Boston Days - Part 12

Leg Godt: How a 94-Year-Old Toy Company Out-Engaged the Smartphone

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a Harvard classroom, a LEGO store in downtown Boston, and one small race car taught me about customer engagement and repeat business.)

Footfall is rented. Engagement is owned. That is the only difference between a store you visit once and a brand you return to for life.

I had waited forty years for one walk into a LEGO store — to build something with my own hands beside other children, browse every shelf without an agenda, and spend a modest, self-imposed budget down to its last dollar. 

Small ambitions, held for a very long time.

I understood why that wait mattered inside a Harvard classroom, months before Boston. Early on during my Senior Leadership Program, we studied LEGO's turnaround as a case in discipline. 

Founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Denmark, the company took its name from "leg godt" — play well. 

The interlocking brick arrived in 1958, the minifigure in 1978. Then came theme parks, video games, and licensing deals that nearly buried it — $800 million in debt by 2003. 

A new CEO cut thousands of products, sold the parks, and rebuilt around the brick. 

By 2015, LEGO had overtaken Mattel and Hasbro to become the world's most valuable toy company — still earning over $9 billion a year, as newborns now inherit smartphones before toys.

That paradox pulled me into the LEGO Store in downtown Boston. 

A three-storey brick giraffe named Gio guards the corner, stopping strangers before they step inside — engagement earned on a public sidewalk, for free. 

Inside, a wall traces the company's history, ending on its founding motto: only the best is good enough. 

Nearby sat a bin of loose bricks, no set, no instructions, where I built beside a teenager, a toddler, and a father, united by nothing but the bricks. 

A sign above read "Adults Welcome," and I took that personally.

I browsed every wall, each merchandised as a complete idea, then bought the one thing that mattered — a small LEGO Formula One race car, a nod to three decades watching the sport, and a deliberate choice of Team LEGO over any real one. 

Twenty dollars, two hundred and one pieces, one evening of building I still remember.

A smartphone holds a child's attention for an hour. It cannot hand a stranger a brick and watch two generations finish something together. 

That difference is why LEGO still outsells every screen, ninety-four years on.

Retailers spend fortunes chasing footfall and forget that footfall without engagement never returns. 

LEGO stopped chasing new customers decades ago — it simply gave the ones it had a reason to return, never with a discount, always with a brick placed in the right hand.

Boston was teaching me again — that repeat business is never bought. It is built, one engaged customer at a time.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11 here.

Boston Days - Part 11

The Floor Never Lies. A Levi's Story.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a Levi's store in downtown Boston taught me about frontline investment, people culture and the only leadership strategy that never goes on sale.)

Every retail store tells you the truth eventually. You just have to know where to look.

Not at the window display. Not at the promotional banners. At the floor. At the people on it. At what they do when no one is watching — and whether that changes when the store gets busy.

Labor Day in America is more than a national holiday. The first Monday of September each year, the country pauses to honour its working men and women — and then, with cheerful irony, heads straight to the shops. 

Retailers treat it as one of the season's defining sales events. Discounts go deep. Footfall spikes. The floor gets difficult to manage. That is precisely when culture either shows up or gets exposed.

I walked into the Levi's store in downtown Boston a few days before Labor Day 2026.

Promotions everywhere. Deep discounts. Stacks of denim at prices that stopped you mid-stride. Trial rooms with a moving queue. Customers working the racks with that particular focused energy that only a genuine deal creates. 

The kind of footfall that tests every system a store has — replenishment, trial room management, billing, floor discipline.

And yet the floor was immaculate.

Every rack faced. Every folded stack clean and aligned. An associate moved quietly down an aisle straightening merchandise while a customer waited at the trial room. 

Unhurried. Unannounced. 

Not performing for a manager. Simply doing what they had been trained — and trusted — to do. The reset was continuous, invisible and relentless. Clockwork, in the middle of a frenzy.

I have seen this before. Not often enough, but I have seen it.

A sunny afternoon in March 2005. Java Green Coffee Shop, Forum Mall, Bangalore. Sanjeev Mohanty, then Vice President - India, sat across and interviewed me for the role of leading United Colors of Benetton's Southern India operations. 

What stayed with me from that conversation was not the questions. It was his conviction — unhurried, like that associate on the Boston floor — that stores are built from the inside out. People first. Standards second. Sales will follow.

Over the year that followed, working under his leadership, we set up five new stores across four states. We also envisioned what was then the largest UCB store in India — 10,000 square feet at the famed Indira Nagar in Bangalore. 

Every one of those stores worked because the people in them understood why the work mattered.

After a long stint at UCB followed by Jabong, Sanjeev went on to build Levi's India into a formidable, consumer-connected business before being elevated to lead Levi Strauss & Co.'s US and Canada operations — the brand's largest commercial cluster in the world. 

That arc does not happen by accident. It happens because you never stop believing that the frontline associate is the business.

What I saw in that downtown Boston store was not good operations management. It was culture made visible.

The wages you pay, the incentives you design, the wellbeing you protect, the training you invest in, the mentoring you make time for — none of these are HR activities. 

