Recently Gibson Brands, Inc. hired Anne Rohosy, previously a top executive at Levi Strauss & Co., Nike Inc., and Liz Claiborne, among others, to serve as chief human resources and transformation officer. The newly created position serves as further indication of how new ownership has been turning around the iconic 127-year-old brand since taking over in fall of 2018 and saving Gibson from the brink of bankruptcy.
MMR spoke with Rohosy in late 2021 to learn more of her business experiences, background with senior Gibson management, and plans to strengthen both the employee and MI dealer experiences with the company.
Can you give our readers a quick synopsis of your professional background prior to coming on board with Gibson?
I started my career in the retail industry and worked for a lot of amazing brands from Swatch to Liz Claiborne, to Nike, Levi’s. Now here I am at Gibson and it’s kind of been, operationally, more sales-driven, and then now I’m just kind of getting into a point where I’m just really managing, you know, businesses.
I understand that members of your family are active and passionate musicians. Are you, yourself? Do you play any instrument?
They are, yes. Hopefully, I can get there one day. I’m actually looking at starting up lessons here again. So the short answer is “No,” and the long answer is, “Yes, but not yet.”
I went to the Custom Shop the other day – and I’ve always been enthralled with mandolin – and I saw them making the mandolins. It’s like… it’s a work of art! That is what I want to start learning. I don’t know that I’m going to be good enough to do it, but…
No, that’s a great first choice! I feel like ukuleles have a really soft entry point in terms of the learning curve, compared to, say, guitar. My own experience is that mandolin sort of exists somewhere in between the two.
Oh, that’s good to hear!
Yeah. I think with some luck and effort, within a couple of days or weeks you’ll be rattling off a couple of tunes. Most people I know started off with R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” just because it’s… I mean, it’s not that difficult. Anyways, good luck with that.
I love that song, so that’s good. David in the custom shop told me, “Give me a half-hour. I’ll teach you the three chords on the mandolin, and you’ll be able to play 80 percent of the music that has come out of Nashville and features mandolin [laughs].
That sounds about right. So obviously, a thing that leaps off of the page, when I first heard the news of you coming on board, was, “Oh, it’s another former Levi’s person joining Gibson.” Did you know JC when you both were at Levi Strauss & Co.?
Yeah, actually, I had known JC when we both lived in Portland when he was president of Keen [footwear] and I was at Nike. You know, it’s a small town in that respect, so you kind of get a chance to know other people. And then, our kids actually went to the same elementary school.
And then I went to Levi’s, and then after I’d been there a couple of years, we had been looking for a brand president, and JC was just was such a Levi’s fan and fanatic. Plus he had such great brand experience that I had just put his name forward just for people to talk to, and the CEO then took it from there and really connected with him. Then we both worked there together, which was great.
That is great, absolutely. I’m going inject a little personal background here. I love Gibson – it’s absolutely imprinted in my DNA. If you include Epiphone, I have five Gibson guitars. It was really rough for people who share my appreciation of the brand for a while there and it’s been really, really wonderful in the past three or so years seeing this massive, aggressive turnaround. Aside from what fans and players may have felt at times, for dealers – MMR‘s primary reader base – an almost antagonistic relationship had developed between Gibson and even in some of the larger dealers and that’s changed drastically. What do you, in this new position, see yourself doing to help expand upon this really positive trajectory that the company’s been on since 2018-ish?
You know, when I look at it, it’s just really driving that culture. I mean, everything that you’ve talked about as far as changing the feel in the marketplace, whether it’s with our employees or whatever we call our team members, or whether it’s with the dealer base and consumers, it’s really about getting back to the culture of what Gibson is all about. So that’s gonna be my main thing. How do we continue to attract people that share in that vision and mission with us? I think we’ve got a really good foundation. JC has stated quite a bit, “It’s a 127-year-old startup,” right? So, you’ve got this amazing brand that has such amazing culture, and fans like you who really want to see this company succeed. So, my main goal is asking, “How do we make sure that we can fuel that growth through people, and sharing that vision, and build that culture even further through different employee value propositions and different programs that we can bring to bear? That’s very simply what it’s all about.
What’s on your shortlist of things you plan on doing or setting in motion to sort of reach those sort of larger angles that you just outlined?
Well, right now it’s so competitive in the marketplace attracting people into different companies, right? I mean, it’s been in the press, just… it’s low unemployment. It’s just difficult to get great people, so it’s really kind of making sure that we’ve got a competitive compensation, total compensation package that brings that value to people who want to come join us on this journey. Just before Thanksgiving, we kicked off a company ownership program, a profit-sharing program, for people which was unbelievable, right? I mean, you look at three years ago, we’re talking about being in bankruptcy, and then our parent company, KKR & Co., in discussions with JC and the team, really came up with this amazing program about sharing in the success, and that’s what we call our S.O.S.: Share of Success.
And we’re working also with a nonprofit called Ownership Works, which KKR has also been very instrumental in putting together, to really kind of bring these types of programs to big companies. But when you can stand in front of a group of team members and really validate all the hard work that they put in, all the investment, all the things that somebody who wants to invest in your business does it’s really super exciting. So it’s working on those types of programs, as well as also looking at development and bringing on board different programs. We’re putting in some different management training, development programs in place. We actually have a physical learning library that we’re putting in each of the different craftories, and then also in Nashville, so people can actually go in and have access to books, whether it’s on lean manufacturing, or marketing, or business and market development.
What would you like MI retailers to know about what you bring to the table in your new position, and how it may potentially impact them positively?
I’ve been officially with the company since the fall of 2021, but I first came to the company and worked to help when Gibson bought Mesa/Boogie – I was running the transformation, Mesa/Boogie into Gibson – so I’ve kind of been observer for the last 14 months of the company. And people in the market talk about how Gibson is in a turnaround, and I can feel the shift happening, and I would absolutely communicate that I believe that the turnaround is over. Now, we’re more about, “How do we accelerate the path that Gibson is on?” Whether it’s product or marketing, or the Gibson Garage, or what we’re doing with our team members, the future is happening in front of us, so how do we accelerate that, and bring all of those conditions for success into the future? And much of it is through the people, which is what I’m going be focusing on, along with the rest of management team.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share with MMR readers that we haven’t already covered?
Just that, hey, the conditions for success are all there. How do we get after it? And it’s all doing it in partnership with our retailers and all of our partners out there in the marketplace that help us bring this to the consumer. We wouldn’t be there without them.
