Teaching Your Customers to Fly: How Kitty Hawk Kites Aims to Delight and Empower People Through Experience

In this episode, Stephanie Beringhele interviews Ben Saltzman, the Marketing Director of Kitty Hawk Kites. Kitty Hawk Kites has 28 retail stores and several e-commerce sites. 

• 01:25: How Ben got into the retail business
• 03:09: Understanding Kitty Hawk Kite's retail business model - Kitty Hawk Kites, Kitty Hawk Surf Company, and Life is Good stores. 
• 05:49: How Kitty Hawk Kites went from being a hang gliding school into becoming a large destination business in coastal states. 
• 06:55: How the mission of the business drives the entire experience. “We want to teach our customers to fly”.
• 7:54: Social media is a powerful tool to communicate with customers.
• 8:43: Encourage your customers to share their stories that relate to your retail business, they will!
• 11:06: The challenges of employee recruiting. Training, housing, and retention are top of mind. 
• 11:54: How Kitty Hawk Kites encourages their employees to grow and move throughout the organization. 
• 14:32: Trade shows are critical to business and relationships, but also for finding trends. 
• 15:41: Economic conditions change how you do business. You need to learn how to pivot in order to get your customers' business. 
• 16:38: Mastering story and sharing customer experiences is critical in showing why you’re important to your customers’ lives. 

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