Nicole Smith

I actually went to beauty school and started in the service industry, working with Estee Lauder and Spa Services at Bloomingdale's. I just fell in love with retail, and grew through the ranks of retail into regional director and group manager. I built and scaled the outlet stores for Tommy Bahama - when I started with the company, there were 3 stores, one that I was managing, and two that were having some issues. I fixed and took care of all of the issues in those locations, and then continued to scale the outlets to 38 stores, working with GCs and doing site planning and working with performers to put together what would be the best locations and how many we need to open to every retail store. It was a scale of about 6 to 1 - so every time we were getting near opening our fourth or fifth retail store, we'd start planning the next outlet store. That division has been thriving ever since. When you scale business, you have to scale everything around it, because otherwise you grow too fast and you have no support. I invested in the growth and development of people so that we would be able to not dilute the brand as we kept opening in all these new areas, that we would actually have internal people to carry on the brand and the image of the company the correct way. People I hired as assistant and store managers are now regional directors and things - it's really great to see how everybody grows through the years. Now at Pickleball Central for about 4 years, I was brought in with my retail background of scaling business and opening stores. I built and scaled the traveling pro shop that travels with the professional tour for pickleball and the team that manages it. When a club came to us asking about issues with aged inventory, I designed a turnkey solution for clubs where we could go in, put a pro shop into their club, give them a rev share on the profit, and they have a turnkey operation with no inventory liability. In the last 2 years, we've opened over 70 of them.