Delivering Happiness

Ask Anything
The feedback from the culture book led us to launch a monthly
employee newsletter called Ask Anything, which is literally just that:
Employees are encouraged to send an e-mail and ask any question
they want. The anonymous questions and answers are compiled each
month and e-mailed to the entire company. We continue to receive
great questions from our employees. A sample of some of the
questions that have been asked:
• When is the holiday party?
• Who is on the 
Zappos.com
 board of directors?
• What other music have we considered having as our hold music?
• I have heard that there are some brands being discontinued. Do you
know which brands are being discontinued?
• Where do you see us in 3 years? How big, how many, and where?
• Why are women’s and men’s shoe sizes different?
• How many people at 
Zappos.com
have the same birthday and
anniversary date? Any one day more than others?
• What’s the most expensive item we have ever had on our site?
• How much does Zappos spend on shipping (to and from) in any
given month?
• Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?
We spent the next several years focusing on improving the customer
experience, strengthening our culture, and investing in our employees’
personal and professional development.
Our sales continued to grow, driven primarily by repeat customers and
word of mouth. Eventually, Sequoia ended up investing in Zappos, Alfred
moved to Vegas and joined the company full-time as CFO, we built out our
board of directors, and Wells Fargo in conjunction with two other banks
increased our credit line over time to $100 million.
It felt strange to have gone from the brink of going out of business to
such rapid growth over such a short period of time. We didn’t know it at the

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time, but all the hard work and investments we made into customer service
and company culture would pave the way for us to hit our goal of $1 billion
in gross merchandise sales in 2008—two years ahead of our original goal of
2010.
Looking back, a big reason we hit our goal early was that we decided to
invest our time, money, and resources into three key areas: customer service
(which would build our brand and drive word of mouth), culture (which
would lead to the formation of our core values), and employee training and
development (which would eventually lead to the creation of our Pipeline
Team).
Even today, our belief is that our Brand, our Culture, and our Pipeline
(which we internally refer to as “BCP”) are the only competitive advantages
that we will have in the long run.
Everything else can and will eventually be copied.