#so is anybody gonna make vp cuts or not

[rinbylin]

[razrbladekiss]

TYRANTS | Chapter Eight - Angels Or Devils

WORD COUNT: 6.3k

WARNINGS: mentions of death, grief, tig, usual SOA shit

MASTERLIST

Irked, Chibs stuffed his cellphone into the pocket of his cut with a prolonged fuck to accompany the squelch of glass against leather.

He couldn’t get a firm grip on anything this morning.

Jax was at large, Isla and Tig had rolled onto the lot together looking much, much too comfortable, and Gemma was chewing every goddamn soul’s ear off about her son.

To say that he wanted the day to be over—before it had even commenced—was the understatement of the fucking year.

“Where the hell is he?” Clay barked from the front of the garage, turning to eye Isla directly. “You sure you haven’t seen him?”

“If I knew where he was, I would’ve told you by now.” Her retort was just as curt, prompting Tig to tense in his spot beside her.

He twined his hand around her bicep in order to calm her, but it was no use.

“Well somebody must know where he is—“

“You tried callin’ Tara?” Chibs cut the president off, hoping he’d be able to take some of the heat off of his daughter—the one that seemed to get all of Clay’s Jax-fueled frustrations launched atop her these days.

He just glared at the Scot.

“I can swing by his place? Make sure he ain’t there?” Tig offered.

“He isn’t. Wendy would’ve said.”

“Alright,” the sergeant smacked his lips together. “We’re gonna have to go without him, then.”

Isla hummed, agreeing with Tig.

That forced a vexed snarl from Clay, and she wanted to throttle him for being so fucking haughty today.

“What? He has a point. If we wait around for him, then we’re gonna be late and the other Sons will get to the cemetery before us. Jax knows where we’re going, and what time this fucking funeral starts, so just trust that he’ll be there!”

Her outburst was completely uncharacteristic. It was brash and loud, and Clay realized that her emotions were running a hell of a lot higher today than what they usually would have, so he allowed it to pass.

He cut her some slack because that was what she needed. Isla needed to blow off some steam, to raise her voice and yell out her frustrations because she would’ve let them bubble over, otherwise.

Plus, unbeknownst to him, she had started to take the Mirtazapine that had been prescribed to her, and she still didn’t know how to feel about it.

It was odd. Everything about today, was just fucking odd.

“Kids right.” The rasped acknowledgment came from Happy this time, nodding in her direction with that signature stoic expression he was known to host. “Jax wouldn’t miss this.”

“Alright.” Clay waved a hand tersely before gesturing to the sea of Harley-Davidsons parked side-by-side. “You heard ‘em. Let’s go.”

Tig grabbed at her hand as she went to slip away—exactly like she did to him last night—and pulled her toward him.

The moment didn’t go unnoticed by Clay and her father as they mounted their bikes, sharing the same look that’d been meshed with confusion and concern.

“You good now?”

She nodded, using her pointer finger to twist the crucifix that was sat against her neck, feeling a foreign heat prickle against her cheeks because all eyes were on them.

After turning up together today, people had their suspicions, too.

And those suspicions were mostly held by Chibs and the pres, but it was partly unrest because they both knew what Tig had done—though, Chibs wasn’t officially privy to Clay pulling the strings.

He would be, though. In time, he would find out for himself.

“Gemma and Wendy are heading out in the SUV. Are you going too?” He squinted underneath the sun, pulling his sunglasses from the neck of his shirt.

“I am.” Isla smiled, squeezing Tig’s hand. “Ride safe.”

She stood straight—not having to shift onto her toes because her heels provided some more height—and pressed a dulcet kiss to his cheek.

“Please don’t get into another fight today.” She expressed sadly, lightly ghosting her fingertips over the bruise sitting uncomfortably against his cheekbone. “I don’t think I have it in me to take care of you again.”

“I can’t make any promises.” Her lips curled upward, expressing some sort of smile—though, what with the forthcoming event, she didn’t feel too good about it.

But she remained silent, after that.

Isla got into the car without saying a single word.

The lull was of course grim, but stillness was what the three women needed. It was good for them to sit in complete silence—the only sound coming from the din of the car engine and outside of the vehicle—because it allowed them space to think.

She needed to collect her thoughts this morning, especially after what she had learned last night. Isla didn’t want to think that Jax would have flipped on Tig like that, but it was Jax.

He was unpredictable.

Never once had she felt a sense of outrage that she wasn’t sure how to quell whenever thinking of her best friend, but she was beginning to understand just why Clay was so pissed at his rashness lately.

Even if he was acting on instinct—using his conscience to rule his decisions—Jax was still acting recklessly. His desire to do the morally sound thing outweighed the need that his club had for him to carry out the act that would result in the greater good.

And he was right to stop Tig from pulling the trigger on that girl, but Isla was wary of how he had decided to handle it.

“You didn’t call me last night.�� Gemma whispered as the car pulled up to the cemetery gates. “You said that you’d call me.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Genuinely, she told her. “When I got in I just went straight to bed, but then Tig turned up at my place and he needed my help, and then—“

“You let him stay.” She finished Isla’s sentence with a hum, providing her with an unusually somber glance. “If there’s anything going on between the two of you, then it’s okay—“

“There isn’t.” Isla shot her down, impatiently waiting for the all-clear to leave the vehicle. “He got hurt last night, needed patching up and didn’t wanna go to the clubhouse in case he saw Jax again, and so he came to me. And, because I’m nice, I let him stay the night.”

“Why wouldn’t he wanna see Jax?”

Wendy’s qualm came unexpectedly. She hadn’t thought that the blonde was listening to the little back and forth.

“Because he was the reason that Tig needed his face fixed.” She spat bitterly when Wendy just blinked at her, hoping to God that they’d be able to get outside soon.

Her irritation with the VP was palpable, and Gemma couldn’t help wondering whether Jax’s stunt had a part to play in why she was so galled when his name was brought up before they left the garage.

Regardless, Isla was getting along with it today. For the sake of Opie and his kids, she was putting her hostility aside and paying her respects to Donna the way that she had always been taught to.

“Woah, what a turn out.” Her admiration for the Sons grew with every single member—every Nomad—that she saw riding along the winding road.

Isla moved between Chibs and Tig, holding tightly onto her father’s hand as they walked toward Donna’s casket.

“Still no Jax.” Almost relieved, Tig noted. “Wonder if he’s gonna ride over with Tacoma.”

“Doubt it.” The Scot added. “He woulda followed us. Dunno where the fuck he’s gotten to.”

“He’ll be here.” She promised hopefully, breaking away from the two men—shaking Chibs off when he held on a little bit tighter, not wanting to let her go.

The black dress she’d thrown on was hardly funeral attire, but the tights hugging her legs underneath the cotton made it a bit better.

Tig watched her pad across the grass and toward Opie, trying to sniff back his own tears at the sight of her taking a long-stemmed blue flower, kissing the petals, and placing it atop the coffin.

It was horrible.

“I’m sorry, Ope.” Isla pressed a kiss to her fingers and ghosted it over the wood, feeling her eyes dampen. “Anything you need—anything at all that you can think of for yourself or your mom or the kids—I’m here. Always.”

He couldn’t quite find the words to thank her, but she knew that he was grateful. Opie didn’t have to say anything for Isla to recognize his appreciation for her, for his family, and for everybody that turned out today.

Jax wasn’t there, though. Not yet.

And, perhaps, Isla being at his side during a time of such harrowing distress was her way of trying to comfort him because his best friend was nowhere to be seen. But she would’ve done it for anybody.

She just wished that it wasn’t Opie.

“I love you…So much.” She whispered through a smile when more people began to filter in, backing away to sit beside Gemma and in front of Tig.

The cool metal of his rings were against her shoulder in an instant, anchoring her back to earth after floating much, much too high above the ground.

She was in a distorted haze, so to speak. Isla’s head wasn’t particularly in the right place today, and it could’ve been down to a multitude of things—but she wanted to simply pin it on her grief.

Chibs saw the way she gnawed into her bottom lip, the way she continually pulled Diane’s crucifix across the golden chain as means of comfort—or, maybe, it was just out of remorse.

He noticed that his daughter—his little girl—peered at Opie’s children sitting beside their grandmother as they said goodbye to the woman that brought them into the world.

He wondered if they understood the weight of it all. They were so young, so impressionable, so innocent, and he saw a lot of Isla in those two kids.

The dull throb of Isla’s heart almost slowed to a halt when the funeral commenced, and Jax was still completely out of sight. Juice held his cut while he stood beside Tara, feeling his chest tighten.

It was difficult to understand just why Jackson Teller didn’t show for such an important moment in Opie’s life.

“I can’t believe him.” Tig hissed out in a whisper, completely ruffled. Isla looked up at the man behind her, holding a dainty hand on top of his. “I can’t fucking believe him.”

He didn’t know what to say. Clay didn’t, either. As he stood beside his Sgt. At Arms and peered down at the disheveled blonde, Clay Morrow struggled to find the words to elucidate his disdain for the lack of action from his step-son.

Donna was family. Opie was family. Family was meant to be there for one another, not purposely ignoring such a pivotal event.

“He’ll be here.” Isla repeated her promise, melting into her space as Tig leant over to kiss the top of her head.

Her eyes glazed over instantaneously, coercing her to turn away before she broke down.

But she leaned backward into his embrace, and watched the ceremony commence.

And it only took a handful of moments for her mood to perk up—as much as it could have under the circumstances—but she was conceivably happier at the sight before her.

“I told you.” She mumbled. She refused to let up her grip on Tig, though, holding onto him firmer now.

It was comfortable. He was comfortable.

“What the fuck…”

Jax looked like hell. Still wearing last night’s clothes—still bloodied and bruised from his scuffle—he sauntered over the grass and made a beeline for Tara.

Isla’s throat hitched.

“Did you do that to him?” She mumbled in reference to the slit in his lip, craning her neck to eye the blue-eyed man.

“Yeah, probably.”

She just shook her head with a tiny smirk, shifting her focus back to the asshole that was taking his sweet fucking time.

It didn’t upset her as much as she thought that it would’ve, watching him go back to her like that. If anything, she was glad that they had managed to reconcile because she made him happy.

But, for a reason unbeknownst to herself, she felt bad for Wendy.

To watch the father of her newborn take his cut from a woman that’d only been back in his life for five minutes, to hold and kiss her in front of everyone, was something she shouldn’t have had to witness today.

They weren’t together, but she knew how that was bound to hurt—to sting and incapacitate her because it was all still so fucking raw.

Poor Wendy.

He took one of the flowers away from the sparse pile, holding it to his lips, and placed it atop Donna’s casket.

Jax glared over his shoulder, shooting the two guilt-ridden men a look that read fury. He made sure that Isla wasn’t looking at him when he did that, though.

He refused to look at her.

And he didn’t stay, either. He paid his respects for all of thirty seconds before stalking away, and leaving the most egregious of tastes on the tip of each tongue.

The funeral flew by, after that.

Before Isla knew it, she was dismounting Tig’s bike outside of T M—again—and stumbling over her heels when she couldn’t quite find her footing. She’d been in a world of her own for the last fifteen minutes.

“You want me to get you a beer?” She asked, handing him her helmet. “Or did you want some of that wine you like?”

He snorted at her taunt, taking it from her. “Beer—but none of that shit Bobby drinks.”

Isla chuckled, backing away from the bike and Tig.

“You want a drink, too?” She asked Clay when he strode over, hands in his pockets.

He nodded, waiting for her to slip out of sight before turning his attention to his Sergeant.

“What’s going on with you two?” Clay asked him accusingly, snatching Tig’s attention from the blonde who was ambling into the clubhouse.

He waved the pres off, lighting a cigarette. “Nothing, man. She’s just been helpin’ me out—“

“That’s what you’re calling it now, huh?”

“That’s what it is.” Tig shrugged, exhaling the smoke from his nostrils. “Y’know what she’s like. She sees someone that needs patchin’ up, and she does it. That’s all.”

Unconvinced, Clay leaned closer to him—striving for the little moment to go unnoticed by those that shrouded the lot. Jax and Tara, for one.

“That’s Chibs’s kid. You be careful.”

“Ain’t nothing to be careful about, brother.” Tig ground his lips together, squinting upward as he rested against his bike. “We’re just friends.”

“You stayed the night with her.”

“Yeah—“

“Twice.”

“Clay—“

“In the same fucking bed!” He snapped, running a hand over his face.

His desire to protect the women in his life—to assert the dominance he had, or his authority—was remarkably overbearing at the best of times.

Isla and Gemma didn’t particularly need to be coddled the way that they’d always been at the hands of Clay Morrow and his club, but they were.

And the thought of his sleaziest, loathsome, savage brother getting closer and closer to that woman churned his stomach. Because he knew what Tig was capable of—what he did—and would be damned if anything were to happen to her at the hands of Tig fucking Trager.

Chibs would kill him, too.

“Nothing happened, nothing’s currently happening, and nothing will happen.” He guaranteed. “Clay, I swear.”

“Alright.” Dubious, the older man responded. “But, if there is, then you be careful. Jax is onto us, and it’s only a matter of time before Isla puts two and two together—‘cuz she ain’t stupid.”

Be careful. Be careful. Be careful.

How about you shut the fuck up?

“I know she isn’t.” Almost irked that Clay would assume he thought that, he retorted. “But she’s got shit going on too, man, I don’t think she’s gonna be focusing on this right now so you don’t gotta worry.”

“Alright.” Clay repeated himself.

He didn’t think that his right-hand was telling him the truth, but he couldn’t exactly do anything about that until an issue arose.

What he did know, though, was that Tig Trager would’ve had some serious hell to pay if he had ignited something with Isla right now.

Or ever, really.

“Keep Jax away from her.” He told Clay, flicking his cigarette to the ground. “She’s pissed at him for what he did to me last night.”

“What’d he do?”

Tig pointed at the cuts on his cheek, grimacing. “She’s fucked off, and if they talk she’s probably gonna throw something at him.”

“Eh. Let her.” Clay waved him off, hastily shutting himself up when he heeded her heels clicking across the gravel toward them. “He needs to be humbled sometimes.”

The rivalry between the two had only intensified since Abel was born and Jax’s priorities shifted from the club.

His family came first. His biological family came first.

And maybe Clay didn’t understand the implications and responsibilities that came along with fatherhood because he’d never had that bestowed upon him, but Jax did.

He knew that he had to provide for his kid, for the one being that was solely dependent on him, and he would never compromise or jeopardize that.

Things weren’t going to be made easy for the man, however.

“Budweiser for you.” Isla smiled, handing a bottle to Tig. She passed one to Clay, holding onto it a little firmer as she offered it to him. “And one for you—but you need to take this, and go see your wife.”

“Why?” Hesitantly, he accepted the alcohol.

Isla shrugged. “She just wants to see you. Seems important.”

“Shit.” Clay hissed, taking a long swig before striding away.

She watched him stamp toward the clubhouse, heeding the change in his mood, and wondered why Gemma was so determined to talk to him at that specific moment.

It could’ve been anything with that woman, really. It could’ve been something so minor, completely insignificant, that Gemma had to get off her chest.

Or it could’ve been something along the lines of elucidating the bone-crushing lament that she held for both her husband and Tig.

Whatever it was, however, Clay wasn’t excited to face her.

“What’d he chew your ear off about?” Isla asked, struggling to open her beer. She sighed, suddenly remembering why she loved her screw-top bottles of wine so much.

“Pass it to me.” Tig took it from her, using his own bottle cap to pop hers off. He chuckled at her grimace, handing it back.

“Thanks.” She groaned, lifting it upward. “So…What did Clay want?”

Budweiser blanketed Tig’s tongue and lips as he pulled the drink away from his mouth, using the back of his hand to rub at the excess.

Quickly, he wondered whether lying to Isla—fabricating the truth and downplaying his superior’s concern—was in his best interest.

But she was perceptive. There was no doubt that she’d realize he was lying to her.

“He thinks that something is going on between us.”

She rolled her eyes, taking a pull.

“What?” A little nervous—on edge, perhaps—Tig asked her. “Did you already know that he felt that way?”

“No.” Instantly, she retorted. “I didn’t know about Clay, but Gemma feels the same. D’ya think they’ve talked?”

“Oh, definitely.” With a small glower, he told her.

They absolutely talked about the two, and that was what worried Tig.

There was nothing wrong with them colluding against the pair, as a rule. He wasn’t offended at the thought, he felt quite honored actually.

But it was the connotation that came alongside those conspiracies. The idea that Tig was only so friendly—so supportive and loving—toward Isla because he wanted one thing from her.

And, really, Tig hadn’t pondered that thought before. Well, not before last night, anyway.

For the first time—possibly ever—sex wasn’t on Tig’s agenda with Isla. Enticing her, breaking her heart, and sending her on her way was not something he wanted.

But Tig was renowned for that, wasn’t he? He was known for being a hapless bachelor. A man whose priorities were neither here nor there.

Everyone just expected that. They saw him with her, and came to that one conclusion.

Maybe Isla expected it a little bit, too. Because she’d known him long enough to understand the kind of man that he was—or had the propensity to be—and she could hardly lie and say that this version of Tig didn’t confuse her.

He’d always been the same with her, though. Perhaps that’d been the difference between every woman that entered and left his life, and Isla Telford.

He wasn’t interested in her. Like that.

“Does that bother you?” With an almost undetectable twinge of hurt, Isla asked.

As if it was a basic instinct, Tig shook his head. “Nah. They talk shit all the time. Stuff like that don’t bother me.”

She nodded, refusing to add anything else. Isla sipped her beer, hoping that the ground would open up and swallow her fucking whole.

There wasn’t a single word in the English language that’d ascribe her feeling at that precise time, but ashamed was possibly the closest she could’ve gotten.

And, still, that was a little bit further off the mark than what she would’ve liked. Because she wasn’t entirely ashamed for reacting the way that she had, more so the way that she fucking felt.

Isla’s heart took a blow when Tig told her that.

For why, though? She wasn’t sure.

It might’ve been the nonchalant expression. The complete colorless response that stirred a foreign emotion within her—striking hard against her chest.

Or, it might’ve been what he had said. It was such a casual proclamation. Something that didn’t mean anything, but everything simultaneously.

She didn’t feel anything for Tig. She didn’t particularly want to feel anything for him, either, but that hurt. A lot.

“Same, to be honest.” She lied, forcing her lips upward in a smile. “Gemma is always on my case about this sorta thing. But I just let it go over my head.”

“Always?”

“Yup. Always.” Isla mentioned around the protruding lump in her throat. “If she’s not talking about me and you—like there is a me and you—she’s talking about me and Jax. And if it isn’t that, she’s bitching about Wendy, or Tara, or just anything she can think of.”

Like there is a me and you.

Tig sniffed a little, nodding. He didn’t want Isla to think that bothered him, but it did. A bit, anyway.

“She’s so overbearing, sometimes.” Genuinely slumped, she stated. Isla leaned against the railing beside Tig’s bike, finally looking at him. “Don’t tell her I said that?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He chuckled, taking another swig. “I’d never purposely get you into shit with your mother—“

“She’s not my mother.” Her eyes rolled. “She acts like it, and I love her like one, but she is not my mother.”

Tig knew. He knew all too well just how Isla felt about that, and he wasn’t exactly sure why he said that to her, today.

Gemma was the best woman she knew and the one that, strangely, brought her all of the comfort and prosperity that she’d craved.

But she wasn’t her mother. She wasn’t close to being Diane, and maybe the comparison between the pair hurt a little. Because Gemma Teller-Morrow was nothing like Diane Telford—and the sooner everybody knew that, the sooner Isla could rest.

“I feel bad talking shit about her. All she’s done is help me.”

“And parent you.” He reminded her, tipping his bottle upward. “She parents all of us, but what I mean is she treats you like a kid sometimes. Jax, too.”

“Yeah. I know.” Peeved, she conceded. “But, what can I do? if I wanna keep her around—keep having her so close to me—then, I guess I’ve gotta make a few sacrifices. And, I mean, it’s not all bad.”

“No?”

“Absolutely not. I’m glad that she’s the woman that took a shine to me. If Luann ended up being the one…”

Tig smirked, sizing her up. “You’d probably be doing porn right now.”

