Chris Wanlass winds his way through one of five shoe departments at Nordstrom’s flagship store in Pacific Centre.
He passes some Christmas shoppers, hurried office workers running errands and others mulling potential purchases. Abruptly, he stops to pick up some litter that someone had carelessly dropped in the middle of an aisle.
Then, after an escalator ride, he adjusts a sign on a rack of women’s wear.
The 39-year-old, who oversees 960 people as the store’s general manager, has a finely tuned sense of how his store should look – a sensibility honed from working at Nordstrom for the past 23 years.
Wanlass was a teenager in small-town Utah when he took his first job, as a stockboy, at a Nordstrom store in suburban Salt Lake City – a 30-minute drive from his home.
Through the years, he has hopscotched across the continent with jobs in bigger cities such as Atlanta, Seattle and San Francisco as well as smaller centres such as White Plains, New York; Sacramento, California; and, finally, Bellevue, Washington, where he managed the 323-store chain’s third-best-performing store.
He believes that the Vancouver location has the potential to be the chain’s top revenue generator despite being slightly smaller than the Bellevue store in square footage.
“Vancouver is one of our five biggest stores by size but its efficient use of space makes it feel almost as large as Bellevue,” Wanlass said in his office, which, with its black-and-white drawings of faces on one wall and brightly coloured abstract art on another, reflects the same spirit of elegant simplicity seen throughout the store.
“We have ambitions of making the Vancouver store the largest one for sales in our company – until the Manhattan store opens in late 2018, when that store will eclipse all of our other stores.”
Retail Insider Media owner Craig Patterson told Business in Vancouver that he expects the Vancouver Nordstrom store could generate more than $200 million in annual sales, and that the company’s opening day likely topped $3 million in sales.
Wanlass would not confirm either assertion but said opening-day sales were very strong and substantially above what was an already ambitious goal.
Company loyalist
While other local executives, such as former Best Buy Canada president Kevin Layden, have called retail the “accidental profession” because they never intended to forge a career in the sector, Wanlass realized early in his employment with Nordstrom that retail could be his long-term dwelling place, and he planned moves accordingly.
Wanlass gave up his original dream to be an orthodontist or oral surgeon around the time that a new manager arrived at his first store – a woman who had moved to Utah from Seattle for the job.
“I thought, ‘Wow – people take on life changes for this company,’” Wanlass said. “I also met some interesting and diverse people, which was important for me growing up in a small town in Utah.”
Openly gay, Wanlass met his partner, Tom Wells, during Wanlass’ 15-month stint in Atlanta, just after that city hosted the 1996 Olympic Games.
Wanlass was that store’s menswear department manager – a promotion from the same role in Utah because the Atlanta store was larger, he explained.
An opportunity to be a corporate buyer for Nordstrom arose in Seattle, so both he and Wells made the move to the West Coast. Wanlass knew that being a buyer would help his career.
When Wells, who works in banking, was transferred to San Francisco, Wanlass persuaded Nordstrom to move him to that city, first as an assistant manager at the Union Square store and then as manager of a smaller store in what Wanlass calls “the fog belt.”
When Wells got a job on Wall Street, the pair moved to Manhattan, and Wanlass commuted to White Plains, where he was the store manager.
“I’ve had two goals personally and professionally in my life,” Wanlass said. “One was to live in Manhattan, which I did, and the other was to live internationally, which I am now.”
(Image: At 39 years old, Nordstrom GM Chris Wanlass has spent more than half his life employed by Nordstrom | Rob Kruyt)
Although Wanlass said he still loves the Manhattan lifestyle, the couple left New York after a two-year stint just before the Great Recession – a decision prompted by their desire to have children. They did not feel that they had a strong social network in the metropolis and they wanted to move closer to family and be in a city where they could have a yard.
“Surrogacy is also illegal in New York,” he said. “You could still do it but we thought the West Coast would probably be better.”
The two chose a surrogacy agency to help them become parents and to ensure that their twin boys, who are now six years old, would have a genetic link.
Nordstrom offered Wanlass a job managing a store in Sacramento and his partner was able to telecommute, so the two moved to a house with a yard and pool and lived a suburban-style existence typified by what Wanlass calls “going to Costco.”
The Bellevue store was the next stop, in 2010, before his arrival in Vancouver.
“I love this company and the opportunities it has provided me,” Wanlass said. “I’ve built a bit of a reputation here and I’m trusting that if the company sees me in a certain role, I’m pretty flexible. If something broader presented itself in Canada, I’d be open to that.”
(Image: Sign on the wall in an internal walkway at Nordstrom | Glen Korstrom)
While the family lived in a house in Seattle before their most recent move, they have embraced the lifestyle afforded by their Yaletown condominium. Wanlass walks to work while his partner telecommutes.
“As a parent, it’s easy when you’re in a house to open up your back door and say, ‘Go play in the yard,’” he said. “When you don’t have the yard space, it requires you – and this is positive – to spend more time together as a family.” •
