Leader Spotlight: Creating a brand that people aspire to, with Mike Wu

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Mike Wu is Senior Director, Ecommerce and Customer Experience at Monos.com. He started his career in hospitality and worked at various hotels, including Poets Cove Resort & Spa, Coast Coal Harbor Hotel by IPA, and L’Hermitage Hotel Vancouver. Mike then transitioned to management consulting at ApartHotel Properties of Vancouver before joining Ksenia Penkina Inc. Before his current role at Monos.com, he worked as an integrator at AromaTech, a fragrance innovation company.

In our conversation, Mike talks about the importance of the creative component in his work and the goal to design a brand that “people can aspire to.” He discusses his goal and efforts as a leader to make people feel included and respected beyond their positions. Mike also shares how Monos’ Customer Happiness team fosters an environment of open communication and helpfulness.

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Adapting to new times and environments

To start, could you introduce Monos and talk about its history over the past couple of years?

Monos is a luggage and travel brand that started around 2018. I joined in 2021, but I’ve known the founders since the company’s beginning. It was an interesting time for them because they had just launched a luggage brand, it was growing, and then COVID hit. Suddenly, nobody was traveling and cities were shut down.

Our founders are very smart, and they quickly pivoted to merchandising a UV wand product. It was essentially a portable travel plug that kills bacteria with UV light. They sold about $2 million worth of product within a month and that kept the company alive. While other companies were shutting down advertising, Monos was able to continue and build a strong base of customers during the pandemic. After COVID, people started buying travel products again so Monos shifted back to luggage, and from 2021 to now, Monos has grown by 500 percent.

You previously worked in several different industries, including hospitality. Have you adapted your leadership style from one industry to the next, or do you have some core principles that remain constant?

You always have to adapt. You’ll always meet new people in different environments as times change. When I was working in hotels, there was not much social media happening, but right now, a whole new generation of consumers have grown up using smartphones and social media. They want to communicate differently and more efficiently, so that creates a necessity for businesses to adapt.

With that said, there are always the basics you hold onto. For me, it’s making sure I’m doing every task to perfection, regardless of its size or importance. Monos is a very creative brand and our teams get excited about big projects. However, huge initiatives aren’t super common. What makes you successful is making sure the small, everyday tasks and projects are completed to perfection. Because those are the things that, when you add them up, make you successful.

I like to compare this to families and children. People say, “Don’t forget about the simple days because those become the big memories.” When you spend time with your kids, the small things like watching them eat or trying to do things for the first time become big memories in the future. I view tasks at work the same way.

Building teams from the ground up

Could you talk about a time when you built a digital team from the ground up? What elements do you feel contributed to the team’s success?

When I first started at Monos, I joined a small customer experience team called Customer Happiness. During Black Friday that year, we were drowning in tickets and customer emails. There were probably 2,000 overdue tickets and we couldn’t keep up. The entire company jumped in to help out — our founders, our creative team, marketers, etc. That’s when I realized I needed to build a dedicated customer service team from the ground up.

We built an offshore customer service team, based in the Philippines. Different agencies offer this type of service, but I wanted to have direct access to our employees. I wanted to train, coach, and mentor them like we do for our HQ team. We were able to find the right partner, hire 40 people within three months, and train them.

To plan for future scaling, we built data points between customer service and different departments like the product and supply chain teams. In a way, we weren’t just adding 40 customer service agents to take care of customers — we were adding resources to help tackle issues at the source. For example, if we can immediately disseminate data to product and supply chain teams and fix issues and they’re identified, then customers won’t have a negative experience and won’t need to email us.

How do you ensure your team remains happy and motivated during those super busy times? How do you prevent or minimize people feeling burnt out or overwhelmed?

There’s a common misconception that customer service reps are only there to answer questions or to help. This is partially true, but I also see customer service as helping direct the customer to where you want them to be. That way, they can experience what you set for them. If you’re able to see customer service as part of the journey, that changes the whole perspective.

In terms of keeping people happy and motivated, I recommend having fun with the team. I’m pretty hands-on; I like to get in there and help. I want to make sure that people see that I want to do their job as well. Additionally, we encourage open communication, so if there’s a question someone doesn’t know the answer to, they can ask the group channel. In fact, we discourage private conversations because we want to be able to see what everyone’s doing so that others can reference that question in the future.

What’s your process for empowering people to feel confident in their jobs and hone in on their unique strengths?

I think it’s important to give everyone equal opportunities and create openness for them. They know more about the day-to-day work than me, so they should know and feel that they are the experts. They can respond to emails or do multiple tickets or chats faster than me because they’re in the system every single day. I also like to give them the opportunity to add on more responsibility, and they’ll take it on if they’re able to.

Making people feel beyond their positions

What’s your approach to promoting a collaborative environment, especially when you have geographically dispersed teams?