“Exactly.” Without shame—not even feeling slightly bashful at the glance she was receiving—she said. “I don’t think I’d hate doing porn, but I don’t think SAMCRO would be thrilled.”

“Absolutely not. Chibs would kill you, for one.”

“And Gemma.”

“Clay, too.” Tig added, withering at the thought.

“What about you?” A little too bold, she asked.

Though their relationship was of the lighthearted nature, Isla wasn’t certain that the habitual riposte was a thing as of late. His response would probably jar her, she thought.

“I wouldn’t hate it.”

She halted, blushing at his words. Her ears prickled with heat, too.

“It’d be hot.” He shrugged, putting his empty bottle against the ground. “I’m sure Juice would love it, too—“

“Oh, get fucked.” She snorted a laugh, throwing the red cap at his chest as he got to his feet. It bounced off the fabric of his shirt, coercing a chuckle from Tig.

“It was only one time.” He taunted, lifting his hands in mock surrender. “That’s still one more time than most chicks ‘round here.”

“He wasn’t awful.” Isla shrugged. “He knew what he was doing, and I had fun. But, like, he hasn’t got any hair…”

“Hair?” Tig began to gesture downward, chuckling when she grabbed his hands to stop him.

“I don’t mean that. I mean hair on his head, Tig.” She calmed her laughter, letting go of him. “I like to tug on it, I guess.”

It felt somewhat illegal, obtaining this information from her.

He already knew that she was a sex fiend, that she liked it rough, and now that she had some kind of hair-pulling kink.

Tig’s chest tightened. So did his pants.

“Duly noted.” Like usual, he quipped. Tig motioned for Isla to head inside with him when he heeded things heating up between Jax and Tara.

She, as always, made a mental note to grill her friend later. Or, maybe, her friends. Because she and Tara were on that level, now, and she felt that things could’ve sailed smoothly between herself and the doctor.

Isla just hoped that she’d open up to her.

“Are you gonna talk to him?” He asked, reading her fucking mind. “I know that you two talk a lot.”

“Probably.” Her shrug was insouciant. “But I’ll leave it a while, I think. Leave the dust to settle over before I approach either one of them.”

Tig’s heart began to thrash. It battered viciously within the constraints of his chest, thumping at an unsteady rhythm the more Isla babbled on as they neared the clubhouse.

It was maiming him, having to keep this to himself.

He knew that concealing it—the weight of it all—was for the best. It’d guarantee peace and conformity within the club and Isla’s life, but it was also a crippling guilt that not even Tig was sure he’d be able to hold forever.

Clay was heartless, though. The nefarious leader hadn’t a single problem with lying through his fucking teeth, and Tig was more than aware that Clay would continue the charade if and when he decided that he could no longer.

He supposed he could thank him for that.

But, then again, he was also the reason that Tig Trager had found himself tangled within yet another web of lethal falsehoods. Thanking Clay was the very last thing that he wanted to do.

“Oh, shit.” Isla stated through partially gritted teeth. She gestured to her father and Happy’s scorned glares. “Why do I keep getting this fucking look from everyone?”

“It’s not you. It’s me.” He snorted another laugh, taking her hand and walking her further into the room after she stopped completely dead.

Really, Donna’s wake was as vibrant as it could’ve been and nobody—aside from Isla’s old man and the Tacoma Nomad—had their sights set on the Sergeant and Chibs’s daughter.

The atmosphere was strangely spirited, hearty and animated as everybody came together to celebrate the life of Opie’s wife…The way that they always had.

But Isla was still on tenterhooks. She loathed the thought of her dad disapproving of her, today, but she didn’t desire the castigation that would’ve come hand in hand with her need to talk to him.

“Tequila?”

“I’ll get back to you on that one.” She smiled at Tig, making a beeline for the bar when she saw Kip. He followed her.

“You’re turning down free alcohol?”

Isla scoffed. “It might be free, but the effects of it would cost me my fucking reputation here.”

Tig’s eyebrows raised. “How so? You don’t not drink, Isla.”

“I know.” Her lips pursed, watching Kip pop the caps off of six beers. “But I never drink tequila. It makes me…uh…it makes me feel a little hot—“

“Tequila turns you on, is what you’re saying.”

“Well, yeah.” A crimson blush bled over her cheeks, her nose, and even across her forehead as her entire face burned red. “It’s no big deal. Just something I discovered after getting black-out drunk when I’d barely turned twenty-one.”

If Tig wasn’t feeling aroused before, then he definitely was at her admission. He had to think of anything to throw his brain off of that mental image.

“I don’t tend to drink the strong stuff.”

“Unless it’s whiskey.”

She pointed with a smile, nodding her head. “That’s right—“

“Hey, what did you want?” Kip interrupted sheepishly, gesturing to the half-empty bottle she had between her fingertips. “Another Bud?”

“Yes, please.” Again, she smiled.

“Same for you?”

Tig nodded.

“Kip,” she began, “and you take something, too. You’ve dealt with these assholes for long enough, now. Take a break. I’ll man the bar if you’d like.”

“Oh, no, I can’t do that—Gemma’ll kill me—“

“With all due respect, fuck Gemma.” She heard Tig chuckle beside her, shrugging when the prospect glanced at the pair nervously. “She won’t say anything if I tell her that I’m the one that told you to take ten minutes away from the bar.”

“Yeah.” He backed her up, grinning. “She never gets mad at Isla.”

It was completely uncharacteristic of him. But she brought something out from the very chasms of Tig Trager’s cold, black heart, and he lauded that.

Not many people had managed to scrape beneath the surface that way, not even Colleen.

God.

Tig shook himself out of the daze he’d slipped into, watching Isla and Kip trade places as she stepped behind the bar, and he made a beeline for a stool.

He’d been standing for a while, now.

“Are you gonna join me behind here?” She asked, drawing Tig’s attention back to her. Isla held up another bottle for him, twinkling underneath the yellowed light above the liquor shelves.

She looked, almost, angelic.

“Sack—“ Tig grabbed at his arm when he tried to leave his seat, feeling the prospect go rigid under his grip.

Isla’s eyebrows bunched together.

“Take two beers for Hap and Chibs.” He released the grey shirt, grinning as he saw the man sweat—clearly anticipating something more than just doing a simple favor.

“Oh, sure.” Kip breathed a sigh of relief, taking the two bottles that Isla had slid toward him. “That all?”

“Yep.” She added, gesturing for him to get on his way and enjoy the break that he’d been appointed.

He headed toward the two men beside the pool table, handing them their beers and pointing toward Tig. He waved with a small smile—hoping to come off as genuine, rather than scheming.

Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Giving the two men a couple of beers to throw them off the scent—or, at least, to distract them from making a fuss—was just a ploy to defer attention from the two nestled amongst the alcohol.

And it seemed to work, too.

As Tig walked around the bar to join her on the other side, Isla popped a few bottle caps, mixed a few drinks, and talked to every person that stopped off in front of the oak, without being so much as glanced at by her father.

Gemma hadn’t noticed the change, either.

“You want anything?” She asked Tig, mindlessly pouring a glass of whiskey for one of the Tacoma guys. “Some tequila?”

Indifferently, he shrugged.

“Okay, well that was helpful.”

“Alright,” he chuckled, grabbing two shot glasses, “I’ll take one, if you do, too.”

“Tig.”

“Isla.” His tone was deriding, though she couldn’t help but smile.

She pushed the whiskey toward the unfamiliar Son, thanking him for showing his face today, and turned her attention back to Tig.

In the thirty seconds in which her focus had been diverted, he’d poured two shots, grabbed some salt, and two lime wedges from underneath the counter.

She swallowed thickly, hoping to god she’d be able to play off the effects of that liquor.

Because it was only the one, wasn’t it? She was only going to have one single shot of tequila and, surely, that wasn’t enough to intoxicate her…

Right?

“Aw, fuck.” She slurred, pushing the empty bottle aside. “I really—“ she hiccuped. “I really need to stop drinking.”

“Why?” Just as garbled, he responded.

“‘Cuz I feel like I’m gonna puke.” She snorted a laugh, pushing all of the limes strewn across the redwood into the bin. “And my breath stinks of tequila.”

He waved her off, looking at his chest as he wiped the alcohol from his leathers. “Tequila don’t smell that bad.”

Isla blushed, though she fished around her purse for some gum, regardless.

And her heart fucking plummeted to the pit of her stomach when she noticed the bottle of antidepressants in the smaller compartment, suddenly realizing that her excessive alcohol consumption tonight was for sure going to mess with her.

Shit.

“Water?” He asked, holding two empty glasses. He heeded the dread in her expression, how she looked like she’d seen a fucking ghost.

“Please.”

Tig handed her one of the glasses, slinging his free arm over her shoulder—mainly in an attempt to stabilize her—and padded over to the kitchen.

The clubhouse was a little more sparse, now. Jax and Tara sat alongside Juice, Chibs, and Happy, meanwhile Gemma and Clay were meters apart from one another.

But nobody seemed to notice the lack of manpower behind that bar, which was a wonderful thing. Because Isla feared that she might’ve collapsed had she not hydrated herself.

She feared that she might’ve said, or done, something that she might’ve regretted, too.

Tequila did make her feel “hot”, after all.

“God, I need this so bad.” She practically moaned, twisting the cold water tap, haphazardly holding her glass underneath it.

Isla didn’t even shut the water off, she just chugged that slightly lukewarm—strangely beautiful—liquid like her life depended on it.

“Fuck.” She gasped for air, putting her glass atop the draining board. “Oh my god, that was so fucking good.”

Tig watched in awe.

As droplets of water trickled from her lips, and chin, to her chest, Tig subtly groaned to himself. He stifled a reaction, however.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, hell yeah.” She nodded.

Tig held her glass underneath the tap again, filling it half way. “You want some more?”

Isla took it from him, cocking her head a little when he didn’t let go of the glass. “What?”

“How’d that tequila make you feel?”

“What?” She repeated herself, forgetting about what she told him earlier. “Oh…”

“How’d it make you feel?” He pressed, releasing his grip though lifting his hand to brush his thumb underneath her glossy lips.

“Good.” Isla stumbled over her words, watching his eyes flick over her features. She gulped, though she put the glass straight back down. “Really, really good.”

Tig jolted, though relaxed when she let her hands rest against his shoulders. He hadn’t expected this today. Or ever, really.

“How good is really really good?” He asked, twisting a couple of ringed fingers through long, loose curls.

Her heart was no longer sinking to the pit of her stomach, but fluttering wildly within her palpitating chest.

“Pretty good.”

“Right.” He caught her bluff, nodding. “I could think of something that’d make you feel really, really, really good, y’know?”

“You think?” Isla leaned into him when a hand pressed into the small of her back, and the other holding onto the nape of her neck. She shivered. “Because I think you could.”

Confidently, he bobbed his head. “Oh, I could.”

She was a bundle of nerves, frankly. Tig was so nonchalant, so breezy, and she was just so fucking fraught.

But he didn’t seem to notice—or care—while he surveyed her face, grinding his lips together in anticipation. He lowered his head a little to meet her height, though she still stood on her toes.

“Make me feel really good, Tig.” She whispered, the citrusy scent of tequila permeating his senses, quickening the rate of his pulse.

Isla’s sweet, soft lips ghosted over his own as she exuded a satisfied sigh, loosening up at the feeling of their noses brushing over one another.

It was so gentle. She hasn’t expected a man of such stature, such hunger and animosity, to be capable of something so soothing.

An unmistakable burst of desire started to seep through her, humming against his lips as she opted to wrap both arms around his neck while he backed her up against the sink.

With the support against her lower back, Isla wound a leg around his waist as the kiss amplified and Tig began to grind his hips into her whilst simultaneously moaning.

She didn’t know how badly she needed this tonight.

Pink nails wound into his unruly curls, mindlessly nudging through the hair—pushing him to hasten. He slipped his tongue into her mouth, then. Lauding the flavor of tequila and cigarettes.

But Isla promptly froze at the sound of footsteps—heels, precisely—clicking across the tile.

“Tig, wait.” She jerked her head a little, urging him to stop. “I can hear Gemma—“

“You can see her, too.” The matriarch stated, rounding the corner and immediately coming into Isla’s line of sight.

Both Tig and the blonde shifted to look at her.

“Am I interrupting something?”

[ladyideal]

The Faceless Shadow: I

Word Count: 2073

Warnings: spoilers of s1 finale, mention of rape, mention of murder, Billy Butcher, language, alcohol

Summary: Five years later, you enjoy life after years of hardwork bringing NYC under one rule.

A/n: yeah... let's just yeah.

Five Years Later

$1.50

You frowned at the prices of the last stack of newspaper in front of the glass window. Billy Butcher's face smirking up at you from the front cover aggravated you. Sure it'd been some time since the Mallory incident, but you'd lost men to Lamplighter when Frenchie left his post. Begrudgingly, you threw in the needed money and snatched the old, wrinkly paper out of its casing.

Using people was what he enjoyed doing, and what he would continue doing in his quest for vengeance. Losing an associate was pitiful, but to one of your made men? There wasn't going to be a second chance. Zero wasn't happy, and you certainly were ticked off at the past still. Tucking the newspaper clip into your jacket, you headed back to the club. 

Ten fronts. All ranging from clubs to restaurants. Mostly legitimate, in terms of paying taxes. New York City was divided into Staten Island, Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, and Brooklyn. Zero headed Queens, and your third took over Staten Island. Although your main headquarters was situated in Brooklyn, you enjoyed the sights and the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Including Vought Tower.

Vought. The head of supes and all things capitalism. The main reason why you kept all business on the very down low, despite the very club that even some of The Seven visited regularly. Blackmail: A very old fashioned, but reliable form of silence. 

Rounding a few corners, you slowed to a halt in front of the vip line. The DJ was in by now, and the lines outside grew by the minute as the sun dipped below the horizon. Two bouncers in black stood outside, flanking both sides of the entrance and refusing bribes for those wanting to enter early. The Vortex was a popular club, and business was booming. Noticing you, the two bouncers stepped aside. And with a polite nod, you entered the club, much to the dismay and protests from behind.

Music pulsate as lights from the dance floor shined and glittered within the dark. The DJ was in, and every body cheered. Rounded tables littered around the edges with plenty of people of all ages, drinking, grinding on one another, and flirting with the multitude of waitresses and sex workers. Smoking was prohibited within, but all was allowed on the outdoor spaces filled with recliners, a pool, and a jacuzzi. 

Ignoring the cat calls thrown your way from those relaxing in the lounges, you headed deeper within the nightclub. Taking a few turns into a less populated section and nodding again at the bouncers standing guard at the bottom of the VIP stairs, you headed up. At the landing, all eyes nervously turned to you.

And rightly so. 

Most knew you were high up in the family. You've made it that way for a reason. The less people knew, the better. Very few people knew who you truly were. With a quick wave, a smile, and a polite hello, you ducked onto another flight of stairs towards your office. 

"Oi, dick face, what are you looking at them for?" Came from behind. Last you knew before you closed the door, was the sound of a brawl. Sighing, you plopped into your office chair and-

"Boss, I've got the year's expenses on your desk." Grace spoke from the speakerphone, effectively shattering your peace. 

"Thanks Grace," You mumbled, pushing the stack of documents to the side. All you wanted was to grab a drink, keep an eye on the offshore accounts, and call it a night. Definitely didn't want a headache with the financial advisor on how to keep your fronts legit. Taxes could go fuck themselves, if you had a say in it. "I'll take a look at them later. Just log it in for next year's tax season."

"Oh and one more thing."

"Yeah?" You reached down into your mini fridge for a beer.

"Well- it's." A nervous pause. "There's someone on the line asking for you." Another pause. 

"Who is it?" You asked, popping the cap off and leaning back into your chair.

"Butcher."

There was a long pause of silence as you tumbled the name on your lips. It had been years since you last saw him, much less even contacted. Ever since the Mallory incident, you immediately cut ties with the former SAS Special Force. Two of your men were burned by Lamplighter, and you haven't quite forgiven him.

"No. Tell him I'm busy. I don't want to speak with him. He can go find help elsewhere."

"He insisted."

Unfurling the newspaper from within your jacket, you laid it out on your desk, frowning down at the same man that wanted to speak with you. The small picture of Butcher himself scowled up at you on the front page, making headlines for brutally murdering Vought's VP. You sighed.

"I'm sorry, I tried. But he's a-" A nervous chuckle. "He's a weasel."

You waved the apology away. "Put him through. We'll talk about this later."

An audible gulp. "He's on line 2 whenever you're ready."

Green light above Line 2 flashed steadily on your landline. Rather reluctantly, you leaned forward and plucked the landline phone up, already regretting giving Butcher your office number. Leaning back once more, you dimmed the lights down and closed your eyes. "We agreed to never contact again."

"Hello love." A familiar voice spoke loudly against the backdrop of New York traffic. 

"No. Whatever the hell you have planned, I don't want part of it. Things are finally looking up, and I'm not going to fuck up this chance. Vought's stocks are booming. I'm making money, don't have to worry constantly on anyone placing a hit on me. Zero is having the time of their life. I'm out of that mercenary life, found a different calling. "

An annoyed sigh. "How is Zero?"

"Married with their husband. Life is good," You shrugged. "If you've got nothing else to say, then I'm heading off to finish this fucking beer. Goodbye Butcher."

"Give me one fucking minute, love. I'll explain everything."

Got nothing to lose. "Forty five seconds and counting."

"Becca. I found Becca. Me wife has a son, Homelander's son. The cunt fucking raped my wife, fucking hid her away for so long. I was there. I saw her. Green lawn. White picket. I can find her with your help. You, mate, as a person of your skills." A pause. "Sitting behind a desk. Wasted."

"Look what Lamplighter did. Burned two of my men. Burned Mallory's grandchildren. Nothing to bring back home, not even their teeths," You hissed, slamming the beer onto the office table. Bubbles sloshed down the bottle, pooled, and dripped down onto the carpet. "It has always been about Becca with you. Becca this, Becca that. No, Butcher. Screwed up that one chance. I'm not doing it. You just don't care. You use your friends, then throw them to the side like fucking garbage when you're done."

"It'll be different this go. None of that "secrets and lies" bollocks. And that Mallory shit ain't gonna happen this time. I swear to God."

Drip. Drip.

You pinched the bridge of your nose, hating every syllable the man on the other line breathed out. With a shake of your head, you sighed, reigning in your anger and pulling out a cabinet for paper towels. "Alright, motherfucker. What did you do? The cameras at the club picked you up."

"We just dusted a supe." Butcher smugly spoke, confidence oozing through the line. 

"Bullshit."

"Translucent." 

That cheeky bastard. "How the fuck did you do it?"

"Well. Big lump of C-4, packed right up his fudger. Boom," He was excited. "Boom. Claret everywhere. Fucking diabolical."

"But…?" You cut into his amazement. 

"He coughed up a solid lead. Spilled the beans in a big way. Now, we play this right, we could shake up the whole hornets' nest, bring down Seven and Vought at the same time. Y/N, you are the only one I can trust."

You raised an eyebrow at the mention of your name, dance so delicately on his tongue. It was as if the man was putting you on a pedestal. "Names are powerful, Butcher. You know this. However, since when have you ever trusted anybody?"

There was a sly pause on the other end. 

Fights were less often nowadays. Since the fall of the fifth family of New York, there was no need for the heightened anxiety to be on the lookout. Nowadays with your tight grip, it was just petty gangsters that riddle the streets, pretending to be big and bad. Some killed, robbed, or graffitied, all in the name of trying to impress you. No action, no thrilling action that needed your every second of attention. 

And if you were going to be honest with yourself, you missed the action, the absolute adrenaline pumping thrill of physically working towards a common goal. There was a camaraderie in that sense, where no place else could ever replicate, but neck deep in shit.

"Oh, fuck me," You mumbled in defeat. 

