Interview With Rich Honiball Of NEXCOM
To start, the individual in this interview is Rich Honiball, who is currently the Executive Vice President / Chief Marketing & Merchandising Officer of the Naval Supply Command (NEXCOM). He has spent time in branding, product development, merchandising, marketing, and sourcing during his career, largely in a retail atmosphere. He has worked with brands such as JCPenney, Brooks Brothers, and Jos. A Bank. He currently oversees all merchandising operations in the Navy Exchange retail division, as well as marketing for the command, which encompasses retail and other command businesses.
A lot of what was discussed in this interview was detailing the current state of the industry and where it currently sits from someone who lives in it. During the interview, Honiball quoted Ron Thurston that retail is an accidental career; most people end up in a retail career due to a plan that did not fully work out. He says no one looks at front-line retail as a career despite it harboring some of the most employees across all industries. He goes further to discuss how retail impacts the general commerce sphere as well as the social sphere of the world more than we realize. From trade routes to the day we celebrate Thanksgiving on retail plays a major role in all these things.
I then chose to ask about some of the shortcomings of Retail and Academia’s attention on the industry. He responded, saying he does not believe that college fails retail but does not understand it. He jokingly discussed his issue with fashion merchandising as a degree, something he often joked about while I interned at NEXCOM. He discusses the numbers around industry and fashion, saying apparel, which makes up 8% of all retail, and fashion makes up 20%-30% of all apparel, meaning you get 3%-4% of all retail with a fashion merchandising degree.
Another major topic we discussed was the idea of mentorship. During my time working with Honiball, he discussed his history with mentorship and how it changed his career trajectory. The main idea he shared when asked about how to effectively get the most from mentorship he discussed a previous mentor who was president of the company that gave him his first marketing executive position, and he discussed that this individual would seek out people above him, to the side of him, and not as experienced as him, to create a broad perspective of his work and how he was doing to improve himself. He also mentioned the idea of informal mentorship and discussed someone he had at NEXCOM who would share how he did in meetings from both the business side and the Naval etiquette side of this position. The final idea he shared was reverse mentorship, in which you take feedback from a specific person at every level of the company, not planning to take every element of feedback, but just understanding how those working under you are perceiving your work.
The final question I asked Honiball was what makes NEXCOM different and how he is preserving that element. He first discussed the obvious expected answer, as he said of the people and community they are serving, but then went deeper. He chose to discuss and highlight that every individual store is an entrepreneur. Each store has its own active duty Commander to lead the store. They are in charge of a lot of decisions, but the branding is done at the top. His job requires consistency from one store to the next, but at the same time, he wants to allow the store to have its own entrepreneurial spirit. He believes the uniqueness of the stores is what takes them to the next level.
