Speed Thrills

Read this interesting twist to the traditional quote somewhere the other day - "Speed kills but with skills it thrills" - super tacky, I know - but it got me questioning whether the old adage of "slow and steady wins the race" is even that relevant in today's hyperconnected world.

One of the teams I've literally watched birth in front of my own eyes and scale (at last count to 800+ employees and associates in under 36 months) is the SUGAR Retail team - and they're anything but slow and steady. "Fast and Furious" would be more apt!

There's a constantly shifting balance of restlessness and ruthlessness that is only brought to order by a fanatic bias towards action and obsession with learning from mistakes. By the end of the first 18 months, we had iterated our store launch plan so many times at so many different scales of operation that out of that was born the now internally popular "SLP" - a painfully-crafted "11-point SUGAR Launch Playbook" that held up across retail formats of different shapes and sizes... and needless to say, provided the wind in our sails.

Execute. Stumble. Learn. Iterate

It was thus an emotionally-charged evening both at the venue and back at offices/homes when SUGAR Cosmetics bagged the IMAGES Retailer Of The Year Award for Rapid Retail Expansion (Small Format)! No kidding, check out the video below:

Super stoked about winning in the small format category today. Super stoked about the journey between now and making it in the large format category next year!

To the team that continues to punch above their weight and inspires me every single day with the fearlessness and naivete that makes every impossible task seem like a possibility:

Thank you - it's an honour to build with you!

Onwards to the next big hairy audacious goal now...