With a grandfather and a father being icons in the Canadian retail industry, it was probably only natural that Ian Rosen would end up today as President and COO of Harry Rosen, one of the country’s most recognizable brands.
“Actually if you had asked a straw poll of people in my family before I joined, who will join, it would not have been me,” said Ian Rosen.
“I was just dead set on figuring out my own interests, my own path, developing probably my own confidence at the end of the day. And through a happy coincidence at every stage of my professional career I ended up realizing that the things that excited me just so happened to be in the world of consumer and retail and fashion.
“My first job out of school was at a smaller strategy consulting firm before I joined Bain (& Company) and my first project was working with a big mine. They were trying to figure out how to improve operations and mine more effectively, get more out of their resource pool, deploy capital differently. I visited the mine, it was a real interesting problem to solve and I loved doing it once but if you told me to do it again, I wasn’t excited. It was predictable in a lot of ways.”
The thing that really excited Rosen was the first time he ever did a project where consumer goods and consumer retail was involved with one unknown variable – the customer.
Rosen joined the iconic retailer in 2018 and was Executive Vice President of Digital & Strategy, with the challenge of transforming the company’s online business, until February 2022 when he took over his current role.
“You got to inspire them to act. You can’t force them to act and it got me really addicted to the idea of coming up with strategies a customer might mobilize around and if they don’t how are you going to change what you do and how do you take big risks knowing that unknown variable,” said Rosen. “It’s something that got me really excited and led me to where I am today.”
Prior to joining the family business, he did a number of placements in retail including Harry Rosen at a young age.
“My funniest story is that my first employment stint here I was asked to leave because I was showing up late to the store all the time. I got no preferential treatment when I was 16 or 17 years old,” said Rosen.
“But I grew up around the business and before I did my MBA I spent four or five months supporting the executive team and learning how we do business which I think is very important. I joined in the digital role and I was at Bain & Company right beforehand working in the U.S. doing strategy consulting, as much as possible with companies that were in the retail side of things. And a lot of them were thinking through their ecommerce strategy . . . I got a lot of exposure to that and got the itch to say ‘hey I really want to do this somewhere else where I can own it and see it through’.
“And Larry (Rosen, his father) convinced me there was an exciting opportunity here.”
Rosen did his undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario at the Ivey Business School in London. He then did an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Chicago.
After being asked to leave the Yorkdale location when he first started working with Harry Rosen, he managed to convince his boss to give him another shot and he worked at the Bloor St location for two weeks over the holidays.
“My job was to organize and clean up tables after the holiday madness had started. I think probably the most amazing experience – I still contrast it to what Boxing Day is today – we were setting up for Boxing Day weekend, rows and rows and rows of overcoats and suits organized by size. We had a big gate crasher and a lineup outside. The doors opened early and the shopping madness was like people were grabbing things and tossing them on the floor, it was chaos in the store. And my job was to clean up quickly after the chaos,” said Rosen.
“That was a really fun experience, getting to really appreciate just how offline retail used to be high volume especially during the holiday period.”
Rosen grew up as a young boy always shadowing either his father Larry or a man named Bob Humphrey who was the CEO before Larry and was Rosen’s grandfather Harry’s right hand man.
“Getting to walk a store with Harry was a treat. Moments I cherish especially after his passing.”
Rosen said the funny thing about being a part of a retail family is a vacation is always turned into a work trip. You’re down in Florida and you have to check out the latest shopping centre to notice the different trends and what people are up to.
“I can’t tell you how many times I drove down to Buffalo or to Detroit to check out what Nordstrom was up to or Neiman Marcus was up to. It was always ‘do you want to go see the Bills game’ and it turned into a stopover at the Walden Galleria and checking out things,” he said.
“Definitely a lot of memories in tagging along and it was a master class in how to look at retail. Harry was able to pick apart how people were speaking to the customer better than anybody else.”
Surrounded by such legendary Canadian retail personalities like his grandfather and father, Ian Rosen learned many things first hand about the retail business.
From his grandfather Harry, he learned that saying it’s all about the customer doesn’t mean talking about it. It’s about doing it. It’s being around the customer. Asking them questions. Observing them while they are in the store.
