the internet.

[0:19:42] DA: Wow, that’s amazing.

[0:19:44] Richard Thalheimer: It is.

[0:19:44] DA: I have to ask, this is my last question, what was your favorite item that was in your store or catalog?

[0:19:53] Richard Thalheimer: Well, the trademark item that made the Sharper Image reputation was the motorized massage chairs because people would come in the store, sit in a chair for half an hour, not buy anything, just enjoy the massage chair. So everybody knew the Sharper Image for these trademark massage chairs. Nowadays, they are around but at the time, like a lot of products, we introduced the first one and had more or less the exclusive on the product for a number of years. And that was true of the Razor scooter, that little aluminum two-wheeled scooter also. Oddly enough, the first iPods were sold at retail only at the Sharper Image because Apple had no stores at the time and they wanted to sell them online but they also wanted to sell them in retail. So they gave them to the Sharper Image exclusively and this is really a fun story is that at the time, people wanted that iPod so much that they would line up in the stores in the morning when we opened at about nine or 10:00. 11:00 the shipment will come in, by noon it was completely sold out and Apple’s stock then was $7 a share but that was before the split. Split seven for one so back then, Apple’s stock was $1 a share in today’s dollars and so I started buying a little bit of the stock. Maybe that was my first good investment because I saw these iPods just flying out of the stores and I thought, “Whoa, they’re onto something.”

[0:21:23] DA: Richard, I just want to say congratulations on writing your next book, especially one like this where you aim to help business professionals out there.

[0:21:33] Richard Thalheimer: Thank you Drew, I appreciate that. It is a thrill to get it done.

[0:21:36] DA: If readers could take away only one thing from the book, what would you want it to be?

[0:21:42] Richard Thalheimer: Find something you love. If you’re working in a job that’s not making you happy and you’re coming home a bit frustrated, you got to think about changing careers. I think every single success is based on somebody doing something that they’re passionate about. You’ve got to find something you love. And the other small little cliché that I love is to think about the concept that you want to do something every day to move yourself forward. Now, it could be very tiny. It doesn’t matter how big it is but I’d like to go to bed every night saying, “I did something today to move my life, my career that is, forward in a direction that I want to go.” So those two things I think, be passionate and do some little thing every day to move forward. Take the weekends off maybe.

[0:22:33] DA: Richard, this has been a pleasure and I am really excited for people to check out this book. Everyone, the book is called Sharper Image Success, and you can find it on Amazon. Richard, besides checking out the book where can people find you?

[0:22:44] Richard Thalheimer: Definitely the book is fine. There is a website called richardthalheimer.com and then I am just getting started with my next project, which is sharperinvesting.com, which will be a free place to visit and learn how to improve your own investments. That is sharperinvesting.com.

[0:23:07] DA: That’s really exciting and Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show today and best of luck with your new book.

[0:23:12] Richard Thalheimer: Drew, thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

[0:23:15] DA: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Author Hour. You can get Richard Thalheimer’s new book, Sharper Image Success, on Amazon. Also, you can also find a transcript of this episode and all of our other episodes on our website at authorhour.co. For more Author Hour, subscribe to this podcast on your favorite subscription service. Thank you for joining us, we’ll see you next time. Same place, different author.