Eats Everything: @asraime @aspiring-ginger @mournthewicked @bluesclues-1234 @ladylizzieofdarbyshire @groovyfluxie @keijibum @also-fangirlinsweden @mysoulshideaway @fandom-imagination-ss @your-sparklywinnercollection @yakuzussian-2nd @supergeekfangirl @mayday1284 @sayanythingcreations

Karl Urban: @fandomsfeelsandfamily @justa-traaash @yueci @writerdee1701 @hlabounty96 @lacychick

The Boys: @space-cowboy2227

[theamberwriter]

Levi’s Secret [Mod!Levi Ackerman||Fem!Reader]

Pairing: Levi Ackerman x Fem!Reader [Mod!AU]

Word Count: 2012

Warning: Cursing, pregnancy

A/N: I posted this a while ago on Quotev, DeviantArt, and Wattpad (I think). I updated it for you all!

Levi Ackerman, co-vice president for one of the most powerful companies in the world, Titan Industries, has a secret. Nothing dangerous - well, maybe it will be if anyone finds out, but it'll only be dangerous to their health. He plans on keeping it that way as long as he can. The shitheads he works with don't need to know about his personal life.

But what is that secret?

If one were to go into the upper left-hand drawer, supposing they got the key, and found the insert in the bottom of it. One could find a mysterious paper object lying flat in the bottom of it.

But what is this object?

Well the other VP Hanji Zoe is determined to find out. She's continuously caught the short man looking at – something – in the drawer. But even the security cameras can't reveal what it is. She only knows where the mysterious object is located. News spread quietly around the office when Hanji blabbed, and some people began to take bets; a porn magazine, nudes of his wife and just regular ole important papers were among the guesses.

Almost everyone wants to know what is in that drawer.

Even the president, Erwin Smith, who is an old friend of the co-VP, is curious about Levi's mysterious drawer.

Hanji knows better, though, than to ask the stoic short man about his secret. She knows he’d blow her off, or threaten her, or move the thing – whatever it is. Hanji also knows better than to ask his wife, [Name], who will only give her a mysterious smile and tap the side of her nose to tease her.

No amount of begging will force [Name] to give out any of her husband’s secrets. And not in fear of Levi getting angry, but because she loves to mock the nosey woman. [Name] knows a side of Levi nobody does, knows things that no one else knows – and that drives Hanji crazy, she wants to know everything. Mostly just so she can pester and tease her short friend about it.

Currently, it is a Friday morning – about 10:54 AM. In the main HQ of Titan Industries, in front of a large set of double doors up on the 34th floor, can be found a certain brunette Hanji Zoe and a young office worker from the floor below. Eren Jeager is the long-time friend Levi’s younger cousin, Mikasa, who also worked in the office.

         “Hanji,” says Eren, looking nervously about him. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

         “Of course, it is,” reassures the woman as she slowly opens the door. “Shorty’s in a meeting, and shouldn’t be back for a while. Besides, I know exactly where to look. I’ve seen him do it a million times on the cameras. – look, just signal me if something goes amiss, alright?”

         Eren sighs, his shoulders slumping. “Right.”

         The woman creeps into the room, after ruffling Eren’s hair, and slowly makes her way over to the pristine desk. She is going to try not to mess it up – it’s so tempting! But she is also trying not to get caught, so she resists the urge.

         Ever so gently, Hanji removes the pen she always sees Levi use from its place in the mug on his desk. It’s one [Name] gave him Hanji notices (even after having seen it a million times, she never took note of what was on it), it’s pictures of their wedding and honeymoon a few years before. But, to Hanji’s dismay, there is no picture of the man smiling or being anything but his usual self! [Name] must have made this specifically for his desk.

         With a sigh, Hanji shakes her head and kneels to retrieve the key from under the desk. If one didn’t look closely, they would miss the small key held in brackets screwed to the top of the desk. The brunette carefully slides the gold key out, glancing it over once, before shoving it in the lock and turning it. She flinches as it makes a soft click sound.

Sliding out the drawer, Hanji then looks for the spot where the tip of the pen would fit. It’s hard to spot, even with the sunlight streaming in the wall of windows behind her. But she does find it. She grins to herself as she lifts up the insert. Standing, Hanji puts her hands under the panel and feels for the edge of the object. When she finds it, she fishes it out and drops the insert.

Placing the pen on the desk, the woman looks at what’s in her hand. At first, it appears to be a white folder but as she flips it over, she finds it’s something else. Hanji’s eyes widen, a squeal escaping her throat. So it was none of the dirty things the office workers conjured up.

She completely ignores the loud, ‘Hello, Mr. Ackerman!’ that Eren just about yells from outside the door. Nor does she hear the growl from the short man as he snaps at the boy to ‘quit fucking shouting’ and ‘get the hell away from his door if he’s just going to stand there like a dumbass.’ Hanji also completely ignores the short man as she runs out of the office to tell Eren of her discovery, even though she tosses him a ‘hey, shorty.’

“Eren, you will never believe –” starts Hanji, but then stops as she realizes that the short man is seething behind her.

         “Oi! Shitty Glasses!” grits Levi, his fists clenched as he glares her down. “Who in the hell gave you permission to go in my office when I’m not there?! And how the fuck did you get that – give it to me!”

         But Hanji simply turns and runs, ditching her heels and knee-highs as she does so that she doesn’t trip or slip. Levi immediately takes off after her, but not before glaring at young Eren and snapping at him to get back to work; Eren shakily does as he’s told.

         Hanji, meanwhile, sprints down the stairs and runs to one of the desk lined floors. Waving the thing in the air, she yells, “I’ve got it!”

         When people look up, all they see is her running with Mr. Ackerman hot on her heels. She only stops when Erwin enters the floor, having seen the commotion on the cameras. Levi stops as well, and then he and Hanji begin to sprint and jump in circles around the president. But this stops as Erwin takes the thing from Hanji, who’s now behind him, while Levi glares down his friend from in front.

         “Erwin. Give. Me. That!” spits Levi, but Erwin sighs and shakes his head as he holds the object high above his head – knowing that his tiny friend can’t reach that without assaulting him.

         “Sorry, Levi,” mutters the blonde. “Everybody’s just curious.”

         “It’s none of their damn business! – and why do those shitheads know that I keep that in my – four eyes, what the fuck?!” Levi’s glare shifted over the broad shoulders of his boss, to where Hanji’s eyes were just popping over them.

         “Well I couldn’t keep to myself that you had a secret, now could I?! – and anybody who said it was porn or nudes has lost their bet, I hope you know!” calls Hanji, at this Levi whips around the glare down everybody in the room. Especially those forking over money, or claiming they had to go to the bank.

         “S-So, what is it?” stutters poor little Armin Arlert from his desk nearest the trio.

         “It’s none –” starts Levi, but he is cut off by Erwin.

         “You might as well tell us, or else Hanji will,” states the blonde. From behind him, Hanji agreed and began to bounce excitedly.

The raven-haired man glares but then sighs in defeat. “Fucking fine! Give it.”

Erwin carefully lowers the object into his friend’s expectant hand. Turning, Levi faces the floor with the white side showing. But then, he turns it around and looks grumpily away.

Slowly, people gather to get a better look – it’s a thin paper picture frame.

DADDY’S LITTLE BABY is hand done in pale orange block letters across the top of the paper frame. Around the outside is decorated in swirls and dots, it even has a mint green bow tied in two holes punched in the corner. In the frame, lies a black and white ultrasound picture.

“Levi’s gonna be a daddy!” shouts Hanji, running around to throw her arms around the man. Levi growls at her but says nothing.

Erwin puts a hand on Levi’s shoulder, smiling lightly down at him. “Congratulations, Levi.”

“Yeah, thanks,” is all he mutters.

Hanji chuckles, “you could be a bit happier!”

“How the fuck can I?! You damn bunch of shit minded assholes weren’t supposed to fucking know! You shouldn’t even know I’m fucking married, but somebody had to go running her damn big shitty mouth!” Levi spits, glaring around the group gathered.

Hanji and Erwin roll their eyes, Hanji ruffling Levi’s hair. “How could I not?! It was exciting! Also, how were you going to explain the fact that [Name]’s in here all the time?! She probably would have told us herself!”

“What would I have told you?” [Name]’s voice cuts through the chatter. People move to the side as the woman pushes her way through with a box in hand. She smiles sweetly lightly as she sees Levi seemingly presenting the picture frame she made him three months ago for his birthday. “Aww, Levi, you’re showing off our babies!”

The plural catches Levi’s attention, any thought of a blush disappearing. Levi raises an eyebrow slightly. “Babies?”

[Name] giggles, nodding and holds out the box to him. Slowly, he takes it while handing her the frame. He eyes her warily as he opens the box. Inside is a new ribbon and an ultrasound picture clearly showing two circles – twins?! Levi about drops the box at this, but only [Name] notices.

“Twins?!” yells Hanji, causing the man to flinch away from the loud sound.

“Yes, Hanji,” [Name] chuckles loudly. “Levi and I are having twins. Can I have a small hole punch someone?”

More chatter flutters through the room, and then Armin shuffles up with a punch. He mutters a ‘congratulations’ to which the woman smiles. Punching through two more holes in the frame, [Name] hands the punch back and walks up to Levi. He just stares intently at her.

[Name] ties the new ribbon through the holes, and then slips in the new ultrasound. Also paper clipping on a matching ‘S’ that was hidden beneath it onto the end of ‘baby.’ The misspelling makes Levi cringe, but he knew it was his wife’s attempt to be funny.

“How long have you known? When the hell did you get that done?!” utters Levi, watching [Name]’s face intently.

[Name] kisses his cheek with a smile. “I went about two weeks ago, when you were out of town.”

“And you’re just now telling me?! We have to go get more shit for the nursery!” hisses Levi, causing Hanji to laugh loudly.

“Don’t worry shorty! We’ll throw you a baby shower!” she says, as though it’s simple. Levi goes to glare, but [Name] cuts in.

“I’d appreciate that Hanji,” she says, “Levi wasn’t going to let me invite any friends.”

“Forget just friends! We’ll have the whole damn building doing in on it! All 35 floors!” announces the insane brunette, bouncing up and down again.

Before Levi could stop her, Hanji began to ramble on and on about all that could be done. As well as going around and assigning things to each employee, who was still in shock that their grumpy boss was going to be a father.

And, though he despises the brunette sticking her nose in his business, Levi knew it made [Name] happy to have everyone finally know.

Suddenly, Levi doesn’t mind sharing his secret.

[frighthouseofalighthouse]

History Asks: 2, 3, 7, 8, 19, 29, & 61, please!

Hi! This is late I’m so sorry!

2: Favorite underrated historical figure?

Julie D’Aubigny! Click the link to read about her bisexual dueling antics.

3: Funniest historical kerfuffle?

All the ways the CIA and others tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. Here is a link to the wikipedia page because it’s so fucking wild. One time he was at a hotel and put his shoes outside the door to be polished and they put hair loss powder in his shoes thinking it would make his mustache fall out and no one would respect him anymore.

7: Which time period would you like to live in?

I’m taking this as completely ideally, barring lack of medical knowledge or misogyny or homophobia etc. So either late Victorian England or oh just please take me back to the revolutionary war.

8: Favorite tv show based on historical events, but not really faithful to real life?

My top 4 are Outlander, Black Sails, TURN: Washington’s Spies, and Ripper Street.

19: If you could travel back in time and kill anyone, who would it be?

Listen I’m not a fan of these questions when people are like “I’d kill Hitler” etc. bc butterfly effect, BUT

The British officer who shot John Laurens can CATCH THESE MF HANDS

29: Rant about your favorite topic.

Ohhhhh I don’t know if you’re ready for this. I have so many favorite topics. so here’s what I’m gonna do. Remember the other history ask I answered with the question about the presidential assassinations? I had spent an hour and a half writing a whole thing about the background of Lincoln’s assassination before I realized it wasn’t needed in order to answer the question about the repercussions. So here’s that plus the thing about the repercussions that I was leading into.

“ John Wilkes Booth was a well-known confederate sympathizer, and though he himself never joined the confederate army, he had many contacts within the disastrously put together confederate government and secret service. Since 1864, Booth had been forming a plan similar to one put forth by Confederate Secret Service member and Virginia Tech president Thomas Nelson Conrad. A plan to kidnap Union President Abraham Lincoln. Conrad’s plan was approved and they sent a team of men after Lincoln, but the mission was soon abandoned because Lincoln’s security was too tight. Unlike Conrad’s plan, Booth’s was to get the president at a moment of vulnerability outside the White House - and to kidnap key members of his cabinet as well, ransoming them for Confederate prisoners. However, after seeing an April 11th speech in which Lincoln promoted giving Blacks the right to vote, Booth decided to assassinate him instead. The next day, April 12th, the Union victory over Richmond and the Confederate army’s surrender was announced, making kidnapping a moot point anyway. On the morning of April 14th, Booth went to get his mail at Ford’s Theatre, where he was an occasional stage actor, and the owner’s brother started bragging to him that Lincoln and his wife would be attending a play there that night. He knew it was the best chance he had, and he arranged for a getaway horse to be waiting for him, and for his co-conspirators to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward at their respective homes. By targeting Lincoln and the next two successors to the presidency, it’s clear that Booth intended to chop the heads off the Union government, throwing it from post-war victory into chaos, giving the Confederates a chance to reorganize and rally their remaining forces. Union Commander in Chief Ulysses Grant was supposed to attend the play as well, but he and his wife decided last minute to visit relatives instead. At 10:14 that night, during the second act of the play, Booth snuck into the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head. His escape was cut off by the man who had come in Grant’s stead - Major Henry Rathbone. Booth stabbed him, jumped over the balcony to the stage, and raised his knife, yelling “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” (Thus Always to Tyrants, which Brutus is alleged to have said after killing Caesar. Also the state motto of Virginia.) Then he and his co-conspirators ran, having failed to kill Johnson and Seward. (The guy supposed to kill Seward only managed to non-fatally stab him, DESPITE THE FACT THAT SEWARD WAS BEDRIDDEN BECAUSE OF A CARRIAGE ACCIDENT. The guy who was supposed to kill Johnson chickened out and got drunk instead. Which sucks because...well, you’ll see.) Lincoln died just after seven the next morning. The secret service and Union army caught up to him and the others and killed booth. The eight other conspirators were sentenced to life in prison. Then Johnson was sworn in as president. 17th president Andrew Johnson is regarded as one of the worst presidents in history, and is one of 3 presidents to be impeached - the only one who actually left office as a result. He had an anti-black stance that went against everything Lincoln stood for, opposing the 14th amendment and every other bill that would grant civil rights to freed slaves. Back then, the rule was still that the runner-up in the presidential race was VP, so the President and VP were opposing parties, which is actually smart and kept power from becoming too imbalanced and corrupt in either direction. The stances of the parties were essentially the opposite of what they are now, as well, so Lincoln as a Republican was far more liberal than Johnson. Southern states rejoining the union re-elected many of their old leaders and the strong rights of individual states that fanned the early flames of the war allowed them to pass anti-black laws that deprived freed slaves in their individual states of the rights to which the Emancipation Proclamation entitled them. Congressional Republicans (read: liberals) who still held the majority, refused to accept senators from those states, and wrote legislation to overrule them. Johnson vetoed them all, and Republican (read: liberal) congress overruled him right back, and this pattern went on for the rest of the administration. Sound familiar, anybody? So much of his cabinet spoke out against him and he fired so many of them that Congress restricted his ability to fire people. He continued trying to impeach the Secretary of War who had put out a reward for Booth’s capture, electing to go down causing as much chaos as he could, and was impeached as a result. Essentially, if Lincoln hadn’t been killed, Johnson would never have been president, and the transition from war to reconstruction wouldn’t have been as awful as it was. Congress wouldn’t have been distracted by Johnson’s antics and would have been able to focus on sending aid to suffering rural areas and rebuilding the country. The lack of aid to rural areas gave an upper hand to urban areas, hence, companies. This is when corporations started to get their foot in the door and tip the scales in favor of higher populated areas/more wealthy areas. So “democratic-republicanism” which favored stronger states rights instead of central government, because they thought it would be “better for farmers and rural communities,” actually led to the alienation and starving out of farmers and rural communities. Hmm, almost like it was never a valid stance to begin with. The Democratic Republicans, back in the Hamilton-era days, weren’t even a proper political party. They had to scramble for a stance that made sense, because they were originally called the Anti-federalists, and their ONLY stance was to oppose the Federalists because they (Thomas Jefferson mainly) hated Hamilton. BUT THAT IS ITS OWN RANT. Anyway. We are still in the Reconstruction period. If it weren’t for Booth, it’s likely that we would have made it further than this.” END RANT

61: Favorite ancient civilization?

Oh I am such a sucker for the Greeks.

THANKS FOR THIS AND SORRY IT TOOK ME LIKE A WEEK TO GET TO IT.

[ewankoseyo]

soft || jaebum imagine

A/N: I actually have another request that I’m working on but I wanted to take a break from Mark for a little bit and do a Jaebum imagine instead (๑˃̵ᴗ˂̵) now I’m feeling hella soft for the guy lol

“Hi there! Can I request a very fluffy college Jaebum imagine where everyone is intimidated by him and thinks he’s big and scary (because he is) to everyone but his girlfriend (the reader) when it comes to her he’s so soft and mushy and although he appears to be very intimidating to his classmates, only his girlfriend sees how adorable he is (homeboy has 5 cats and is obsessed with Bart Simpson and strawberry milk and antis still claim he’s mean guuuuuurl IDGI) Thank you!🥰💚”

——

Yugyeom swore you had secret powers or something.

When Jinyoung had ordered him to ask Jaebum if they could use his car to help the community service club officers transport supplies across campus, Yugyeom greatly refused. Approaching the Im Jaebum was a suicide mission. His resting scowl served as a warning to anyone even thinking of trying to talk to him.

Rumor had it that he got into a physical altercation with a new TA the year before—reasoning behind the fight still a mystery—resulting the TA’s first and last year at the university. With Jaebum still attending school, his influence over everyone went unquestioned.

So just don’t mess with Jaebum—don’t even think of approaching him with anything—and you’d be fine.

Unfortunately there were too many supplies that needed to be transported and Jaebum had the extra car they needed to help move things. And Yugyeom, being one of the newer members of the club, knew he couldn’t disobey President Park Jinyoung.

He didn’t even know how or why Jaebum joined the club.

(Of course Yugyeom knew it was in his best interest not to ask.)

“J-jaebum-hyung, I mean Jaebum-sunbaenim...” Yugyeom gulped, mentally kicking himself for his minor slip-up. As Jaebum removed one of his earbuds and glared menacingly up at the younger boy, Yugyeom slowly accepted the fact that he was a dead man.

“Yes?” His voice was venomous. Jaebum raised his eyebrow, as if challenging Yugyeom to pick his next words wisely. Yes, what is so important that you need to interrupt me working and make me pause my music? he seemed to say.

“I just, uh...” Did the room just get hotter? Why was he sweating all of a sudden? Yugyeom gulped again. “I-I was wondering—the club was just wondering...” Shoot, Jaebum looked mad. Yugyeom was dead, he was absolutely gonna die.

Like a guardian angel, you seemed to come out of nowhere. “Sunbaenim,” you started softly, giving Jaebum a gentle smile. “I think what Yugyeom is trying to say is we were wondering if we could use your car tomorrow? We are moving some stuff across campus for the mixer event and the officers need one extra car to help. Is that okay?”

Yugyeom was fully prepared to protect you from Jaebum’s wrath, though unaware of how to, until—

“Sure,” Jaebum answered abruptly before putting his earbud back in. “Whatever you say, Ms. VP.”

“Thanks Sunbaenim, I appreciate it.” You smiled sweetly at him before turning to Yugyeom. “Yugyeom, could you go help Youngjae and Bambam set up chairs for the meeting? I have to go over the presentation with Jinyoung.”

“Sure thing, Noona.” As you left, Yugyeom could only stand there and attempt to process what just happened. Did Jaebum just...comply with someone? And did the corners of his mouth perk up a little?

Was that supposed to be him smiling?

Jaebum yanked out his earbuds again and glared at Yugyeom. “Why are you still here? She asked you to go set up.”

“Right, sorry.” Yugyeom laughed nervously, giving the brooding boy a little wave before heading in the direction of his friends.

Yup, you definitely had secret powers.

