Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford d.school
Perry is one of our outsiders. Not a professor, but an entrepreneur to the core. He received his Masters from Stanford in the Product Design program in 1991 and has taught there periodically since 1996. Perry left Stanford with his master's thesis in hand; a single high performance snowshoe, yes ‘snowshoe'. Perry was hell bent on starting his own business and left Stanford with the expectation that the world would beat a path to his door to get his modern snowshoe. That didn't happen, at least not right away. Perry had new product idea, without an established market, requiring him to build an entire sport around snowshoeing. This experience engaged disciplines well beyond engineering. Perry ultimately built his master project into a business, Atlas Snowshoe Company that still manufactures and markets the best snowshoes in the category it created. Through this experience he learned two things: you can't do anything significant on your own, you need a team; and engineering something is not nearly as much fun as marketing what you have engineered.
In 2000, Perry decided it was time for a change. He sold his snowshoe business and moved to Southern California to run Sales and Marketing for Patagonia, an outdoor clothing brand. There, Perry got a chance to market on an entirely new scale globally. The challenge of balancing the need to drive sales while building a brand with very important commitments and a sustainability message which Patagonia has radiated since its' inception was exhilarating. The trick, if there is one, is to stay close to the customer, understand the enthusiast and their experience, while staying aligned with the company's commitments to build a message that resonates between the two. Perry believes marketing is as important a discipline as engineering. Communicating a great message is a noble challenge.
In 2007 Perry jumped into a new challenge. As CEO of Timbuk2 in San Francisco, he leads not only the original bike messenger bag company, but also one of the last manufacturers in San Francisco. With a great brand and product he is focused on delivering custom products to Timbuk2 customers, or rather ‘a customer experience'. Perry is also implementing a lot of the techniques used at the d.school in Timbuk2 organization and offices.
Perry comes to the d.school with a keen focus on implementing the learning. (Perry can regularly be heard telling students in the classes that he has taught, “Get out there where the answers are.”) A rule he has for one of the product design project class he teaches is that any student who gets a legitimate purchase order for their product aces the class. The classroom is not reality, and to implement you need to get real. Perry measures his success in these classes by the number of projects that get to market. The d.school offers the opportunity to coordinate the full range of disciplines needed to approach any opportunity, and to go for it. When not at work on the next thing, Perry can usually be found away from land in the ocean surfing the waves at Ocean Beach, or swimming in the Bay.