In addition to the team in the Philippines that I mentioned earlier, we have teams in different parts of the US, Canada, etc. We utilize technology quite well. We’re on Slack, but we have this unique culture on the platform where it feels like we’re all in the same room or the same office. We joke around, talk about families and trips, etc. If we receive a funny email from a customer, we forward it to everyone and laugh about it together.

We also encourage everyone to talk in public channels so that we can continue to foster that environment of openness. We want to make people feel like they’re part of something unique, even though they may be far away from other coworkers physically.

With such a global team, what’s your approach to promoting inclusion and ensuring people feel valued?

People feel valued when they are empowered. Our Customer Happiness team is very flat in structure. Everyone is on the same level and is able to make decisions. We don’t have an escalation process; if a customer is unhappy, we don’t transfer them to a supervisor or manager. The agent handling them has the authority to make decisions based on what they think makes the most sense.

Doing this helps people feel valued and respected. It’s important to build a philosophy and culture like that. It also trickles down to helping people feel included.

The importance of how you make people feel

Going back to building things from the ground up, do you have an example of a time when you modified an existing process in a way that led to a measurable improvement in customer experience?

Yes, I have an example from my time in the hospitality industry. When a guest checks in early to a hotel that was full the previous night, their room is often unavailable as it’s still being cleaned. Still, telling a customer who arrived a little early, “Oh, we were full last night, so you have to wait until 4pm” is not a great customer experience.

So, we developed a script where we go behind the desk and pretend to scan through the computer for an available room. Then, we’d say, “I took a look for you and unfortunately, there’s no room available at the moment. I’ll be happy to take your bags and send you upstairs to enjoy some complimentary tea or coffee while you wait, though.” Even though we knew there were no rooms available, just performing that action showed customers that we wanted to help.

Recognizing that those little actions do make a huge difference was important. It’s not about what the resolution is, it’s about how you present it and how you make people feel.

Have you been able to translate that type of idea into a digital experience?

We’re actually developing something right now along those lines in our customer service flow. Nowadays, everyone loves to chat, text, and DM. I personally feel like writing emails and putting them in a nice email format is somewhat outdated.

If I were to write a long email and say, “Hi, thank you for the email. First of all, allow me to look into this for you,” That’s great and professional, but we’re testing this concept of responding in a chat format in email. For example, we’d say, “Thank you! Allow me to look into this for you.” Having that short and formal conversation in email humanizes the conversation and makes it more personal. Tweaking how we speak is going to be impactful, in my view, but we’re working to test it and change it as needed.

Building a lifestyle brand

Could you talk a bit about your very successful lifetime program?

Sure. If you buy a piece of Monos luggage and have an issue with it, it’s taken care of for the lifetime of the product. If the body of the suitcase breaks or cracks, we’ll repair it for you. If there’s an issue with the handle, we’ll replace it. We want to see how we can extend the life of the product for as long as possible.

For example, say a customer is traveling to Europe and the wheel of their luggage breaks in Berlin because the airline handles it roughly. We’ll send a brand-new replacement luggage to Berlin and deliver it to the customer at their hotel. One time, a customer experienced a hotel fire. The outside of their luggage was completely destroyed, but the inside was perfectly intact. We sent them a brand-new replacement.

Also, if we do replace someone’s luggage because it is scratched, but the luggage is still functional, we’ll ask that it be donated locally or given to someone in need. We’ll send them a replacement, but we have a commitment to sustainability. We’re part of Climate Neutral Certified and 1% for the Planet, so we want to reduce the amount of shipping, emissions, transportation, etc.

Consumers may research product features online, but getting a feel for the luggage, its movement, fabric, etc., is more of an in-person experience. Have you put anything in place to try to bridge that?

That’s tricky because you can’t feel or touch something through a screen — that’s why our creatives are so important to us. We try to create a digital environment that showcases our products as an aspirational brand. When people look at the product, we want them to envision how this luggage will fit into their lifestyle.

In terms of omnichannel, we want to create an environment where customers can have a conversation with us online, walk into a store, continue the same conversation there, and vice versa. We are communicating at all times. If a customer needs a price adjustment in-store, the store staff puts the request in our public Slack channel for the online Customer Happiness team to take care of. We’re able to be very efficient that way.

Balancing conversion and creativity is one of the core values of the ecommerce team. Could you talk about that a bit and share how you strike that balance?

I’ve worked with different ecommerce teams that focused on conversion first. The sentiment would be, “We need to use words like this for SEO, or “We have to put the buttons here and fill this space with text.” But, if you look at the resulting page through a creative lens, you realize that it’s so jumbled that you’ve lost the brand identity. The page was built for SEO, not the customer.

We balance that and understand where people are at. They’re on Instagram, TikTok, etc., to look at beautiful pictures and experiences. Again, this is how we want to create a brand that people can aspire to — a lifestyle brand. That has its own conversion potential as well.