——

Bambam didn’t believe Yugyeom when he said he saw Jaebum smile.

Im Jaebum didn’t smile at people. He scowled. Or if you were lucky, he completely disregarded you, letting you live another day.

Bambam made it a point to never have to interact with Jaebum. Unlike Yugyeom, he knew how to deflect from situations and preferred to stay alive.

Though Bambam never accounted for accidental run-ins.

He only meant to grab his water bottle that he forgot at the club mixer and bounce, he didn’t mean to overhear a conversation he wasn’t supposed to.

“Baby, please don’t cry anymore, it hurts my heart to see you cry.”

Was that...

“Oppa, I worked so hard on that project, I don’t understand why the professor gave me a zero. I’ve never failed an assignment.”

Bambam peered behind a pole to see you and Jaebum down in the stairwell. Jaebum was crouching against the wall, looking up at you with the kindest eyes that Bambam had ever seen.

“Your professor probably didn’t actually grade it yet and maybe just put that assignment in there as a hold. If he keeps the grade like that, I’ll march with you to his office and help you make him change his mind,” Jaebum assured you with the most gentle voice. “Now please don’t cry, Princess. Would you smile for me, for Oppa? Please?”

It took Bambam everything in him to stifle back a laugh. After seemingly getting a smile out of you, Jaebum stood up, his grin meeting yours.

“That’s my girl,” he cooed, wiping your tears with his thumb before pulling you into his chest for a hug. As Jaebum looked up contentedly after kissing the top of your head, he noticed—

Shit, Bambam thought to himself. I’m a dead man, a dead dead man.

The smile on Jaebum’s face left as soon as he saw Bambam. Holding you closer to him so you let yourself bury your face in his chest, Jaebum gave Bambam a murderous look.

Leave before she notices, it seemed to say. And if I hear you tell ANYBODY about this...

Bambam quietly went back upstairs before Jaebum could finish the implied threat.

Maybe Yugyeom was right sometimes...

——

“And then he was like ‘don’t cry Princess, smile for Oppa!’”

Youngjae and Yugyeom broke into a heap of giggles as Bambam reenacted for them the encounter he watched.

“See? What did I tell you?” Yugyeom managed to get out through his laughter. “Noona makes Jaebum-sunbaenim—”

“Soft?”

The three boys immediately cut off their laughing fit, silently saying a prayer to themselves as they addressed the older boy now standing before them.

“Sunbaenim,” Bambam attempted to say casually. “I didn’t know—”

Jaebum glowered at Bambam. “No, go on, finish your story. And then what did I do?”

Bambam laughed nervously. “It’s okay...I don’t think that’s necess—”

“I said. Finish. Your story,” Jaebum spat out. Youngjae and Yugyeom exchanged subtle amused looks, both of them stifling back a laugh. Jaebum turned to them and pounded the table they were sitting at, causing them to jump in their seats. “You punks think this is funny?!”

“Sunbaenim,” you uttered from behind. Bambam and Youngjae were finally understanding what Yugyeom meant when he said you had secret powers. You gently took Jaebum’s arm. “Could you come help me move some tables? They’re too heavy to push around by myself.” You pulled him along with you after beaming at the younger club members. “See you later, boys.”

Jaebum visibly relaxed from his agitated state as he followed you, slowly lacing his fingers through yours. Noticing him look at you fondly, the three boys broke into another fit of laughter once you were both out of sight and earshot.

“Yeah, he’s definitely wrapped around her finger.”

——

[petitrangement]

In 1998, five New York friends — Julian Casablancas, Albert Hammond Jr., Fabrizio Moretti, Nick Valensi, and Nikolai Fraiture — formed a band called the Strokes. They released a debut album, Is This It, in 2001. In 2009, NME named it Album of the Decade; Rolling Stone ranked it No. 2, behind Radiohead’s Kid A. This is an account of what happened in between, starting in 2002.

Ryan Adams (musician): One night I was hanging with the Strokes guys and Ryan [Gentles, the band’s manager]. We were really stoned because we were basically always smoking pot. It was very late. Fab would always play me a song that he had written, some beautiful, romantic song. So one night, jokingly, I’m almost certain, Fabby said, “Dude, what if John Mayer was playing that guitar right now?” And I said, “I can make that happen.” Now, I lived down the block from John Mayer, and he’d been talking to me about his new song for a while. So I texted him, because he was always up late back then. I said, “Come to this apartment. Bring an acoustic guitar. I really want to hear your new song.” I didn’t tell them that I’d done it. So everyone is sitting there and I was like, “Let’s all take bong hits.” I really wanted it to get crazy. We smoked some bong hits; I probably did some blow. The doorbell buzzer rings, and I open the door, and John Mayer walks in with his fucking acoustic guitar, and they were all slack-jawed. John sat down and played the fucking acoustic guitar — three or four songs that probably have gone on to be huge — while those guys just sat there staring at me like, Oh my God, you’re a witch.

Gideon Yago (journalist): Ryan Adams, he was one of those guys where I just remember being like, I just don’t know. I didn’t take to him very well. I mean, that to me was the beginning of the end.

Fabrizio Moretti (drummer, the Strokes): He would come over to our apartment a lot.

Albert Hammond Jr. (guitarist, the Strokes): When he shows you a song, he doesn’t stop for hours. You’re like, “Oh, that reminds me of a song I wrote.” And you play a G chord and he’s like, “I know what you’re talking about,” and he grabs the guitar back. There’s no way to play music with him. It’s the Ryan show, always.

Ryan Gentles (manager, the Strokes): I introduced Jim Barber and Ryan Adams. Courtney [Love] was dating Jim at the time.

James Barber (former A&R executive): Courtney thought the Strokes were a positive cultural influence. She was doing this MTV special. She wanted them on.

Marc Spitz (journalist): She was like their Yoda. Their coke Yoda. I’m not saying she gave them cocaine. I mean, most everyone was on cocaine, but it seemed like as soon as they really made it, she was all over them. And she was not in the best shape at the time. Maybe not the Jedi you want whispering in your ear about how to be a rock star.

Ryan Gentles: I was friends with Courtney; she would call me at random hours to give me advice. Then she did this overnight-broadcast thing for MTV.

Marc Spitz: It was called 24 Hours of Love, and the premise was that she would take over the MTV soundstage, the one in Times Square, for 24 hours.

Albert Hammond Jr.: When you’re fucked up and the idea is funny, you just do it. You’re like, Oh, yeah. We’ll go up there and hang out with Courtney Love. By the time you’re in a taxi and you’re in traffic, you’re like, Wait, what are we doing here?

Ryan Gentles: She was all strung out and drunk; it was almost embarrassing. She was running up and down the hallways naked.

Albert Hammond Jr.: Oh, she was fucked up.

Ryan Gentles: I actually adore her in a way. She’s so smart. But I don’t know her. I don’t think anybody knows her.

Jenny Eliscu (journalist): Gentles briefly managed Ryan Adams during that era, which seemed to not go great.

Ryan Gentles: Ryan and I were buds. And went down to New Orleans and made Love Is Hell. Then I had to quit, because the Strokes exercised a clause in their contract that said I wasn’t allowed to manage other artists.

Albert Hammond Jr.: Julian had a very clear thing, and we liked to do things a certain way. I think a lot of things they blame Ryan for is stuff the band just doesn’t want to do.

Ryan Gentles: Do you know how many times I begged the Strokes to do some shit and they just said no and it was idiotic and everyone in the world knows they should do it?

Amanda De Cadenet (photographer): They’re the band that turned down a million dollars for some Heineken ad. That’s dumb.

Dave Gottlieb (former VP of marketing, RCA): We got a request from Heineken for … it was either “Hard to Explain” or “Last Nite.” I think it was “Last Nite.” It was $600,000.

Ryan Gentles: When they were making Room on Fire they said they felt my attention wasn’t all theirs. They said, “You have to stop managing Ryan Adams.” It sucked. He’s super-talented, and I was ambitious, and I liked his music a lot, and I still do. How did he take it? Real bad.

Catherine Pierce (musician): Julian thought Ryan [Adams] was a bad influence on Albert.

Albert Hammond Jr.: Ryan would always come and wake me at two in the morning and have drugs, so I’d just do the drugs and kind of numb out. I knew I would shoot up drugs from a very young age. I’d been wanting to do heroin since I was 14 years old.

Catherine Pierce: [Albert] used to say, “I love drugs. I’m not an addict, I love drugs!”

Albert Hammond Jr.: In that Room on Fire time, I definitely got into a lot of pills and the beginning of opiates. That OxyContin kind of thing.

Catherine Pierce: Albert and Julian really loved each other and were kind of dependent on each other. Julian’s acceptance was really important to Albert, and I think Albert’s opinion was really important to Julian.

Albert Hammond Jr.: When Julian and I stopped living together, that’s kind of when it changed.

Catherine Pierce: It was such a weird time, because everybody was simultaneously psyched about “Oh, we’re all becoming famous, this is awesome, let’s all hang out.” But it was also like, “Wait, Ryan’s a bad influence.”

Albert Hammond Jr.: I remember Julian threatening to beat Ryan [Adams] up if he hung out with me, as a protective thing. He’d heard that Ryan would come and give me heroin, so he was just like, “If you come to my apartment again with heroin, I’m going to kick your ass.” I hadn’t really been doing it in baggie form until Ryan showed up. He was definitely a bad influence.

Ryan Adams: That’s so sad, because Albert and I were friends. If anything, I really felt like I had an eye on him in a way that they never did. I was around and we actually spent time together. He would show me his songs. It was like, “No one ever listens to my music, but do you want to hear it?” I would be like, “Fuck yeah!” I loved him so deeply. I would never ever have given him a bag of heroin. I remember being incredibly worried about him, even after I continued to do speedballs.

Julian Casablancas (front man, the Strokes): Did I specifically tell Ryan to stay away from Albert? I can’t remember the details, to be honest. I think heroin just kind of crosses a line. It can take a person’s soul away. So it’s like if someone is trying to give your friend a lobotomy — you’re gonna step in.

Ryan Adams: I didn’t do drugs socially, and I don’t remember doing drugs with Albert ever. I wanted to smoke cigarettes and drink, like, dark red wine or vodka and write all night.

James Endeacott (former A&R executive): Albert getting into smack was just ridiculous.

Albert Hammond Jr.: For me, the drug stuff was a release. I don’t know how to explain it. Success depressed me.

Ryan Adams: It was very dramatic, the way it all went down. I was asked to meet one single person in a bar and I got there and it was the whole band and Ryan. I was more or less given a lecture, a hypocritical lecture, and then they told me that I was not going to be part of their scene anymore. It was very weird. It was easy to brand me as the problem. I would suspect that they soon learned that I was not the problem.

Andy Greenwald (journalist): One thing about the 2000s is that everything happened too fast. The time that passed between Nirvana and Candlebox probably was two or three years. The time between the Strokes and Longwave was like 18 months. And there were diminishing returns. The Strokes weren’t really that big. Everyone needed them to be that big and desperately wanted them to be big, but they kind of weren’t.

Brian Long (former A&R executive): Bands like the Strokes, they sucked on the proverbial major-label tit, drank the last gulp of milk that was there. They were the handoff from one era to another era. I remember when their second record came out, we really liked them and were championing them, but we were all wondering if they could develop in a way that would make an interesting career. The analogy we used to make was, will they end up making a London Calling? Could they be that? Or is it going to be just cutting different colors from the same swath of fabric? And that’s kind of what’s happened.

Dave Gottlieb: Room on Fire is as good as Is This It; the problem was the band did not sell it. You’d ask, “What’s your vision? What are your goals?” They didn’t really have an answer.

Jim Merlis (publicist, the Strokes): When the reviews started coming in, they all said that it sounds exactly like the first record.

Albert Hammond Jr.: With Room on Fire [2003], people were giving us shit because they said we were sounding too much the same. With the third album, we were getting shit that we don’t sound like Room on Fire. We got fucked by the same thing twice!

Dave Gottlieb: If the Strokes had happened five years earlier, they would have sold 2 or 3 million records, not 1 million, because of the internet.

Moby (musician): The Strokes were the first band of that era that went beyond just being PR darlings, and suddenly people were buying the records. It’s interesting, in their case, because they never sold that many records, but they made really good records. The reach, the awareness of them was so much greater than the record sales.

Dean Wareham (front man, Luna): It’s hard to make something perfect. They made a perfect record, and that’s hard to do again.

Jenny Eliscu: It’s important to zoom out and look at what happens when a genuinely so-fucking-good-it’s-insane band happens — it’s always disappointing on the commercial scale. The Stooges were never a commercial success. And yeah, the internet culture of today accelerates the pace at which you’re looking for the next example of the thing, and we get bored with the thing, because everyone knew about it so quickly and disseminated it so quickly. Hipsters get over shit so quickly. But it’s important to state that there’s a difference between the underground and hipsters. The underground is real and permanent. It’s more art than it is commerce. The Killers … and Kings of Leon were never part of the underground. Fuck no.

Nick Valensi (guitarist, the Strokes): We had conversations that went along the lines of “Gosh, I think our songs are better than ‘Mr. Brightside’ by the Killers, but how come that’s the one everyone is listening to? They did it a different way. They recorded it in a different way. They promoted it in a different way. We could be that big.”

Jim Merlis: There was bad stuff going on with the band — a lot of fighting, arguing, and the shows were bad. They were really, really drunk, everything was becoming a bummer, they didn’t want to tour. They didn’t want to do anything. It was just not fun to be around them anymore.

Marc Spitz: They seemed a lot older. A lot older. And it had only been, like, two years. And they seemed defeated in a weird way. And impatient, like they just wanted it to be over, you know? They were not deluded that maybe it was over, their moment was over.

Albert Hammond Jr.: That’s probably the first time I noticed it had stopped being fun, the recording of First Impressions [of Earth, 2006]. That’s when things started getting into the gap: Friends, girlfriends, strangers would all start coming in, being like, “You should be a bigger band,” and I was like, “Yeah, we should be a bigger band …” For as strong as we were and as close as we were, we weren’t close or strong enough to fight that.

Fabrizio Moretti: That’s the house of cards that is being in the Strokes. There were a lot of emotions that were kept secret but were so evident. We didn’t know how to process them, (a) because we were children and, (b) because it’s hard to process subliminal subconscious volcanic emotions. We were kids that wanted to conquer the world, but we had no idea that we were going to be given the chance.

Marc Spitz: Even when Spin made the Strokes Band of the Year [for 2002] after the Is This It tour, it was already starting. I mean, they played like they believed onstage. They went out there to kill, every fucking night. I still haven’t seen a better band. I didn’t see the Clash, but it was like what you imagine they were like. They came out and punched the audience in the fucking mouth every night. But I remember Nick saying, even then, “Man, this is all bullshit. Like, we’re not even Band of the Year. We shouldn’t be here. The White Stripes are Band of the Year.” They didn’t want to own it, you know?

Julian Casablancas: My biggest regret in general is that I drank so much. I warded off any kind of intense introspection.

Marc Spitz: Julian was a perfectionist. And you saw Jack White was too, but something about the whole thing sat better with Jack. He acted more like a rock star. He crashed his car, he dated Renée Zellweger, he punched out that guy from the Von Bondies. He seemed more suited to that role. His vision seems pretty strong. And Jack didn’t have the burden of New York City.

Jack White (front man, the White Stripes): Sometimes being thrust out there pushes you to hurry up and figure yourself out and do away with years of fumbling. That happened to the Strokes; they had to get it together fast. Meg [White] and I had three albums out and an almost too realistic view that nobody was ever going to care about our music. We were assuming we had a life of playing in bars for 30 people in our future. The extra time to get our things together was good for us mentally. It still shocks me that the mainstream accepted that music; it doesn’t add up.

Austin Scaggs (journalist): I saw the Strokes’ bubble burst when I went to South America and Brazil for a bunch of shows with Kings of Leon and Arcade Fire and the Strokes. I was like, “Ryan, I’ll take the video camera, I’ll document this trip, I’ll just shoot everything and you can have whatever you want. I’ll pay for my own ticket.” Honestly, I was thinking it was going to be like Led Zeppelin, like you walk into the room and there’s a bed full of women. I thought it was going to be a giant debaucherous orgy of booze and drugs. It was the absolute opposite. To be super-blunt about it, the Strokes were crumbling right in front of my eyes, right in front of the camera. There was a lot of resentment and there was a lot of tension. When I got home I was like, “Wow, that was not what I expected.” I didn’t see one naked girl the whole time.

Albert Hammond Jr.: During the recording of our third record, I was just sad.

Ryan Gentles: They were never broken up. They never talked about not making another record. It was just Albert wanted to release some music, and Julian wanted to release some music, and Nikolai wanted to release some, and Fab did some … It wasn’t really planned to go that long, it was just “I need a few more months.” “Now I want to put out a record.” It was all ill timed, and they would disagree on when they’d get back together.

Albert Hammond Jr.: I went through a downward spiral. We met up to start writing Angles in 2009, and then I just hit the lowest point in June, July, and August. Everyone came out to record at my house upstate and I was fucked. Everyone knew, “Oh, Albert’s definitely high,” and then two days later they came up and said, “You have to go.” Not all of them; Julian didn’t come up. But my mom was there, and so the choice was that basically everyone would forgive me if I went to the three months of rehab, so I did.

Catherine Pierce: We are good friends now, but it took a few years. There was a moment when we hated each other.

Albert Hammond Jr.: I’m sorry I killed everyone’s dreams. I don’t know if they’re still mad at me.

Laura Young (blogger): To me, the Strokes’ first album is one of the greatest albums ever. But they represent such a moment in time that it’s hard to break out of unless you really reinvent yourself. Unless you’re the Beatles and you make Sgt. Pepper, you’re not going to break out of that mold of “Oh, this is that band that came out of the early 2000s and defined a moment.” Nothing they do will ever be as cool as that first album.

Albert Hammond Jr.: There was this amazing time, before we had to record the first record, we’d play to 80 people or something like that, but no one really knew us. We could just walk around town and think, I’m in this band, we can bring people to shows, and that was by far the best time. Everything was so innocent. Somehow you lose the innocence through time and through doing too much, then you spend a lot of time chasing that same innocence.

James Murphy (front man, LCD Soundsystem): Is This It was my record of the decade. Whenever people pooh-pooh it, I’m like, “You’re saying that now, but I guarantee you you’re going to have a barbecue in ten years, play that shit, and say, ‘I love this record.’ ”

Suroosh Alvi (co-founder, Vice Media): For all the talk about the Strokes, how they fucked it up, that their records suck now, there is still no one cooler. They are still the last imprint of that particular brand of rock cool. They are the last real rock stars. And live, they’re still so spectacular. They don’t do anything, they just stand up there and kill it. I saw them at Coachella right before that MSG show and Julian was like, “I just flew in, I don’t know what the fuck is going on, I just got on my gold-plated jet.” Such a bored rock star. And then he gets onstage and doesn’t do anything but kill it.

Excerpted from Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City, 2001–2011, by Lizzy Goodman (Dey Street Books/HarperCollins). Copyright © 2017 by Elizabeth Goodman.

*This article appears in the May 15, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.

[olivereliott]

Fighting Talk: Harley design boss Brad Richards

Harley-Davidson is under a microscope right now: its every move is dissected, examined and critiqued.

And there have been plenty of moves lately. They’ve killed the Dyna while relaunching the Softail. They’ve announced a barrage of new models, including the Livewire. But although revenue is holding up at the moment, sales figures have been declining for several years—and were down 10% in 2018.

It’s a challenging time for the Motor Company. So I sat down in Milwaukee with Harley’s VP of Styling and Design, Brad Richards, to ask how they’re going to fix this. Harley’s PR lead Joe Gustafson joined us too, and both were raring to go.

Bike EXIF: There’s a lot of pressure on Harley-Davidson right now. People expect every new bike the company releases to be ‘the’ bike to turn things around.

Brad: It’s so funny that you should say that. It’s as if you’re the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, and your entire library was forgotten before whatever single you’re putting out. That’s what you’re judged on—the latest track.

You really think that we’re just going to abandon the core, and start doing other things? The messaging has always been that we’re going to embrace electric … because it breaks down so many barriers for new riders. There’s no transmission, there’s no clutch. It’s very simple to get involved in two wheels, via electric.