“If someone did a horseshoe around the store and didn’t connect with anything, Harry was the first person to chase them out of the door and say ‘can I just ask you a few questions? What didn’t you see? What did you come in here for?’ He was always looking to learn not in an invasive way ‘hey I want to close the sale’ but he was very obsessed in understanding what the customer was doing,” said Ian Rosen.
“And number two with Harry, he was just a legendary merchandiser. He could articulate how a store was speaking to a customer. Like what signals we were giving off . . . He was just a master of that and I got to walk so many stores and malls with him. In fact, when I joined I did a day every two weeks with Harry just walking stores and I would try and teach him about ecommerce . . . I was trying to teach him and see if he could add anything to what the client experience ought to look like.”
Rosen said his father Larry is phenomenal at inspiring standards and scaling excellence.
“Harry came up with a brilliant idea of how to become a square peg in a round hole. How to mean something just for men and develop an expertise there. But how do you take that and scale it across 18,19, 20 stores? How do you train a leadership team to embrace that way of doing things? Pass on those standards. How do you measure success? Harry I think came up with a phenomenal concept but Larry and his leadership did a really good job evangelizing the way we do things,” said Rosen.
“These are still some of the same ways we do things today. And that’s really key.”
With Larry still in the role of CEO and Chairman, he is constantly available to give advice about the retail industry and the business.
“To my father’s credit he’s surrounded himself with a youthful leadership team that brings a fresh perspective and he realizes that fashion is a bit of a younger person’s business. He’s not on the cutting edge of what’s in and hip and he doesn’t want to pretend to be. So he needs to bring points of view into that.”
Ian Rosen said he reminds himself on a recurring basis that he is not Harry Rosen, and he is not Larry Rosen. And he will not be either of those two gentlemen. His brother Graham is the retailer’s Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Finance.
“He and I talk about how we’re not one another either,” said Rosen. “You can’t replicate it. In terms of my leadership style, I really love to understand how it works and I will invest a tremendous amount of energy in understanding why we’re doing things the way we’re doing it because I don’t want to bring anybody along on a journey that I can’t speak credibly to.
“And I think the worst thing that I’ve seen in my past life is when a dogmatic point of view starts to shift an organization one way and everybody underneath says they don’t understand, it doesn’t make sense to them. So I’m really invested in understanding why and I think that allows me to bring more and more people along with me and I think especially during COVID that was a huge win for me in my old role where we were taking a monumental step forward with respect to ecommerce and how we invest in technology.
“I can tell you where all the data is stored and how it’s mobilized and what systems speak to what systems. I put in the energy there so that we can come up with the right solution.
“I’m also a bit of a coalition builder. Once we build and shape the vision I like to work with a team that’s going to inspire the solution and come up with an answer. It’s not about me baking the cake.”
Rosen said he also likes to be approachable as it allows him to build stronger connections with not only his team around him but also their reports. Rosen doesn’t mind being forthcoming with his own shortcomings and he doesn’t mind picking on people for the expertise he believes they should have. He tries to make sure the company isn’t too hierarchical in the way it’s speaking to one another.
Outside of work, Rosen is busy with his family with three young girls and another one on the way. He enjoys playing hockey in a league. He loves to spend time in the pool. Skating as well.
“I had my first (child) at the end of 2019. COVID was the strangest blessing because the business I was in and charging forward was facing such an existential problem but I also got to be around for my first child’s firsts every step along the way because we were all locked up inside our houses,” he said.
“It showed me that the balance is so important.”
Today, balancing work and family remains important to Rosen. He said as a leader you have to be very trusting of the team around you.
“One of the best leadership sound bites that somebody shared with me recently that I’ve been leaning into is one of the luxuries you have as a leader is you get to set the expectations. You get to be very clear and ask ‘I need this to do my job’. That’s a luxury you have and if you don’t use it you’re not doing your job and you’re not helping other people do their jobs effectively.”
He said it’s also important to understand where to find things that give you energy so you’re more productive with the limited time you do have.
“This isn’t about clearing your email inbox. It’s about driving a business forward and sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice answering that email to make sure you’ve really weighed in strategically on a key project. That ultimately becomes one of the biggest challenges in front of people these days.”