They are the actual work of leadership. They are what determines whether your floor holds its standard on a chaotic pre-holiday Saturday.

The associate folding jeans in the middle of a sale frenzy is not completing a task. That person is protecting your brand, enabling your conversion and defending your margin — simultaneously, willingly and at scale.

Take care of your frontline. They will take care of everything else.

Boston was teaching me. Again.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 and Part 10 here.

Boston Days - Part 10

One Store. Two Concepts. A Retail Sangam at Assembly Row.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the art — and ambition — of co-locating two distinct retail concepts under a single roof.)

There is a phenomenon in nature — and in Indian languages there is a word for it: Sangam. The meeting of rivers. Where two bodies of water converge and yet retain their individual colours, their distinct character, before eventually merging into one. 

Rovers Bhagirathi and Alaknanda meet at Devprayag in the Himalayas — one clear and swift, one jade-green and fuller — visible as separate threads for a stretch before the river earns its most sacred name: River Ganga.

In Africa, the Blue Nile and the White Nile converge at Khartoum, Sudan, the difference in hue unmistakable even from a distance. In Germany, the Rhine and the Moselle meet at Koblenz — the Deutsches Eck — one dark, one lighter, side by side before yielding to each other.

A fellow pilgrim recommended it warmly. Assembly Row, Somerville. The combined TJ Maxx and HomeGoods store. Go, they said. You won't leave easily.

They were right. Wow was my first reaction.

The combined store spans approximately 45,000 square feet — TJ Maxx occupying roughly 28,000 and HomeGoods anchoring the balance. Large enough to disorient first-timers. Purposeful enough to reward the patient.

That is precisely how TJ Maxx and HomeGoods begin and end inside Assembly Row.

TJ Maxx was born in 1976 in Framingham, Massachusetts — an off-price apparel and fashion retailer under the larger TJX Companies umbrella. Today, TJX is a global behemoth with revenues of approximately $54 billion and over 4,900 stores across nine countries. 

TJ Maxx's differentiator is its treasure-hunt model — a curated mix of private labels, select international brands, and opportunistic buys, all at 20 to 60% below traditional retail. What struck me was the dominance of private labels, with a handful of recognisable international names sprinkled strategically through the aisles.

HomeGoods launched in 1992 — also a TJX creation, and a natural evolution of the same off-price philosophy applied to home furnishings, décor, and kitchenware. Its value proposition is sharp: global sourcing, constantly rotating assortment, and price points that make discretionary spending feel responsible. 

Similar concepts operating globally include Burlington in the US, JYSK across Europe, and Next Home in the UK — each anchoring the off-price home segment in their respective markets.

The customer synergies are obvious. The shopper who browses for a discounted jacket is frequently the same person who lingers over a ceramic lamp. The household wallet has multiple compartments — and this store is designed to open all of them in a single visit. 

Like a seasoned relay athlete passing the baton without breaking stride, TJ Maxx hands the customer seamlessly to HomeGoods at an invisible midpoint, the transition so organic it is barely felt.

Back in India, Big Bazaar attempted something similar — fashion and grocery under one roof. It was bold and prescient. But the mood states for clothing and groceries are fundamentally different. 

One is aspiration-driven; the other is need-driven. The shopper's mental wallet rarely visits both categories with equal enthusiasm in the same visit. Fewer takers initially, and eventually, structurally difficult to sustain.

Shoppers Stop and Home Stop represent a closer Indian analogy. Home Stop, a standalone home lifestyle format under the same K Raheja Corp umbrella, never shared a roof with Shoppers Stop to my knowledge — they remained separate standalone stores. 

Home Stop stores have been largely phased out in recent years, further validating how hard this adjacency is to execute profitably. If a combined format exists anywhere today, it is an exception worth investigating, not a pattern.

Three Insights. 

First, shared customer DNA is the strongest argument for co-location — not proximity of product categories. 

Second, the off-price model creates a treasure-hunt psychology that benefits enormously from size and variety, rewarding exploration across both concepts. 

Third, a seamless transition zone between the two concepts — visible but not jarring — is where the real design intelligence lives.

Four Strategies. 

One: anchor each concept with its own identity before inviting the overlap. 

Two: let value, not discount signage, do the emotional heavy lifting. 

Three: invest in sight lines — the HomeGoods world must be visible from deep inside TJ Maxx, creating curiosity. 

Four: train frontline staff to serve both concepts fluently, so the customer never feels handed off, only accompanied.

Five Lessons for Indian Retail Practitioners. 

One: customer synergy must be tested before store design is committed — survey before you sketch. 

Two: the off-price model requires sourcing sophistication that cannot be shortcut; it is a supply chain play first and a retail play second. 

Three: mood-state alignment matters more than category adjacency — Big Bazaar's challenge was mood, not merchandise. 

Four: size is a feature in this format, not a cost — undersizing kills the treasure-hunt. 

Five: in India, where organised retail is still maturing, the combined-concept model demands patience; the payoff is real, but the runway is longer than investors typically allow.

Assembly Row did not just show me two stores. It showed me what retail can be when two well-defined identities trust each other enough to share a roof.

Boston was teaching me. Again.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.