But we’re also going to innovate with our core internal combustion product as well. The only reason that I think folks are letting us get away with the electric stuff—and not everybody is accepting of it, but most people are—is because we haven’t abandoned our core product. If you think about Pan America and the Streetfighter and so on, those are bikes in the middleweight space, and we’re clearly innovating and investing in the future of that product.

So when I hear people saying ‘Oh, Harley’s lost their way, they’re making an electric bike, it’s all over…’ you’re exactly right, they’re only looking at the electric product. I feel like they need to look at the rest of the portfolio too.

Right after announcing ‘More Roads,’ you released the FXDR 114. Detractors were saying that it’s too traditional a Harley and won’t attract new riders. And some older Harley fans didn’t quite get the modern styling. How do you manage that tension between the brand’s history, while still looking forward from a design point of view?

Brad: I think it’s a great question. If you look back at the history of Harley-Davidson—from the birth of the company—we were incredible innovative. People say we’ve never done an adventure touring bike—in 1903, roads were not paved. Every bike we made was an adventure touring bike.

During World War II we made a hundred thousand WLAs; that was a bike that was also intended for pure off-road use. You can argue that World War II kind of created the birth of the segment, and we were there with a product. There are still thousands of them running around today, still functioning.

So when people have a hang up on what we’ve just released. Most of the time it’s because the context in which they’re making that judgment, is the last 20 years. The boom years, the core, mid-90s through early 2000s, where our current archetype rider was defined.

The new generation wants nothing to do with that archetype—loud and proud and bold. We love those folks, and I love that part of the culture. But millennials don’t want that. They want subtlety, they want high quality experience, but they don’t brag, they don’t boast, they’re not loud, they’re not obnoxious. So we have to be able to tailor some of the products to this new generation.

It’s the same problem that we had in about 1947. Post World War II there was a massive boom. Guys came back from the military, and there was this huge investment in social free time and hobbies and so on, and our bike sales went through the roof. But by 1949, there was a massive drop-off in the sales of our big twins. The volumes were almost cut in half. And so we invested in light weight and low displacement. That’s how Sportster was eventually born.

We’re going through the same thing right now. It’s so cyclical. So it’s funny to me.

We’ve done tons of research. And the research has told us that the younger generation loves the brand. They know what it stands for, they know its authenticity and quality and the history, but they just don’t see products that they really wanna ride. So the More Roads initiative is to create bikes that appeal to that generation, because they’re giving us the permission to go into adventure touring, to go into electric, to go into Streetfighter, and other places that we’re gonna go.

It’s the tip of the iceberg. The next five years, we’re gonna blow minds. I keep thinking about the reaction we’re getting now, it’s like ‘holy smokes, wait two years from now,’ because the stuff is just gonna keep coming.

When the new Softails were released, a lot of people were upset that the Dyna was gone. But when the Dyna was first released, no one liked it. So I guess by now you’re used to weathering that storm of criticism…

Brad: You have to have a thick skin. Some of the younger guys in the studio who are right outta school, they design something, and all of a sudden the feedback starts coming out on Instagram. They’re like ‘Holy smokes!’ It’s okay…most of the folks that you meet love what we’re doing and understand what we’re doing.

When Pan America [below] was revealed, and the feedback started coming in, it was pretty polarizing. There was some great stuff and there was some pretty bad stuff, and what I told upper leadership at that time, was, the worst thing that we could have done is release a design and no-one commented on it.

I personally love all the feedback, whether it’s good or bad, and I love people that bring it to me and are very frank, and ask me why we’re doing what we’re doing. As a designer, I wanna do things that are compelling, that are remembered. Our team wants that.

And are we gonna have home runs every bike? No. That’s impossible. But we’re gonna have some really compelling product, that in the future will be in the museum, and people are gonna say ‘You know what? That’s the moment when they pivoted, and thank God they did, because they’re still in business today.’

Joe: You look at Softail, and you look at what was added to the conversation. You look at Dyna, and people like performance, they want the feel, they want the look. And Softail’s lighter, it’s smoother, and it’s faster.

Yeah it’s better, in every way.

Brad: I have a Low Rider S, that’s my favorite bike [below]. And that was the first bike that I did when I got here with the team. We had a hole in the life cycle plan, and we needed something quickly, just to be totally frank, and all the parts and components were there. And we all knew what was happening with Dyna.

So was that your ‘twilight’ Dyna?

Brad: Yeah, we wanted to make the ultimate Dyna. That’s why I’ll never sell mine, I think it’s gonna be a collector’s item. But having said that, and as much as I love my bike—and I put money into it, upping the performance and suspension and doing all kinds of things to it like everybody does—when I went to Spain and rode with you guys on the new bikes, there’s no comparison.

The new Softails are just infinitely better motorcycles. And if you talk to anybody who really does this stuff and takes it seriously—Mark Atkins [Rusty Butcher], Speed Merchant, Noise Cycles—the guys who are riding our new bikes, taking them apart and customizing ’em. They all know that the new bikes are infinitely better too.

Are you feeling a lot of pressure to progress on the tech front? Premium bikes like the FXDR 114 and Road Glide [above], for example, don’t have some of the same tech (like switchable rider modes) that their competitors do.

Brad: We look at everything. I wish I could take you to the test track in Yucca, Arizona, and show you all the things that we’re experimenting with.

We are not static any more. We are embracing these things, and we are exploring all avenues of technology, and motorcycling. Because all of these things that you’ve described, make motorcycling safer, and easier, and it breaks down barriers for people to get into the sport.

Joe: If you look at Livewire [below], it’s got riding modes, it has a six-axis IMU, it has cellular connectivity. I could be sitting at lunch and know when my bike’s being charged.

But that tech (in Livewire) comes at a massive premium.

Brad: Livewire’s a halo product. It’s a halo product for EV, but it’s also a halo product for connectivity and all these other things that Joe just described. These things eventually become less expensive, and we do integrate them into the rest of the product line.

But let’s be frank. It is not a bike that’s been designed for millennials, from a price point. And the EV technology’s expensive right now. Battery technology’s incredibly expensive. It will get less expensive, and it’s going to change, but Livewire’s really about the first product from a major OE, that’s very compelling, very well engineered.

I think that there was a misconception, in the way it went to market for some reason—it didn’t really come from us—that it is the answer to the millennials.

From a design point of view, Livewire does hit that sweet spot between modern, and keeping with Harley-Davidson’s design language. But how did you figure out the smaller electric vehicles, from a design point of view?

Brad: We had the one that’s in between a dirt bike and a mountain bike—the one that was at X Games [above]. But we felt in the studio that there might be something that was more like a 70s minibike [below]. Because a lot of us that ride Harleys, grew up on a little Briggs and Stratton minibike.

So it was like: “What if we took this, and did the modern interpretation of that?’ And all of a sudden you have this whole new generation of younger folks, learning to ride a Harley-Davidson on something like that.

A lot of the baby boomers, and what we call our core customers, are sort of ageing out of the sport. They’re embracing things like boating and RV-ing and camping. And really, that is a migration stream that’s happening. So I said, “What a great way for that generation to reconnect with Harley-Davidson, by having a couple of these strapped to their Airstream trailers.”

We wanted to do something that was very friendly, very approachable. But the trick is, that when you get on it, it’s gotta be fast as f–k. We called it the ‘Angry Little Bastard,’ that was its nickname. So you have this little thing that looks like a kid’s scooter, you get on it, and it’ll outrun a Sportster ’til 3rd gear.

Joe: From a riding situation—no license, torque, speed—it pulls so many notes of what people love about motorcycles into a new package. That’s really what it’s all about. We were at X Games with these concepts, people that didn’t even ride…it kind of pulls at those heartstrings. ‘What is this? I love Harley, I want this.’

I guess online commentary always leans towards being more negative than positive… was the reaction different when people saw the bikes in person?

Joe: Oh absolutely. Think about on Bike EXIF with the seat argument. ‘You can’t sit on that seat, there’s no way that’s gonna be fun!’ Then you see it in person. I would challenge a lot of Bike EXIF commentators to say if they saw that bike in person, they would love it.

There’s a lot of riding scenarios, that you gotta look at those two concepts where it’s not, you know, “I’m gonna buy this bike and I’m gonna go to Sturgis.” It’s: “I’m gonna buy this bike, and fit it in my life.” Which is a really cool aspect of these bikes.

Brad: It was all about getting people to embrace two wheels, because that wasn’t happening with the current state of product that’s out there.

I love the smaller electric concepts, but personally I think Livewire’s too expensive for everybody.

Joe: If you look at the package of that product—it’s performance, it’s the riding suite, it’s connectivity. So it’s not price point. It’s, “What experience are you trying to get for that?”

Brad: I’d argue that there are some customers who have never looked at Harley-Davidson, because there hasn’t been an EV product. If you read some of the feedback, it’s “never been interested in Harley-Davidson, never noticed the brand, until they agreed to do this. Until they showed this.”

When I said Livewire wasn’t designed for millennials…the experience was. But that wasn’t necessarily our primary objective. Our primary objective was to do a very compelling motorcycle in general, with this new EV technology. And put it in the Harley-Davidson lineup, designed with Harley-Davidson DNA and ethos.

So was the motivation more about a solid product than massive sales?

Brad: There are a lot of people at Harley-Davidson that are much smarter than I am, and figure out business cases. We don’t set out to lose money on anything. But a product like this, there’s a different nuance to it, because it’s about the future. And it’s about trying to attract a new customer to the brand.

And frankly, there are a lot of places in the world where internal combustion will eventually go away. And so we want to have something for those folks. So that is the other piece that’s very important to think about.

Because again, going back to the beginning of the company, I argue to people that in 1903, Harley-Davidson was Apple. In 1903, most people didn’t go more than, like, 14 miles from the farm they grew up on. All of a sudden here comes this product that allows you to go 100 miles from home in a day. Your social network has just increased in a magnitude of a hundred.

Changing gears back to gas and oil for a minute; when Pan America and Streetfighter [above] were announced, it was very subtly mentioned that the new motor would be coming in a 500 cc, 750 cc, 950 cc and 1250 cc versions. And I immediately thought, is this going to replace the Sportster?

Brad: We would never walk away from Sportster. Sportster is like Mustang. I had this conversation with a friend last night, the design director of Ford. We were talking about Sportster and talking about Ford. In the early 80s, they created the Ford Probe—remember that thing?

He said the Probe was the new Mustang. They felt the technology, and space age…this was gonna do it. And they researched it. And it just absolutely tanked. So at that point they decided, ‘you know what, let’s just keep Mustang around.’

A lot of companies have extremely equitable iconic names in their brands, and sometimes, for whatever reason, they start to challenge whether those are still of value to the overall big picture and ecosystem. I think there were probably some conversations at Ford Motor Company that time, and somebody said ‘yeah we don’t see value in the Mustang name anymore, the new generation doesn’t care about that.’ And obviously they were proven wrong. Thank God, because that’s one of the best selling cars that Ford has.

So I love Sportster. I love internal combustion, Harley V-twins…that’s my passion. I can’t divulge future product stuff, but you know, the company would be in some kind of dire straits to walk away from the Sportster name and brand.

Pan America, Streetfighter and Custom [below] are pretty progressive, design wise. But take a bike like the Sportster Iron 883…is there room in that new platform for an updated Iron? How do you still develop bikes that appeal to core customers that want a ‘typical’ Harley?

Brad: One way to do it is to have an extremely modular platform. And so, again, there are certain iconic products in our lineup that we will continue to embrace. It’s very exciting designing Harley-Davidson motorcycles, because of all the passion that our customers have.

You evolve the product. And what we showed with those first three models, I think that shows the diversity that we’re really after. And showing what we can do when we really decide to move the needle in a way that’s going to attract a whole bunch of new incremental customers.

With those new models, are we looking at better performance, lighter bikes?

Brad: Have to. Because to your point about some of the metric competition, you can find bikes that are a lot less expensive than a Harley-Davidson, that have some of these performance attributes, that are more compelling. So we have to move the needle on everything. It’s gotta be lighter, it’s gotta be faster, it’s gotta be more of a visceral experience.

We can’t walk away from the connection that you have emotionally to a Harley-Davidson when you ride it. It’s not the same connection I have when I ride one of my Ducatis, or ride a friend’s Yamaha. They’re great bikes, but emotionally they’re the most un-compelling. They’re appliances to me.

A Harley-Davidson is not a disposable product. It’s something you hand down to your son or daughter. We need to continue to do that, with even the electric product and all the technology that we’re embracing, the Harley DNA needs to come through. That is our special sauce, we cannot walk away from that.

A lot of people see you as a company that just makes cruisers—are you trying to break that perception, trying to get back to being perceived as a motorcycle company?

Brad: Yeah. I think that everything we’re doing is proving that’s our goal.

Our thanks to Brad, Joe and Harley-Davidson.

Harley-Davidson | Instagram | Images by Harley-Davidson and Wes Reyneke.

[razrbladekiss]

Tyrants | Chapter Seven - Fix You

WORD COUNT: 6.1k

WARNINGS: Gun talk, mentions of murder, The usual SOA shit. 

An almost unsettling fog blanketed Charming tonight, amplifying the sinister aura that’d been drifting through the town since Stahl had made her mark.

Since June Stahl had made it her mission—her whole purpose—to destroy the Sons Of Anarchy, and anybody that laid in her path.

She was doing a damn good job of that, too.

Isla wasn’t sure what her hasty arrival would mean for the club, but she knew that it wasn’t going to end pretty. She was aware that the bitter agent was just as stiff-necked as Clay, and wasn’t going down without a fucking fight.

Which, a fight, the Sons could do. It was whether they’d all make it out alive that Isla couldn’t predict.

She wouldn’t want to put her money on it either, actually.

“Any word on Bobby?”

“No.” Gemma’s sigh was sad, exhausted. “Rosen swung by just after you left with the she-devil. Said there’s a witness in a safe house willing to testify against Bobby and Ope in court. And if he does stick to his word, they’re going down for murder.”

Choosing to ignore her comment about Tara, Isla continued to pace the room. She held her cell tightly between her pink fingertips, hoping it’d light up and vibrate with a call from Jax, or Tig, or even Happy.

“Shit.” She hissed, mindful of the fact that there was a sleeping baby in Wendy’s arms and any offensive sounds would rouse him in an instant. “Did Clay tell you what their next move was?”

“Yeah. But I don’t think you’re gonna like it, sweetheart.”

She didn’t have to be privy to the plan to know that their next move involved one witness, three men, and a handful of shrapnel bullets.

“Jax know about this?” Almost concerned, Wendy asked. Isla’s ears perked up at that, too, because she wanted to know.

The VP was brutal, he was domineering and harsh when he had to be, but he wanted minimal blood shed. He didn’t host that same massacre mentality as Tig or Clay, and he definitely didn’t desire the sick thrill of gunning down a witness being protected by the fucking ATF.

“I’m assuming that he doesn’t.” The blonde uttered for Gemma after noticing that she was taking a painfully long time to respond. “Clay sent Happy, Tig, and who else? Juice?”

“Not Juice.”

“Did Clay go?” A little bit condescending, like she already knew the answer, Wendy asked. She rocked Abel back and forth as she did so, penetratively glaring at her ex-mother-in-law.

Isla swallowed thickly, stuffing her cell into the back pocket of her jeans when she realized what Gemma was trying to say.

Clay never did his own dirty work—it was always the Sgt. At Arms and whoever else was willing to get the blood on their hands. And her father, the forward-thinking, strong-willed Scotsman, never shied away from a task of this nature.

“It’s okay.” She spoke aloud, elucidating her innermost thoughts. “It’s fine. They’ve got Hap—he’s never been caught before—he knows what he’s doing.”

“And Tig, too. Y’know what he’s like.”

“Yeah.” Reflectively, she spoke. “At least they’d go through with it if my dad couldn’t.”

“You saying that your old man is weak?”

“No.” Isla spat at Wendy, glaring at her. “I’m saying that he has a conscience. Hap and Tig are a little bit hasty with the trigger and don’t tend to think before they execute somebody.”

In agreement, Gemma nodded.

“But it’s gotta be done.” She concluded, sitting on the arm of the couch. “The witness has gotta be dealt with—even if Jax doesn’t know anything about this.”

She felt her heart constrict at the thought of nobody telling the Vice President about their plans to get rid of that man.

The man that had the power to take down Opie and Bobby, and leave a club without their brothers.

Two families without their fathers.

And though it was inherently wrong to commit murder, Isla had been brought up knowing that the Sons got rid of their problems by planting bullets in the skulls of their enemies.

It was bad and immoral, and she couldn’t think of a way to excuse it to anybody on the outside. But to SAMCRO, it was habitual. It was what they did because it worked. Every single time.

“Wait a second.”

“What’s the matter, baby?”

Isla pulled a hand through her hair. “How is Clay so sure that they’re not gonna get caught? Y’know, ‘cuz this witness is being protected by the ATF—“

She was cut short by a delicate, albeit firmer than usual, knock at the door. Isla piqued a brow when Gemma got up to answer.

“They’ve got it covered.” Was all she managed to muster out before she went to see who’d decided to turn up at that hour.

Isla’s brain was doing cartwheels. She was nervous, she was pissed, but, most of all, she was upset that Chibs hadn’t told her where he was going tonight.

She snapped herself out of it, though. When Gemma scoffed as she opened the door and trailed back to her spot on the adjacent couch, Isla’s interests had been roused.

“It’s kinda late for a house call.” Her eyes rolled.

Tara trailed in behind her, feeling uneasy at the mere sight of the SAMCRO Queen and Jax’s ex-wife—but Isla being the only friendly face eased her a little bit.

“I was on my way home from work. Just thought I’d stop by and check in.”

“That’s sweet.” Isla smiled at the brunette, offering her the space next to Wendy. “Here.”

“It’s okay, I’ll stand—“

“No, I insist.” She protested softly, getting up. “It’s been a long day for you, sweetie. I’ll sit by mama bear over there.”

Gemma snorted, trying to figure out just what had happened between the pair for Isla to suddenly be so kind and considerate toward the woman she loathed for the best part of a decade.

But she was drawing a blank, because she realized how stupid that would’ve been to wonder—she was just like that. Nothing had to happen for her to be that way.

Isla was the kind of woman that Gemma wanted to be, while simultaneously being her exact double. She was a cleaner, kinder, brighter version of the matriarch, though she hosted that flicker of something that’d tie her to the battle axe that raised her.

And maybe calling the woman a “battle axe” was a little bit harsh, but it was true—on almost every single count.

Gemma was strong-willed, stubborn, martinent, and she took no shit from anybody. Isla wasn’t like that. She wasn’t a doormat, and she didn’t let people walk all over her, but she never went out of her way to demand respect.

Even though she’d been brought up to know she was better than the other women that lived among the Sons Of Anarchy.

“Is he here?”

“Does it look like he’s here?” Gemma’s lips twitched.

“No, I just…I guess I miss him, you know?”

Wendy nodded, tending to a fidgeting Abel. “Yeah, I do.”

Isla looked between the pair—sadly. She watched two of the most important people in Jax’s life sit side-by-side, meditative and wondering about the positions they had both been thrust into.

He had lived two completely different lives with each woman, and she was grateful to say that she had been present in both.

But to see Jax struggle—to see his heart break twice—was too much for Isla to think about, really.

She had watched Tara walk away, right out of his life without a second glance or even a second thought. And it was painful to discern. Painful to know that her best friend had lost the love of his life because she felt that she was too good to stick around for him.

Isla knew that wasn’t the entire truth, and that Tara was just doing a good thing for herself. But, at the time, she was young and stupid and extremely closed-minded when it came to the people that wronged the ones she loved, and all she wanted to do was hate that woman.

She’d grown up a lot since then, though. Isla was a different person entirely—a better version of herself—and she understood each reason behind every last thing Tara did when she did it.

Even if Jax’s mother couldn’t get to grips with it—couldn’t think about trusting her—Isla could.

It was a little bit difficult now, however. To see Tara and Wendy in the same room—trying to coexist peacefully in Jax’s life—was hard.

