As I mentioned in my first post in this series, every startup has their t-shirts. But you can tell a lot about a company by the t-shirts they make. And so I would like to continue to take you through our history - and our culture - with the most complete collection of Bazaarvoice t-shirts with the possible exception of my co-founder, Brant Barton.
This is the second in my series, and I'll cover the years 2007-2009 here. The first post covers our first two years in business - 2005-2007.
Michael Osborne, our first global head of sales, and I worked hard on establishing a sales-driven culture. In my opinion, this is very important for a B2B company. Your clients are the ones that pay your bills and you should be obsessive about both selling to and servicing them well. All other functions in the company are in support of that goal. The most successful B2C companies, like Wal-Mart and Amazon, are no different in that they are obsessive about those that also pay their bills - with the only difference being they care most about consumers - versus businesses - as consumers are their key source of revenue. Osborne, as we all called him because his personality is bigger than life, was amazing in this regard and a huge part of the culture that quickly took root. His theme song for us "doing the impossible" in our achievements quarter after quarter became Don't Stop Believing by Journey. The YouTube video below will give you a window into our culture and all of us celebrating at the Alamo Drafthouse, where we held our All-Hands (I talked about why the awesome Alamo in my first post in this series). I took this video right after my talk to close out the day, where I was expressing my deep love for the company and then the Bazaarvoice band brought the house down by playing our theme song. This can only be described as a magical moment as I think you'll agree in watching the video (have you ever seen this type of energy at a company you worked at?).
Our Don't Stop Believing (or DSB for short) culture had taken deep roots by this time. So, of course, we needed DSB t-shirts. And perhaps it is most appropriate that the two that I have were made by our London team, where the DSB culture was just as strong.
I should point out that both of these t-shirts are green. That is a whole other story on our DSB culture that is worth telling. You see, Osborne had this ugly green soccer ball that he always carried around. Because of his incredible performance, beating almost all of the odds, something organic took root. Green day was born by the Bizarre Committee, a group of volunteers that self-organized to help evolve the Bazaarvoice culture and be a voice of the people. They selected the color green and everyone started to wear green - whether Bazaarvoice logo'ed or not - at the end of the quarter. Osborne was smart and he ran with this - hard. He realized that it could have been any color, or symbol, and that it symbolized something very rare, almost Noterdame like - and that is an undying brothers-in-arms camaraderie. To "do the impossible", you must have the ability to pull together as a unified team. As you do so, brick-by-brick you establish a strong culture of performance and team unity. Here are photos of that soccer ball, a green SellStrong wristband that almost all of us wore every day (and I still wear every time I'm in the Bazaarvoice office), and a photo of the Austin team in 2007, all wearing green at the end of the quarter.
The next series of t-shirts were launched at our client Summit. We held our first Summit in 2008 and it was a really special event (our sixth Bazaarvoice Summit in the US is next week and I couldn't be more excited). When you invent a new industry - and Bazaarvoice is still in a nascent industry today - you have the opportunity to create the definitive event for that industry and that is exactly what I believe we did at Bazaarvoice with our Summit. The main focus of our Summit is, of course, our clients. They are in the best position to teach each other how to leverage the voice of the customer throughout their business and they are the main stars of the stage. As Marc Benioff points out in his book Behind the Cloud (required reading for any B2B business, in my opinion), clients are in the best position to sell each other. So Sam Decker, our first global head of marketing, created the Bazaarvoice "School of C2C Marketing" seal with the Latin words "Aquiro", "Sermo", and "Dilato" (loosely translated as to acquire or gather customers, to enable them to discuss, and to amplify or expand their conversations). You can also see that this evolved into the "Social Commerce Pro Team" seal at our second Summit in 2009 as our community of clients got more "pro" on how to make the voice of the customer an integral part of their business success.
Our 2008 Summit t-shirt:
We also created a version for our team as all Bazaarvoice employees wanted one after our first Summit, which energized us and was a kind of coming-out party for the company overall. I believe this was the first t-shirt we made with American Apparel materials, which are soft, comfortable, and more form fitting than the standard, heavy cotton company t-shirt:
Our 2009 Summit t-shirt (I'm not as crazy about the colors on this one, which are meant to symbolize the orange in the University of Texas at Austin - where we held our Summit - as the symbol is hard to read):
Before Sam left to start Mass Relevance, he created one last t-shirt and this was "Be the Conversation", a kind of mantra for us and our clients about the world we were creating. In all honesty, this t-shirt or tagline was not a huge hit but I include it here for completeness sake for this period of 2007-2009. Not everything is a hit - but I want to be clear that Sam did a lot for our company and was a world-class CMO and now a great CEO.
I'll end this post on the anniversary t-shirts. You'll remember from my last post that we started this tradition at the end of our first year in business and they are team favorites. For our three-year anniversary, we crowdsourced the design. I cannot remember who won the content and it isn't one of my favorites from a design standpoint, but I do love the phrase on the back and that is why I believe it won the vote. It reads "Without U it's just GC." - a wordplay on UGC or "User-Generated Content". I love this because it described the ethos of the company at that 3-year mark. We really cared - about our clients and each other.
For our four-year anniversary, I provided the idea and our designers ran with it. Perhaps I was wrong to buck the crowdsourced design, which we returned to for our five-year anniversary and beyond as you'll see in part three of this series once I post it. But it is one of my favorite Bazaarvoice t-shirts today and the symmetry of our four-year anniversary was just too perfect in my opinion not to run with this concept. Here we were 4-years old with 400 clients and 400 employees. Now some argued with the way I was counting this at the time. So to be clear, for employees I was counting part-time, work-from-home employees as well as our outsourced developers in Ukraine. But the way I looked at it - that is what it took for the company to run. Without all of those people - not just our full-time, in-the-office employees, we wouldn't have been able to operate the company. As far as the client count, we used to count unique brands whereas today - where Stephen reported last week that we serve over 2,400 clients and over one-third of the Fortune 100 - we are counting clients like P&G as one client. This is more of a question of methodology and we count clients this way today to try to make it easier for public investors to model our business.
