But what are you guys seeing from the footprint and how not to expand too much?

Yeah, so there is a return or a desire to shop from the young consumers today.

And we see that in research, we see that in feedback loops, and they want a third place again.

And so I think we have to be very fluid.

However, there are so many changes happening in terms of consumption and understanding Gen Z, but also Gen Alpha and their preferences.

Social shopping, live shopping, those are all new and interesting.

It is super important to have a real estate portfolio that reflects being where your consumer needs you.

Bri, that's a $95,000 program, right? I mean, I look at, was it worth it and why? I mean, because that's a huge fee to pay to get into those programs to continue to educate yourself.

And so can you talk a little bit about, you know, that part of your journey?

I think I have a very unique seat and the privilege to have watched many leaders come through PacSun.

And so the power of observation, careful listening, and really understanding where our challenges and opportunities were from an inside perspective, being in so many different roles, whether it be in merchandising, design, marketing, the digital sphere, I had a real deep understanding of what the company was great at and where we still needed to unlock real opportunity.

I would say it was a very natural transition, but also very intentional.

So when I first took the seat, the first thing I did was a leadership offsite to really align on where do we need to move? What do we need to understand? There's a book by Bill George called The True North that I have all of our leaders within the organization read, and it comes with a workbook.

where you really look at your own internal purpose and then how it translates to the company's purpose.

And our purpose was an outcome of our leadership retreat.

want

So I'm curious what that word means to you and how you would like the average PacSun fan, person who's following to, the, the brand, how you would like them to feel connected to you.

Yeah.

I think first and foremost, when we decided to lead with purpose, we reevaluated stakeholder centricity, and we really thought about who do we want to have the most buy-in into the mission, the purpose, the values of PacSun, the results.

And we brought in our suppliers, our brand associates, our brand ambassadors, of course, the board of directors, our employees, our customers.

But it's really thinking about it in a much more 360-degree view and having really kind of equal stakes at the table when you're considering who your stakeholders in the business are.

When you think about your community, it starts first and foremost with our brand associates in our stores.

We have six, 7,000 brand associates at any given time, up to 10,000 during peaks, and it starts with that energy, that enthusiasm, that passion.

What have been some of the major learnings running this? And, you know, I know they're all still relatively new programs, but about what has engaged users the most, what has excited them, what has, what has moved them to take an action, what actions are most meaningful to PacSun, any of that stuff.

So can you just define what is this concept that you're now sort of shaping within the company and also encouraging others to think about? And also talk about what inspired it in the first place.

Yeah.

I'll start with what inspired it, because fifteen years back, we recognized that we didn't have an equal reach in terms of, uh, gender inclusivity, and so we had to do some unique moves in the marketplace, such as signing a ten-year contract with Kendall and Kylie Jenner and bringing more women and girls into the fold in terms of reach and opportunity, and I would classify those as more traditional terms of engagement from a collaboration standpoint.

What we learned through collaborations was the power of authentic engagement, and we learned also who we should be selecting for collaborations, which brands should we be partnering with, which artists, which athletes, which celebrities, which musicians.

And so I would say there was like a ten-year learning curve in terms of how to engage your community in the most effective way possible, which led to the question of, you know, we should probably do more research.

We need to more deeply understand the behavioral shifts, so we can then understand the consumer shifts and the shopping and behavioral shifts that are happening.

But you can't do that.

How do you do that at scale, though? So it's not just your executive team, but how do you do it with hundreds or thousands of colleagues?