The lull was boisterous. The sheepish silence was deafening, and the thwacking of Isla’s heart against her chest was vociferous enough to be heard by Gemma across the way.

It was a position she didn’t want to be thrust into, but she wasn’t willing to get up and leave had anything been said.

She sat beside the older woman, watching her watch them like a fucking hawk, until her phone vibrated in her back pocket.

Isla shifted, pulling the cell from the denim and flipping it open.

Janet: Can u make it in for 9 tomorrow morning?

Her eyebrows pinched together, looking up a little confused. Isla swore that she sent Janet a text message that told her she wouldn’t be able to work in the morning.

She couldn’t miss Donna’s funeral. She didn’t want to, either.

“Who is it?” Gemma spoke inquisitively, peeling her eyes away from the conversion between Wendy and Tara.

“My boss.”

“Janet?” She nodded. “What’d that bitch want?”

“For me to work tomorrow morning—”

Gemma turned to her, grimacing. “But it’s the funeral. You told her that, right?”

Once again, Isla bobbed her head while fiddling with the buttons on her cellphone.

“She’s not gonna let me take another day off.” Her throat hitched at the realization. “I’m just gonna have to go with you, ignore her calls, and tell her that I didn’t see the text she sent to me tonight.”

Lying to and ignoring the woman that paid her at the end of every month, the woman that had helped her financially for the last five years, wasn’t what Isla wanted to do today.

But it was the only way she could pay her respects to Donna, she thought.

“You’re not gonna go in, right?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m just gonna call her after the funeral and apologize—“

“Don’t apologize.” Gemma chastised, knitting her eyebrows together. “If she can’t understand that you’ve got a funeral in the morning that you can’t miss, then she can go to hell—“

“Alright, Gem.” Her chuckle was hearty as she put her hand against her purse, pulling it to sit against her shoulder.

“What’re you doing?”

“I’m gonna head home.” She rose to her feet smiling over at Tara and Wendy. “It’s getting late and we’ve gotta be out early tomorrow.”

“Alright, baby.” The older woman stood with her, pushing her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. “Call me when you get there?”

Isla smiled, pecking her cheek. “Of course.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” She directed toward Tara—not particularly giving a damn if Wendy would be there or not.

The doctor simply smiled and nodded, giving her the answer that she not only wanted, but needed. She needed her there by her side in the morning. Isla feared she wouldn’t be able to get through it without her, actually.

But she was dreading the day. To see those men hold themselves together—to see Opie strive not to crumble—was something that she didn’t want to have to witness tomorrow.

So many funerals had she attended, so many friends and family members had been seized from her reach throughout the course of her life, but she hadn’t seen anything like this before.

She hadn’t ever seen a friend lose his one true love, the woman that brought him unintelligible happiness and two beautiful children to cherish with his entire being.

She hadn’t seen Opie suffer so much before. The man that was strong and willing and would hastily blow shit up with little to no regard for consequences, was disintegrating before her very eyes.

And Isla didn’t fucking know how to help him cope with that. She didn’t even know if she could help him to cope with that.

Her anxiety was still present on the drive home, too.

Even after getting into bed and recounting the events of the afternoon, Isla was still nervous as to what’d happen next. Because Clay’s reaction to Bobby getting arrested didn’t inspire much confidence, either.

And the way that Piney had disappeared earlier to seek vengeance, to hold a fucking pistol to the head of Laroy Wayne—the man that allegedly played a role in the murder of Donna Winston—was also prickling away at her thoughts.

Something was going to go wrong, wasn’t it?

No matter how well thought out their plans might’ve been, or how seamlessly they carried out the crime, something always went wrong. Somebody was always caught out, or hurt, or just felt bad about what they were doing.

Isla could’ve written that shit, now. After so many failed hits, failed attempts, and unfortunate events, Isla was almost a pro at predicting what the future would entail.

Almost as if she’d manifested it by merely thinking, her attention was piqued by the hastening roar of a motorcycle engine—clearly pulling up to her place.

It was wonderful to know that Gemma hadn’t decided to follow her home tonight, but the rough din could’ve led to any of the others.

She hoped it wasn’t Jax, and she really hoped it wasn’t her father or Happy.

As she slid out of bed, Isla reached for the pink robe with the daisies on it that rested against the back of her bedroom door, and shrugged it on over her silky pajamas.

It was great that she lived in such a small house, really, because she was able to get from point A (her bedroom) to point B (the front door), in a matter of seconds, or before the person outside got angry that she was taking too long.

He hadn’t knocked the door yet, but she knew that he was about to.

Isla rummaged around the little bowl beside the entrance for her front door key, suddenly realizing that she had way too many of them—her house key, a key to her mailbox, keys to T M, keys to her dad’s place, her car keys, she had somebody’s bike keys, too.

The little chain that hosted a few pieces of metal, a cherry keychain, a tiny motorcycle, and an old beaded bracelet that Chibs had given to her for safe travels, was hastily being shoved into the lock and twisted counterclockwise.

“How’d you know I was out here?” Tig asked from about a foot away, barely visible to her as the streetlights were out, for some reason.

“Literally couldn’t hear myself think over the sound of your bike.” She chuckled, leaning against her door frame. She squinted, trying to focus on him—but it was no use. “What’re you going here, Tigger?”

He stepped further toward her—reluctantly. The dim glow of her living room light suddenly illuminated the space a hell of a lot more, hitting Tig square in the face as Isla shifted a little to her left.

Her heart clenched.

“I need you to play nurse again.” Bashfully, he smiled.

There were tears of pain trickling from those crystalline hues, his left hand firmly planted against his ribcage, and she suddenly heeded the dried blood underneath his nose, his lips, and a bruise forming against his cheek.

“Tig…” Her words broke away from her tongue, the lump in her throat constricting her airways because seeing him so beaten and exhausted hurt her.

“You should see the other guy.” He tried to joke, but the humor was lost on her.

Lost on him, too. He didn’t think it was funny, but he hated the way she was looking at him.

“Sorry to bring this here.” Tig sniffed harshly, squinting as the pain suddenly started to hit him. “I’ll—uh—I’ll go—“

“No. No, you’re not going anywhere.” She stated firmly, stepping out of the house and down the path. “You’re gonna come in, I’m gonna fix you up, and you’re gonna tell me what happened.”

“Isla…”

“Please, Alex.”

Tig couldn’t help that little smile pulling at the corners of his lips, always liking that she’d say his name so softly. Anybody else referring to him that way would’ve gotten a swift kick in the fucking gut—but she was different.

Isla was a comfort. Always had been.

He stepped inside, following closely behind her as she made a beeline for her bathroom. But she instructed him to sit at the dinner table, stifling a laugh at the way she tried her hand at being the authoritative figure.

She’d even told him to help himself to the Jack Daniels she kept for when Chibs called ‘round.

“You’re so lucky dad taught me how to treat wounds.” She called from the end of the hallway, shuffling across the carpet in a pair of sparkly pink slippers.

“I know.” He agreed, thankful. “He did a good job, too.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.” Isla smiled, putting her first aid necessities atop the table. “But don’t tell him that I’m about to ask you to take your shirt off, or else he’ll beat the shit outta you.”

“What?”

“Take your shirt off.” She smiled again, gesturing to the part of his body that his hand had subconsciously taken purchase against. “I’m not tryna make you do a strip tease for me, Tig, I just need to see if you’ve got any cuts there or if it’s just a bruise.”

“I think it’s just a bruise,” he mused, shrugging off his black zip-up, and starting to unbutton the cotton shirt adorning his torso.

Isla bit her bottom lip as she fiddled with the tube of antiseptic cream, wondering how she would broach the topic. She wanted to know what had happened—because whatever it was clearly did not go to plan—but she didn’t want him to think that she was trying to force it out of him.

“See.” Tig ran his hand over the red marks, lines, and the small flecks of yellow surrounding his rib cage and lower abdomen. “All good.”

“Not all good.” She halted him as he tried to reason with her, furrowing her eyebrows. “Where did they come from?”

Nobody could lie to her. Ever.

Nobody had to lie to her, really, because Isla Telford tried not to ask any questions—but she was worried tonight.

Worried about Tig and the various messes that he’d found himself entwined in over the last day and a half. Worried that he was in trouble, that he was tormenting himself over something out of his reach—his control.

She was just worried about him, really.

His sigh was throaty, hurt palpable. “You want the whole truth, or the dumbed-down version?”

“The whole truth.” She retorted instantaneously, letting him button his shirt before she started to clean the blood from his face. “And don’t try to lie to me, because I know you too well for that.”

Like last night, he felt pathetic. He felt that twinge of vulnerability poke through again, and he hated it.

He hated the thought of Isla seeing him this way—in pain, downtrodden and exhausted—and he hated the thought of her knowing that whatever it was he did today had gotten to him so much.

“The witness that was gonna testify against Ope. Me, Hap, and your old man went to go ‘n handle him,” Tig sucked in a deep breath when the alcohol pad nicked at a cut he was unaware of.

“I know about that part.” Easily, she followed on. “So what happened? Was he too fast?”

His head shook, an airy chuckle escaping his lips. “He was a she. A teenage girl—“

“Jesus, Tig.” Almost disgusted, she took a step back. “You didn’t…”

“No.” He reassured her, letting her soften a little bit before coming out with; “but me and Hap were gonna.”

“You’re kidding?”

If there was one thing that Isla knew SAMCRO did not do, it was kill women. Ever.

There had been accidents that saw innocent girls caught in the crossfire—last night, for one—which was inevitable. But the club never went out of their way to end their lives.

“Wish I was, Isla.” Tig’s eyes watered, but she didn’t do anything. She didn’t say anything, either. “I dunno what's happening to me.”

I don’t either, Tiggy.

“I was gonna put that bullet in her and if it wasn’t for Jax—“

“Jax was there?”

“He stormed in after someone must’ve told him we were gonna off the “man” that saw Ope and Bobby kill Hefner at that complex.”

“Oh.” She nodded along, cleaning out the wound she had literally only just fixed yesterday.

But the cogs inside of her brain were slowly turning.

“Oh…” Isla quickly looked down at him, piecing the puzzle together. “Tell me he didn’t do this to you.”

He winced as the whiskey left a searing trail down the back of his throat, barely making eye contact with her before she snapped.

“Tig! Talk to me—“

“Alright, fine! Yeah, he did this!” He raised his voice at her, watching anger flit across her delicate features. “He held his glock to my goddamn head and I was ready for him to pull the trigger, but he didn’t.”

She blinked at him, uneasy at the thought of what Jax had started to morph into. Who he had started to morph into.

“We ended up fighting and I got a few hits in, but the asshole punched me in the fucking face and threw me onto a table—that’s probably where the bruises came from.”

“And this was because of the girl, right?”

“Right.”

“But Happy and my dad were there, too…Why did Jax beat the shit outta you?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t,” she grabbed the tumbler from his right hand so he couldn’t silence himself with anymore alcohol, and put it atop the table.

“Because he stormed in when I had the gun to that kid’s head, and I was gonna pull the fucking trigger.” He recounted, sobbing as he spoke.

She was seething. Oh, Isla was fucking furious—but she didn’t want to spook him after this, because he was unpredictable and really unstable. She didn’t want him to do anything stupid.

“It’s alright.” The damp pad was discarded, tossed to the middle of the table when she grabbed gently at his chin and forced him to look upward. “You didn’t kill her, I’m assuming Jax handled it some other way, and you’re outta the blue, okay? It’s fine.”

Maybe Isla was so quick to forgive him for something that he didn’t do because she was also toiling with the idea of coming to terms with an act just as—if not more—treacherous than Tig’s.

She seeked that reassurance, that “it’s okay” talk from somebody after what she had done with her best friend, but she knew that the only person that’d give it to her was Jax. Because he was also trying to accept it.

The guilt was hefty and Tig knew all too fucking well what that’d entail, but he had no idea that Isla was suffering that same thing, too.

“You didn’t know the witness was a kid. None of you were to know that if Rosen didn’t specify.”

“But I was still gonna do it.” He added. “After I found out she was a kid, I was still gonna kill her.”

“But you didn’t.”

He was making it difficult for her to get through to him.

“It was horrible and I know that what you were going to do was bad, but you weren’t the only one there, about to do what you had to for your brother.” Isla’s thumb ran softly underneath his lower lip, hoping the tears welling in her eyes weren’t about to fall to the apples of her cheeks.

Because that’s all that Tig was doing. He was doing this for his brother. For the man that had already sacrificed so fucking much for his club, he deserved every last sliver of prosperity and protection that SAMCRO could offer.

And, perhaps, Tig wanting so desperately to pull that trigger was a way for him to solidify the fact that Opie wasn’t going to be sent away—wasn’t going to suffer more after his wife had been “mysteriously” killed. But Isla simply saw that as him wanting to do an inherently evil thing that’d see the greater good ensue.

Looking past the fact it was a teenage girl, however, was something she had to work on for the sake of her own fucking sanity.

“Thank you.” Tig broke the silence, getting to his feet. He towered over her a little bit as he did so. “See you tomorrow—“

Isla didn’t have enough time to think about what she was doing, but that phrase triggered something inside of her. She grabbed at his hand as he went to slip away, looking up at him with that almost heart-wrenching innocence of hers.

“I did something bad, too.” She blurted, letting her tears fall freely. “I can't say what I did, but it was bad and I regret it every fucking day because I can’t sleep properly, and it’s the only thing on my mind, and I just—“

He silenced her when he wrapped both arms around her trembling frame, holding her impossibly close to his chest as she weepeed into the navy cotton, and he gradually moved a hand upward to twist into her hair.

“It’s alright, baby, let it out.”

Mentally, he commended himself for being the one person that Isla trusted enough to confide in—to crumble before. But it was also sickening because the woman was so fucking stubborn and rarely ever shed a tear in front of a Son.

Chibs was the only one that saw her like this, really.

He felt horrible. Not because she was so upset but because she had so obviously been harboring that emotion, that pain and anguish and she didn’t know how to express it without crying.

“I’m scared, Tig.” Isla mumbled sadly into his chest, trying to sniff back the horrid emotion but failing miserably.

“Of what?”

“Myself. And these stupid things that I can’t stop thinking.”

“Thoughts are normal.” He reassured her, running a hand up and down her back. “Intrusive thoughts are normal. Don’t you worry—“

“You can’t tell me not to worry, because that’s gonna make me worry.” Her words were plied in a weak laugh. “And when I worry, I cry—obviously.”

“Don’t cry.” He chuckled, too, using the pad of his thumb to brush across her cheek. “You’re too pretty to cry this much.”

“And you’re too much of a mean old man to be this comforting.” Tig feigned offense, gasping dramatically at her words. “So, what was it? What pulled at your heartstrings so much that made you think you had to try and make me feel better?”

“It’s my good deed for the day.” Her lips curled upward into a grin when his expression softened.

“Do you think you can extend that good deed?”

He grunted, nodding. “Suppose so. What’d ‘ya want me to do?”

“I was just gonna ask if you’d stay with me again tonight.” All irreverence in her tone had melted away, promptly replaced by a borderline debilitating sincerity. “You don’t have to because we’ve gotta be out early for the funeral tomorrow, and that’d mean you’d have to leave earlier to get yourself fixed up, but—“

“I can leave a little earlier.” He cut her short, still swiping at the tears that wouldn’t quit flowing from her eyes. “If you get your ass up and ready before eight, you can leave with me too.”

“Yeah?” Hopefully, she asked. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.” Tig confirmed, slinging his arm over her shoulder when she pulled away and pointed toward the end of the hall. “And I guessed that you didn’t wanna head to the garage alone—and Gemma would probably beat the shit outta you if you were late—so if you come with me, you’ll be on time.”

Isla just hummed, thankful for the genuine intentions behind Tig’s actions. He was sweet when he wanted to be.

“Where am I sleepin’?” He asked with a little grunt, a twinge of pain prickling against his ribcage. “I’ll take the couch—“

“Oh, shut up. You’re not sleeping on my couch after getting your shit rocked.”

Tig glared at her, but she simply raised an eyebrow. She gestured to her bedroom.

“Y’know, if we keep spending the night together then people are gonna get a little suspicious.”

“Eh. Let ‘em.” Isla stated offhandedly shimmying her shoulders out of her robe, and throwing it onto her vanity stool as she got to her room. “I don’t care what Gemma thinks.”

“Not so much Gemma.” They shared a knowing look, but he followed her into the room and sat at the edge of her bed regardless.

Isla sighed, sitting beside him.

“If you’re worried about my dad because of how he was this morning, then you don’t need to be. I think he’s just a little bit spun out after last night, and feels bad for Ope—‘cuz, y’know, he’s been through this too.”

Tig’s heartbeat hastened to an almost debilitating tempo, wondering how Isla knew the similarities between Diane and Donna. But she blew those thoughts right out his brain when she built on her response.

“He lost his wife and was left with a kid,” she pointed to herself, “and didn’t know how to navigate this life without the woman he’d depended on for so long. It’s just heavy at the moment.”

“Yeah,” he shook his head a little, looking at his hands bunched together in his lap, “you’re probably right about that.”

“It’s all that it is. He’s just feelin’ it a little more than what we are.”

I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Isla.

“Anyway.” She perked up a bit more. “If you wanna freshen up, I’ve got some shampoo and lotions that don’t smell like roses in the bathroom—and I think there might be some razors in one of those cupboards, too.”

“You gonna join me?”

The tips of her ears began to blaze, stippling heat across her cheeks and down to her neck until she could almost feel how red she was getting.

Despite knowing that was a joke—the habitual banter shared between them—it still forced a feeling to swell in her stomach.

A feeling of something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

“Maybe tomorrow.” Isla chuckled at the playful pout tugging at his lips, urging him to step into the en suite before she physically fucking exploded.

He grabbed a towel from the pile, walked in, and shut the door behind him, and she threw herself against the top of the comforter with a groan.

At what point had Tig’s harmless flirting turned into something more for Isla, she wasn’t entirely sure. What she did know, however, was that she was definitely enjoying it a little bit too much now.

And that would complicate things, she was certain of it.

But she strived not to let it get to her, and slid underneath the unkempt covers for the second time tonight.

When Tig emerged from the bathroom, he was thankful to see that she’d covered herself up because the tiny crimson cami and shorts combo was killing him.

He wasn’t able to pinpoint just what it was that’d made him feel so differently about that this evening, but he knew that he wasn’t able to get the image out of his fucking head.

“Was that nice?” She asked from the left side of her bed, barely opening her eyes as he stepped onto the carpet.

“It was.” Tig answered softly, picking his jeans up from the ground.

“You can’t seriously be wearing those to sleep in?”

“I’ve slept in more uncomfortable outfits.”

Isla huffed out a breath, gripping the covers and pulling them back. “Wait here.” Begrudgingly, she left the bed again and traipsed toward the cabinet at the end of her hallway.

He watched her saunter away, heeding the crow tattoo on her lower back that he’d never noticed before. He wondered who she’d gotten that for, and he also wondered if anybody even knew about that—because he certainly did not.

“These are clean, you can wear them.” She threw a pair of pajama pants at him from the doorway, hoping he wouldn’t make a face.

Cautiously, he held them out in front of him. “Whose are these?”

“Nobodies. I just learned—from Gemma—to always keep spare shit at my house. Like the shower stuff and razors, and I’ve got things for whoever might need them.”

He smiled, forgetting that she was so thoughtful.

Tig unzipped his pants and slipped into the checkered cotton as Isla rummaged around the bottom drawer of her closet, pulling out a couple of pillows.

“You do this a lot?” He quizzed, getting into bed. “Take care of us guys, I mean.”

“Not really. Only when one of you needs it.”

He nodded, taking one of the two pillows from her.

“Aside from stitching you up two days in a row, the last time I took care of somebody was when Jax and Wendy split and he let her live at his place.”

“He never said.”

“‘Cuz Gemma would go nuts if she found out that he came to me and not his mommy.” She chuckled, settling beside him before flicking the lamp off. “And he only stayed with me for a couple weeks because he didn’t wanna sleep at the clubhouse.”

“So you were harboring Jax from her, huh?” He nudged her, prompting Isla to shift closer to him.

“I guess so.” She joked back through a yawn. “I felt bad for him because she’s such a hardass sometimes. He just wanted somewhere to stay, and somebody to keep him company that wouldn’t ask an abundance of overbearing questions.”

“And you were that somebody.”

“Yup. I was.” Tig turned onto his side to face her. “And I liked it because I hate being alone. It was nice to have somebody around.”

“You? Not wanting to be alone?” Sarcastically, he let out.

Had he not already been hurt, she would’ve slapped the smugness off of his face for that comment.

“What’s that all about, huh?”

“The being alone thing?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, really.” She mused quietly, pursing her lips. “I think I just got used to being around my dad, and whenever I wasn’t with him I was with Gemma—and I didn’t move into my own place until I was twenty-three, so…”

“So you always had somebody.”

“Yup. I guess I have some attachment issues.” Isla chuckled, silently thanking him for not ridiculing her the way she thought that he might’ve.

But Tig was always so thoughtful when it came to her, and he probably wouldn’t have been able to find it in himself to make fun of that sentiment.

He had his own issues, too. He wouldn’t dream of mocking that she didn’t like to be alone.

“Is it Jax’s?” He asked out of nowhere in reference to the crow. “The tattoo you got.”

Isla froze. She didn’t know that he’d seen it tonight.

Only Tara knew about that. Only Tara knew about a lot of things, it seemed.

“No.” She rasped, hating the way her words became lodged at the back of her throat.

Tig raised a brow. “Whose is it? Is it Juice’s—“

She snorted at his words, and he smiled because he had finally gaged a more positive reaction. Her smile—though barely visible—was most certainly as beautiful as ever.

“It isn’t anybody’s. It’s just a SAMCRO crow.” The smile was weak, now. Faded and pained, but it was there.

She wasn’t lying, but it felt like there was more to the story than what she was letting on, and he was happy with the answer that he’d gotten. So he didn't push it.

“Would you ever get a crow for someone?” A question that he never thought he’d be asking Chibs’s daughter, but a question that he had to acquire an answer to.

After mulling it over for a few seconds, Isla nodded. She laid her hand atop Tig’s that was resting against his pillow, and flicked her eyes upward to meet his gaze as he yawned.

“Maybe one day. But, right now, I’m happy knowing that my little tattoo represents my dedication to the club as a whole—not just refined to one person.”

[gustavowilh]

How Nordstrom and Starbucks Approach Customer Love

We had the pleasure of hosting Ryan Bruels, Director of Engineering at Starbucks, and Jeff Raffo, Director of Engineering at Nordstrom, for a fireside chat on customer centricity at our 2017 Customer Love Summit.

Nordstrom and Starbucks are the gold standard for building exceptional customer experiences that transcend digital and in-store, and we got the inside scoop on how they decide what to build next to stay cutting-edge, how they successfully roll out new features globally, how they provide their world-famous customer service across channels, and how they use mobile to foster customer loyalty. As department heads for two of the most customer-centric engineering orgs that exist today, Ryan and Jeff have unique perspectives on what it really takes to put customers at the heart of a business.

Specifically, Jeff shares how Nordstrom approaches:

Personalization through bridging the gap between digital and in-store experiences through paying attention to cultural nuances and solving the top in-store challenges through digital channels.

Aligning internal teams to focus on the customer through empathy, knowing the data, and balancing the speed of their digital experience with their culture of connecting with customers.

And Ryan explains how Starbucks thinks about:

Improving user experience by getting in front of customers as much as possible, eliminating assumptions, and allowing yourself to be surprised by how people actually use your ditigal experience.

Loyalty starting with partners (employees), and including a seamless digital experience that brings customer and company together.

Whether your company is early in its mobile innovation journey or consider yourselves seasoned pros, we can all learn a thing or two about #customerlove from Nordstrom and Starbucks. Watch the complete talk with Ryan and Jeff to learn how their teams approach customer love and put the customer at the center of their product roadmaps. If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Emily: Awesome. So who’s excited for this panel?

Crowd: Woo.

Emily: Woo.

Ryan: Right, good.

Emily: So let’s get right to it.

Jeff: Sure.

Emily: What the heck does the director of engineering do at each of your companies? What do you guys do all day long?

Jeff: Very little.

Ryan: Right. Advocacy is a good one. I think…when I think of our roles, certainly my role at Starbucks, it’s about, how do you create an engineering culture? How do you create a culture around, like, great software engineering and customer-focused experiences, in the context of a big retail company? I think that’s a huge part of it. So, relationships with business, tech, to kind of get great things done.

Emily: Awesome.

Jeff: Yeah, I think developing a culture of engineering is ultimately important, especially in the enterprise space. Also, I spend a ridiculous amount of time meeting with my peers, to make sure that I am in the loop on what they’re doing, and vise versa, to make sure if there’s some huge crosscutting project, that we’re ready to go and we don’t stub any toes.

Emily: That’s perfect. Well, that leads right into my next question. So, we all know that technology is constantly changing how we live our lives, and customer behavior. So, how do you decide what to build next and stay cutting edge and ahead of it all?

Jeff: So, for us, we have an insanely talented product and user experience team that really helps and does a good job of guiding us on where we need to go. That combined with an emerging culture of test and learn and doing things like A/B test, to figure out which experiences resonate the most with our customers couldn’t be more important to us at this point.

Emily: Awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. I think one of the really interesting challenges for any company in our space, is like not only are we paying attention to the digital analytics and the stuff that comes in from our mobile applications, and then web applications. But we have to pay attention to store logistics too. I mean, we have to pay attention to what’s happening in our stores, and the recent examples around our mobile ordering system is a great example. How can we use our digital experiences to make that in-store experience, like, really, really good and minimize chaos and everything? I guess, it’s just constantly listening to customers by way of data or actual store logistics, I guess.

Emily: So that’s a super hard problem. Can you dig in a little bit more about how you do the digital and in-store, how you keep track of all of that and all the tech stack that you’re working with? How do you do that?

Ryan: Yeah. That’s a big one.

Jeff: That’s a tough one.

Ryan: It’s a multi-headed hydra. Analytics are huge. As we’re talking today about customer data and the kind of metrics that we pull off our digital experiences, that’s a huge part of it. But there’s numerous other ways for us to get ahead of customer insights. We are constantly in front of our customers. We’re doing customer insights kind of research. We are putting A/B test into the app – Jeff kind of mentioned that – to really test, “Is this something that’s gonna help our customers through the funnel? Is this something that’s helping them get even through the line faster at the store?” Things like that are the daily part of our work.

Jeff: Yes. So, organizationally, we have…so we have a mobile apps business unit and we have a nordstrom.com business unit. We also have an omnichannel business unit that looks across those experiences for opportunities to use both of those platforms, to enable things within the store. I think that’s fairly new for Nordstrom, but it’s been really, really successful so far.

Emily: How did it go about…I know you guys have changed quite a bit the structure.

Jeff: Yes.

Emily: How did this come about?

Jeff: How did this come about? That’s a really good question. I’m not totally sure, to be quite frank. The omnichannel, like, anybody with a brick-and-mortar presence and an online presence, omnichannel is a huge thing for them. But yeah, I’m not completely able to comment.

Emily: Okay, fair. So, Jeff, this Reserve & Try on In-Store feature is super hot right now. I’m sure a lot of you guys have tried it, especially the women in the room. Can you tell us about it and how you rolled it out and how you worked with the stores, how you tested? Tell us a bit about it.

Jeff: Yeah. So the experience…So, currently, it’s only released in western Washington. It’s going to expand nationally here in a couple of months or so. But the experience, for those of you who don’t know about it, essentially…So, two of the biggest complaints we have about stores is it’s really hard to find inventory, and it takes a really long time to do anything in the store. So we’ve allowed customers, using the mobile app, to search inventory in their store, on the app, and then reserve it. To where the store will then accept the reservation, figure out where that merchandise is, and send a text back to the user saying, “We found your item. Please come to the store when you have time.”

And then the user comes in to the store, we have it staged in the waiting room for them, the dressing room for them. They can try it on. They can decide if they like it. They can also decide if they would like other things with it, and then check out right there. So, the ultimate business KPI for this experience is, “Will we be able to get people in and out of the store within 10 minutes?” And, yeah, like you said, it’s been a very, very hot experience for us and one that we’re really, really excited about.

Getting it enabled in the store hasn’t been necessarily a seamless experience. If you grew up in technology like me and I think Ryan did as well, so the cultures around the store are very different than the cultures around the technology group. Though it’s changing pretty quickly. But historically, that’s very much the case. So the way we think about problems and the way the store thinks about problems couldn’t be more different in a lot of situations. So, one, developing an application that is store-centric was a challenge for us early on.

I think the biggest enabler in helping fix that was essentially sending, no joke, the VP, the director, the engineering manager and all the engineers, all the product folks, all the program folks into the store, talking with the people that are actually gonna enable the experience. To get a good idea, essentially building empathy for those people so we can build things that we knew they were going to need, as opposed to what we assumed they were gonna need. I think, if anything, that was one of the biggest things we did to help this become a seamless thing.

Ryan: That’s really…I mean, it’s really interesting. You have these…they’re not worrying worlds, but they’re not worlds that have necessarily always talked to each other. And that’s like the digital and this in-store thing. And so, on the one hand, you have pressures on the digital, which is like we wanna complete our order fast. We wanna get in and out. Like, we know what we want. We just wanna order. In the case of Nordstrom, you want to be able to try on the clothes. In the case of Starbucks, you have to go and pick up your coffee.

But it’s a very, like, rapid fire, in and out kind of thing. I wanna be done. And that clashes sometimes with Nordstrom and Starbucks, both value this customer connection. Like the salespeople at Nordstrom, the partners in our stores at Starbucks, part of the culture is all about this connection. So there’s a potential, if you don’t focus and really try to strengthen this relationship between your retail teams and your tech teams, that you could completely disconnect your salespeople and your partner, your in-store partners from the digital customers. Like, how can we create that connection while still achieving the goals of the digital experience? I think it’s just been a fascinating problem to work on.

Jeff: I totally agree. So one other thing I was gonna mention is that the nature or the culture of the in-store employee for Nordstrom is one of very much an entrepreneurial culture. So if these technology solutions we provide don’t meet their needs, they’re going to go right around them. So it’s really, really important to make sure you understand your customer in that situation, because you could spend millions and millions of dollars developing something that nobody ends up using very, very easily.

Emily: That reminds me of a couple of headlines I saw around Mobile Order & Pay being too successful. Can you speak to that and kind of how you bring that feedback back to the team? What changes do you make?

Ryan: Yeah, sure. A brief context, the Mobile Order & Pay, so this is an ordering experience within the app. You can literally select drinks, food, whatever you want to order, pay with your preferred sort of payment method and then actually go pick up the order in the store. How many people have actually, like, used MOP?

Jeff: Everybody.

Ryan: Nice. See, I have a different thing about the difference between analytic data and, like, survey data, because that was really interesting. But, yeah. So, as MOP got more and more successful, obviously, we’re all really thrilled by it. But as we talked about it on our investor call a couple of months ago, there was sort of a downside to that, which is sort of a…it’s so much increase in the traffic in the stores. But that traffic wasn’t traffic that was standing in line to order drinks. It was traffic that was sort of just waiting for their drinks. Like, they wanted to come pick it up and were just kind of like at the store, maybe not at the right point.

So, what that had an impact on was potentially you open the door and there’s all these people around you. You figure that’s the line and you’re like, “That’s okay. I’ll peace out.” So, what that really has done is pushed us to really strengthen that relationship with our partners in-store, to really think about how we can use the digital experience to smooth out the line, how can we be more accurate with our wait time data, for example? How can we be more clear to the customer when their drinks are ready?

We just launched a great pilot which is rolling out to stores, where we do this very…it was a very simple A/B test, actually, to start. Where we just say…we have a little notification that comes up that says, “Your order is ready.” And like, that simple thing sort of alleviates a lot of anxiety on the customer behalf and they actually know, “Okay. Now I can sort of stand up from my table,” or “I can come in the store and pick up my drink.” So it’s pushed us to just really understand the store operations a lot more.

Emily: That’s really smart. And Jeff, I’m curious, so you’ve also launched Buy and Pick Up in-store.

Jeff: Yup.

Emily: So can you talk about what learnings as you have from the Try On, to Buy, kind of any different hurdles?

Jeff: So it was actually reverse. So we enabled buying…We call them BOPIS. It’s Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store. It’s not a great moniker.

Ryan: BOPIS.

Jeff: Yup. Super awe-inspiring. But it was different, right? Actually, it’s so funny, the code name for the stores experience was ROTIS, Reserve Online Pick up at the store. Anyway. Not interesting to anybody but me. So, they definitely helped inform each other. I think we learned a ton about the in-store experiences from a technology standpoint, from the BOPIS work that we did.

And then again, as both of us have mentioned a couple of times, doing A/B test to figure out locations within the store, where it makes the most sense to pick up items. Which type of in-store employee should be working with a customer at any given time? Like, all that experience, it’s really hard for me to pin-point one right now, but there was a ton of data amassed during the BOPIS work that really informed a lot of the roadmap for what we did with Reserve Online.

Emily: Awesome. So, Ryan, Starbucks is a global operation. You have thousands of stores. So how do you think about global scale with mobile innovation?

Ryan: Man, another, like, huge question. There’s the obvious ones, right, which is like technology at scale, millions of customers using the app every day. Like, how do we expand that out to some of our major global markets? So I think some of the more interesting challenges that I think this is what really makes being a digital product team within this big retail company so interesting, is we have to pay attention to things like cultural nuances and differences in the way that other countries sort of think about their morning coffee habits and everything like that.

So, without diving into too many details, like, even the way that we express our loyalty and rewards program, it’s very different culturally. Like, sometimes you may have a culture that redeems rewards in a different way or they don’t see it as sort of wanting to get a free drink, but maybe they want a different sort of input into Starbucks, for example. Customer experience is king. I think if you think about Starbucks, we try to create sort of a very welcoming and consistent sort of brand experience across the world.

When you walk into a Starbucks in any country, it is both familiar and it’s that third place that we invite you to come in and sit and enjoy. But it also has sort of the cultural distinctions. Every country has their own sort of look and feel at Starbucks. We must take those as part of the digital experience as well. I think it’s really that customer experience angle that’s the most interesting approach to that, in addition to making sure it all scales well.

Emily: One thing you mentioned in the prep is that you actually have multiple apps across the world. From a technology perspective, how do you keep the apps consistent? Is it all based out of headquarters? Do you have teams abroad that are working with your team?

Ryan: Yeah. Current state, we work with a variety of our international partners to do the development work. It’s one of the stronger goals of our technology teams right now, to just look out at the globe and see what doesn’t make sense. In full honesty, it’s one of these things that we’re just trying to make the right plan for right now. I wish we had our grand plans for the global takeover, but we don’t. It’s definitely still something we’re learning. But it’s, again, part of the fun challenges.

Emily: Awesome. So I got this question when I asked folks around what they’re curious in. And a lot of people would like to know, like, “What’s the decision-making process before launching a new feature?” Like, what are kind of some of the things you have to go through internally before you decide something like Mobile Order & Pay, or Reserve & Try on In-store?

Jeff: So, depending on the feature, there’s various maturations you have to do to get something to actually see the light of day. From a Nordstrom standpoint, it can range from a board decision. But typically, it’s something that lands in the product team, an ideation process happens. They go through and they test it. They come up with comps to see what makes the most sense. You’d write out a business plan and you’d find what business KPIs you need to achieve to have this thing actually make sense and spend money on. Then if all those things turn out to be positive, then the project is scoped and handed to the engineering team to execute on.

Ryan: Yeah. I think it comes from a variety of sources. I think more and more, we’re trying to be a data driven digital products team, which means a lot of the product decisions we make are driven very concretely by the analytic data. But it really can…there are multiple influences. It may be that we’re making changes to our Starbucks rewards program, our loyalty program. And that necessarily needs to have its front face in the mobile experience.

And so, that the…it may be sort of a new program from our loyalty team and then that gets…between our engineering and product management team, sort of worked out, designed, all that. It could be something wholly internal. So it’s something that we know we wanna either improve in the app. Or we’re seeing analytic data that says, “Oh, man, we can probably improve some customer experience and really shorten the time through the Mobile Order funnel,” for example. Or Erick has sort of alluded to this, sometimes you just get a call from Howard and there’s some changes to make. Thankfully, he’s an incredibly sharp dude. So if he says he wants something in the app, there’s usually a good reason.

Jeff: I think it’s a pretty interesting time to be alive in this space right now. Because the process I just described sounds very long and onerous. There’s a strong desire within Nordstrom to shorten that as much as possible, and not spend a lot of time trying to figure out the exact right thing and get things out as soon as possible. So you can then get it in the customers’ hands and then figure out whether it resonates or not.

It was a huge pain point for my engineering team early on, to where we would do all this work. We would release the experience and then it wouldn’t have any needle moving business KPIs. So we did all this work and we tested it and we looked at all the data, but we nev

from Blogger http://gustavowilh.blogspot.com/2017/08/how-nordstrom-and-starbucks-approach.html via IFTTT

[darincjohnson]

How Nordstrom and Starbucks Approach Customer Love

We had the pleasure of hosting Ryan Bruels, Director of Engineering at Starbucks, and Jeff Raffo, Director of Engineering at Nordstrom, for a fireside chat on customer centricity at our 2017 Customer Love Summit.

Nordstrom and Starbucks are the gold standard for building exceptional customer experiences that transcend digital and in-store, and we got the inside scoop on how they decide what to build next to stay cutting-edge, how they successfully roll out new features globally, how they provide their world-famous customer service across channels, and how they use mobile to foster customer loyalty. As department heads for two of the most customer-centric engineering orgs that exist today, Ryan and Jeff have unique perspectives on what it really takes to put customers at the heart of a business.

Specifically, Jeff shares how Nordstrom approaches:

Personalization through bridging the gap between digital and in-store experiences through paying attention to cultural nuances and solving the top in-store challenges through digital channels.

Aligning internal teams to focus on the customer through empathy, knowing the data, and balancing the speed of their digital experience with their culture of connecting with customers.

And Ryan explains how Starbucks thinks about:

Improving user experience by getting in front of customers as much as possible, eliminating assumptions, and allowing yourself to be surprised by how people actually use your ditigal experience.

Loyalty starting with partners (employees), and including a seamless digital experience that brings customer and company together.

Whether your company is early in its mobile innovation journey or consider yourselves seasoned pros, we can all learn a thing or two about #customerlove from Nordstrom and Starbucks. Watch the complete talk with Ryan and Jeff to learn how their teams approach customer love and put the customer at the center of their product roadmaps. If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Emily: Awesome. So who’s excited for this panel?

Crowd: Woo.

Emily: Woo.

Ryan: Right, good.

Emily: So let’s get right to it.

Jeff: Sure.

Emily: What the heck does the director of engineering do at each of your companies? What do you guys do all day long?

Jeff: Very little.

Ryan: Right. Advocacy is a good one. I think…when I think of our roles, certainly my role at Starbucks, it’s about, how do you create an engineering culture? How do you create a culture around, like, great software engineering and customer-focused experiences, in the context of a big retail company? I think that’s a huge part of it. So, relationships with business, tech, to kind of get great things done.

Emily: Awesome.

Jeff: Yeah, I think developing a culture of engineering is ultimately important, especially in the enterprise space. Also, I spend a ridiculous amount of time meeting with my peers, to make sure that I am in the loop on what they’re doing, and vise versa, to make sure if there’s some huge crosscutting project, that we’re ready to go and we don’t stub any toes.

Emily: That’s perfect. Well, that leads right into my next question. So, we all know that technology is constantly changing how we live our lives, and customer behavior. So, how do you decide what to build next and stay cutting edge and ahead of it all?

Jeff: So, for us, we have an insanely talented product and user experience team that really helps and does a good job of guiding us on where we need to go. That combined with an emerging culture of test and learn and doing things like A/B test, to figure out which experiences resonate the most with our customers couldn’t be more important to us at this point.

Emily: Awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. I think one of the really interesting challenges for any company in our space, is like not only are we paying attention to the digital analytics and the stuff that comes in from our mobile applications, and then web applications. But we have to pay attention to store logistics too. I mean, we have to pay attention to what’s happening in our stores, and the recent examples around our mobile ordering system is a great example. How can we use our digital experiences to make that in-store experience, like, really, really good and minimize chaos and everything? I guess, it’s just constantly listening to customers by way of data or actual store logistics, I guess.

Emily: So that’s a super hard problem. Can you dig in a little bit more about how you do the digital and in-store, how you keep track of all of that and all the tech stack that you’re working with? How do you do that?

Ryan: Yeah. That’s a big one.

Jeff: That’s a tough one.

Ryan: It’s a multi-headed hydra. Analytics are huge. As we’re talking today about customer data and the kind of metrics that we pull off our digital experiences, that’s a huge part of it. But there’s numerous other ways for us to get ahead of customer insights. We are constantly in front of our customers. We’re doing customer insights kind of research. We are putting A/B test into the app – Jeff kind of mentioned that – to really test, “Is this something that’s gonna help our customers through the funnel? Is this something that’s helping them get even through the line faster at the store?” Things like that are the daily part of our work.

Jeff: Yes. So, organizationally, we have…so we have a mobile apps business unit and we have a nordstrom.com business unit. We also have an omnichannel business unit that looks across those experiences for opportunities to use both of those platforms, to enable things within the store. I think that’s fairly new for Nordstrom, but it’s been really, really successful so far.

Emily: How did it go about…I know you guys have changed quite a bit the structure.

Jeff: Yes.

Emily: How did this come about?

Jeff: How did this come about? That’s a really good question. I’m not totally sure, to be quite frank. The omnichannel, like, anybody with a brick-and-mortar presence and an online presence, omnichannel is a huge thing for them. But yeah, I’m not completely able to comment.

Emily: Okay, fair. So, Jeff, this Reserve & Try on In-Store feature is super hot right now. I’m sure a lot of you guys have tried it, especially the women in the room. Can you tell us about it and how you rolled it out and how you worked with the stores, how you tested? Tell us a bit about it.

Jeff: Yeah. So the experience…So, currently, it’s only released in western Washington. It’s going to expand nationally here in a couple of months or so. But the experience, for those of you who don’t know about it, essentially…So, two of the biggest complaints we have about stores is it’s really hard to find inventory, and it takes a really long time to do anything in the store. So we’ve allowed customers, using the mobile app, to search inventory in their store, on the app, and then reserve it. To where the store will then accept the reservation, figure out where that merchandise is, and send a text back to the user saying, “We found your item. Please come to the store when you have time.”

And then the user comes in to the store, we have it staged in the waiting room for them, the dressing room for them. They can try it on. They can decide if they like it. They can also decide if they would like other things with it, and then check out right there. So, the ultimate business KPI for this experience is, “Will we be able to get people in and out of the store within 10 minutes?” And, yeah, like you said, it’s been a very, very hot experience for us and one that we’re really, really excited about.

Getting it enabled in the store hasn’t been necessarily a seamless experience. If you grew up in technology like me and I think Ryan did as well, so the cultures around the store are very different than the cultures around the technology group. Though it’s changing pretty quickly. But historically, that’s very much the case. So the way we think about problems and the way the store thinks about problems couldn’t be more different in a lot of situations. So, one, developing an application that is store-centric was a challenge for us early on.

I think the biggest enabler in helping fix that was essentially sending, no joke, the VP, the director, the engineering manager and all the engineers, all the product folks, all the program folks into the store, talking with the people that are actually gonna enable the experience. To get a good idea, essentially building empathy for those people so we can build things that we knew they were going to need, as opposed to what we assumed they were gonna need. I think, if anything, that was one of the biggest things we did to help this become a seamless thing.

Ryan: That’s really…I mean, it’s really interesting. You have these…they’re not worrying worlds, but they’re not worlds that have necessarily always talked to each other. And that’s like the digital and this in-store thing. And so, on the one hand, you have pressures on the digital, which is like we wanna complete our order fast. We wanna get in and out. Like, we know what we want. We just wanna order. In the case of Nordstrom, you want to be able to try on the clothes. In the case of Starbucks, you have to go and pick up your coffee.

But it’s a very, like, rapid fire, in and out kind of thing. I wanna be done. And that clashes sometimes with Nordstrom and Starbucks, both value this customer connection. Like the salespeople at Nordstrom, the partners in our stores at Starbucks, part of the culture is all about this connection. So there’s a potential, if you don’t focus and really try to strengthen this relationship between your retail teams and your tech teams, that you could completely disconnect your salespeople and your partner, your in-store partners from the digital customers. Like, how can we create that connection while still achieving the goals of the digital experience? I think it’s just been a fascinating problem to work on.

Jeff: I totally agree. So one other thing I was gonna mention is that the nature or the culture of the in-store employee for Nordstrom is one of very much an entrepreneurial culture. So if these technology solutions we provide don’t meet their needs, they’re going to go right around them. So it’s really, really important to make sure you understand your customer in that situation, because you could spend millions and millions of dollars developing something that nobody ends up using very, very easily.

Emily: That reminds me of a couple of headlines I saw around Mobile Order & Pay being too successful. Can you speak to that and kind of how you bring that feedback back to the team? What changes do you make?

Ryan: Yeah, sure. A brief context, the Mobile Order & Pay, so this is an ordering experience within the app. You can literally select drinks, food, whatever you want to order, pay with your preferred sort of payment method and then actually go pick up the order in the store. How many people have actually, like, used MOP?

Jeff: Everybody.

Ryan: Nice. See, I have a different thing about the difference between analytic data and, like, survey data, because that was really interesting. But, yeah. So, as MOP got more and more successful, obviously, we’re all really thrilled by it. But as we talked about it on our investor call a couple of months ago, there was sort of a downside to that, which is sort of a…it’s so much increase in the traffic in the stores. But that traffic wasn’t traffic that was standing in line to order drinks. It was traffic that was sort of just waiting for their drinks. Like, they wanted to come pick it up and were just kind of like at the store, maybe not at the right point.

So, what that had an impact on was potentially you open the door and there’s all these people around you. You figure that’s the line and you’re like, “That’s okay. I’ll peace out.” So, what that really has done is pushed us to really strengthen that relationship with our partners in-store, to really think about how we can use the digital experience to smooth out the line, how can we be more accurate with our wait time data, for example? How can we be more clear to the customer when their drinks are ready?

We just launched a great pilot which is rolling out to stores, where we do this very…it was a very simple A/B test, actually, to start. Where we just say…we have a little notification that comes up that says, “Your order is ready.” And like, that simple thing sort of alleviates a lot of anxiety on the customer behalf and they actually know, “Okay. Now I can sort of stand up from my table,” or “I can come in the store and pick up my drink.” So it’s pushed us to just really understand the store operations a lot more.

Emily: That’s really smart. And Jeff, I’m curious, so you’ve also launched Buy and Pick Up in-store.

Jeff: Yup.

Emily: So can you talk about what learnings as you have from the Try On, to Buy, kind of any different hurdles?

Jeff: So it was actually reverse. So we enabled buying…We call them BOPIS. It’s Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store. It’s not a great moniker.

Ryan: BOPIS.

Jeff: Yup. Super awe-inspiring. But it was different, right? Actually, it’s so funny, the code name for the stores experience was ROTIS, Reserve Online Pick up at the store. Anyway. Not interesting to anybody but me. So, they definitely helped inform each other. I think we learned a ton about the in-store experiences from a technology standpoint, from the BOPIS work that we did.

And then again, as both of us have mentioned a couple of times, doing A/B test to figure out locations within the store, where it makes the most sense to pick up items. Which type of in-store employee should be working with a customer at any given time? Like, all that experience, it’s really hard for me to pin-point one right now, but there was a ton of data amassed during the BOPIS work that really informed a lot of the roadmap for what we did with Reserve Online.

Emily: Awesome. So, Ryan, Starbucks is a global operation. You have thousands of stores. So how do you think about global scale with mobile innovation?

Ryan: Man, another, like, huge question. There’s the obvious ones, right, which is like technology at scale, millions of customers using the app every day. Like, how do we expand that out to some of our major global markets? So I think some of the more interesting challenges that I think this is what really makes being a digital product team within this big retail company so interesting, is we have to pay attention to things like cultural nuances and differences in the way that other countries sort of think about their morning coffee habits and everything like that.

So, without diving into too many details, like, even the way that we express our loyalty and rewards program, it’s very different culturally. Like, sometimes you may have a culture that redeems rewards in a different way or they don’t see it as sort of wanting to get a free drink, but maybe they want a different sort of input into Starbucks, for example. Customer experience is king. I think if you think about Starbucks, we try to create sort of a very welcoming and consistent sort of brand experience across the world.

When you walk into a Starbucks in any country, it is both familiar and it’s that third place that we invite you to come in and sit and enjoy. But it also has sort of the cultural distinctions. Every country has their own sort of look and feel at Starbucks. We must take those as part of the digital experience as well. I think it’s really that customer experience angle that’s the most interesting approach to that, in addition to making sure it all scales well.

Emily: One thing you mentioned in the prep is that you actually have multiple apps across the world. From a technology perspective, how do you keep the apps consistent? Is it all based out of headquarters? Do you have teams abroad that are working with your team?

Ryan: Yeah. Current state, we work with a variety of our international partners to do the development work. It’s one of the stronger goals of our technology teams right now, to just look out at the globe and see what doesn’t make sense. In full honesty, it’s one of these things that we’re just trying to make the right plan for right now. I wish we had our grand plans for the global takeover, but we don’t. It’s definitely still something we’re learning. But it’s, again, part of the fun challenges.

Emily: Awesome. So I got this question when I asked folks around what they’re curious in. And a lot of people would like to know, like, “What’s the decision-making process before launching a new feature?” Like, what are kind of some of the things you have to go through internally before you decide something like Mobile Order & Pay, or Reserve & Try on In-store?

Jeff: So, depending on the feature, there’s various maturations you have to do to get something to actually see the light of day. From a Nordstrom standpoint, it can range from a board decision. But typically, it’s something that lands in the product team, an ideation process happens. They go through and they test it. They come up with comps to see what makes the most sense. You’d write out a business plan and you’d find what business KPIs you need to achieve to have this thing actually make sense and spend money on. Then if all those things turn out to be positive, then the project is scoped and handed to the engineering team to execute on.

Ryan: Yeah. I think it comes from a variety of sources. I think more and more, we’re trying to be a data driven digital products team, which means a lot of the product decisions we make are driven very concretely by the analytic data. But it really can…there are multiple influences. It may be that we’re making changes to our Starbucks rewards program, our loyalty program. And that necessarily needs to have its front face in the mobile experience.

And so, that the…it may be sort of a new program from our loyalty team and then that gets…between our engineering and product management team, sort of worked out, designed, all that. It could be something wholly internal. So it’s something that we know we wanna either improve in the app. Or we’re seeing analytic data that says, “Oh, man, we can probably improve some customer experience and really shorten the time through the Mobile Order funnel,” for example. Or Erick has sort of alluded to this, sometimes you just get a call from Howard and there’s some changes to make. Thankfully, he’s an incredibly sharp dude. So if he says he wants something in the app, there’s usually a good reason.

Jeff: I think it’s a pretty interesting time to be alive in this space right now. Because the process I just described sounds very long and onerous. There’s a strong desire within Nordstrom to shorten that as much as possible, and not spend a lot of time trying to figure out the exact right thing and get things out as soon as possible. So you can then get it in the customers’ hands and then figure out whether it resonates or not.

It was a huge pain point for my engineering team early on, to where we would do all this work. We would release the experience and then it wouldn’t have any needle moving business KPIs. So we did all this work and we tested it and we looked at all the data, but we nev

from WordPress https://darincjohnson.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/how-nordstrom-and-starbucks-approach-customer-love-2/ via IFTTT

[michaelmikkelson]

How Nordstrom and Starbucks Approach Customer Love

We had the pleasure of hosting Ryan Bruels, Director of Engineering at Starbucks, and Jeff Raffo, Director of Engineering at Nordstrom, for a fireside chat on customer centricity at our 2017 Customer Love Summit.

Nordstrom and Starbucks are the gold standard for building exceptional customer experiences that transcend digital and in-store, and we got the inside scoop on how they decide what to build next to stay cutting-edge, how they successfully roll out new features globally, how they provide their world-famous customer service across channels, and how they use mobile to foster customer loyalty. As department heads for two of the most customer-centric engineering orgs that exist today, Ryan and Jeff have unique perspectives on what it really takes to put customers at the heart of a business.

Specifically, Jeff shares how Nordstrom approaches:

Personalization through bridging the gap between digital and in-store experiences through paying attention to cultural nuances and solving the top in-store challenges through digital channels.

Aligning internal teams to focus on the customer through empathy, knowing the data, and balancing the speed of their digital experience with their culture of connecting with customers.

And Ryan explains how Starbucks thinks about:

Improving user experience by getting in front of customers as much as possible, eliminating assumptions, and allowing yourself to be surprised by how people actually use your ditigal experience.

Loyalty starting with partners (employees), and including a seamless digital experience that brings customer and company together.

Whether your company is early in its mobile innovation journey or consider yourselves seasoned pros, we can all learn a thing or two about #customerlove from Nordstrom and Starbucks. Watch the complete talk with Ryan and Jeff to learn how their teams approach customer love and put the customer at the center of their product roadmaps. If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Emily: Awesome. So who’s excited for this panel?

Crowd: Woo.

Emily: Woo.

Ryan: Right, good.

Emily: So let’s get right to it.

Jeff: Sure.

Emily: What the heck does the director of engineering do at each of your companies? What do you guys do all day long?

Jeff: Very little.

Ryan: Right. Advocacy is a good one. I think…when I think of our roles, certainly my role at Starbucks, it’s about, how do you create an engineering culture? How do you create a culture around, like, great software engineering and customer-focused experiences, in the context of a big retail company? I think that’s a huge part of it. So, relationships with business, tech, to kind of get great things done.

Emily: Awesome.

Jeff: Yeah, I think developing a culture of engineering is ultimately important, especially in the enterprise space. Also, I spend a ridiculous amount of time meeting with my peers, to make sure that I am in the loop on what they’re doing, and vise versa, to make sure if there’s some huge crosscutting project, that we’re ready to go and we don’t stub any toes.

Emily: That’s perfect. Well, that leads right into my next question. So, we all know that technology is constantly changing how we live our lives, and customer behavior. So, how do you decide what to build next and stay cutting edge and ahead of it all?

Jeff: So, for us, we have an insanely talented product and user experience team that really helps and does a good job of guiding us on where we need to go. That combined with an emerging culture of test and learn and doing things like A/B test, to figure out which experiences resonate the most with our customers couldn’t be more important to us at this point.

Emily: Awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. I think one of the really interesting challenges for any company in our space, is like not only are we paying attention to the digital analytics and the stuff that comes in from our mobile applications, and then web applications. But we have to pay attention to store logistics too. I mean, we have to pay attention to what’s happening in our stores, and the recent examples around our mobile ordering system is a great example. How can we use our digital experiences to make that in-store experience, like, really, really good and minimize chaos and everything? I guess, it’s just constantly listening to customers by way of data or actual store logistics, I guess.

Emily: So that’s a super hard problem. Can you dig in a little bit more about how you do the digital and in-store, how you keep track of all of that and all the tech stack that you’re working with? How do you do that?

Ryan: Yeah. That’s a big one.

Jeff: That’s a tough one.

Ryan: It’s a multi-headed hydra. Analytics are huge. As we’re talking today about customer data and the kind of metrics that we pull off our digital experiences, that’s a huge part of it. But there’s numerous other ways for us to get ahead of customer insights. We are constantly in front of our customers. We’re doing customer insights kind of research. We are putting A/B test into the app – Jeff kind of mentioned that – to really test, “Is this something that’s gonna help our customers through the funnel? Is this something that’s helping them get even through the line faster at the store?” Things like that are the daily part of our work.

Jeff: Yes. So, organizationally, we have…so we have a mobile apps business unit and we have a nordstrom.com business unit. We also have an omnichannel business unit that looks across those experiences for opportunities to use both of those platforms, to enable things within the store. I think that’s fairly new for Nordstrom, but it’s been really, really successful so far.

Emily: How did it go about…I know you guys have changed quite a bit the structure.

Jeff: Yes.

Emily: How did this come about?

Jeff: How did this come about? That’s a really good question. I’m not totally sure, to be quite frank. The omnichannel, like, anybody with a brick-and-mortar presence and an online presence, omnichannel is a huge thing for them. But yeah, I’m not completely able to comment.

Emily: Okay, fair. So, Jeff, this Reserve & Try on In-Store feature is super hot right now. I’m sure a lot of you guys have tried it, especially the women in the room. Can you tell us about it and how you rolled it out and how you worked with the stores, how you tested? Tell us a bit about it.

Jeff: Yeah. So the experience…So, currently, it’s only released in western Washington. It’s going to expand nationally here in a couple of months or so. But the experience, for those of you who don’t know about it, essentially…So, two of the biggest complaints we have about stores is it’s really hard to find inventory, and it takes a really long time to do anything in the store. So we’ve allowed customers, using the mobile app, to search inventory in their store, on the app, and then reserve it. To where the store will then accept the reservation, figure out where that merchandise is, and send a text back to the user saying, “We found your item. Please come to the store when you have time.”

And then the user comes in to the store, we have it staged in the waiting room for them, the dressing room for them. They can try it on. They can decide if they like it. They can also decide if they would like other things with it, and then check out right there. So, the ultimate business KPI for this experience is, “Will we be able to get people in and out of the store within 10 minutes?” And, yeah, like you said, it’s been a very, very hot experience for us and one that we’re really, really excited about.

Getting it enabled in the store hasn’t been necessarily a seamless experience. If you grew up in technology like me and I think Ryan did as well, so the cultures around the store are very different than the cultures around the technology group. Though it’s changing pretty quickly. But historically, that’s very much the case. So the way we think about problems and the way the store thinks about problems couldn’t be more different in a lot of situations. So, one, developing an application that is store-centric was a challenge for us early on.

I think the biggest enabler in helping fix that was essentially sending, no joke, the VP, the director, the engineering manager and all the engineers, all the product folks, all the program folks into the store, talking with the people that are actually gonna enable the experience. To get a good idea, essentially building empathy for those people so we can build things that we knew they were going to need, as opposed to what we assumed they were gonna need. I think, if anything, that was one of the biggest things we did to help this become a seamless thing.

Ryan: That’s really…I mean, it’s really interesting. You have these…they’re not worrying worlds, but they’re not worlds that have necessarily always talked to each other. And that’s like the digital and this in-store thing. And so, on the one hand, you have pressures on the digital, which is like we wanna complete our order fast. We wanna get in and out. Like, we know what we want. We just wanna order. In the case of Nordstrom, you want to be able to try on the clothes. In the case of Starbucks, you have to go and pick up your coffee.

But it’s a very, like, rapid fire, in and out kind of thing. I wanna be done. And that clashes sometimes with Nordstrom and Starbucks, both value this customer connection. Like the salespeople at Nordstrom, the partners in our stores at Starbucks, part of the culture is all about this connection. So there’s a potential, if you don’t focus and really try to strengthen this relationship between your retail teams and your tech teams, that you could completely disconnect your salespeople and your partner, your in-store partners from the digital customers. Like, how can we create that connection while still achieving the goals of the digital experience? I think it’s just been a fascinating problem to work on.

Jeff: I totally agree. So one other thing I was gonna mention is that the nature or the culture of the in-store employee for Nordstrom is one of very much an entrepreneurial culture. So if these technology solutions we provide don’t meet their needs, they’re going to go right around them. So it’s really, really important to make sure you understand your customer in that situation, because you could spend millions and millions of dollars developing something that nobody ends up using very, very easily.

Emily: That reminds me of a couple of headlines I saw around Mobile Order & Pay being too successful. Can you speak to that and kind of how you bring that feedback back to the team? What changes do you make?

Ryan: Yeah, sure. A brief context, the Mobile Order & Pay, so this is an ordering experience within the app. You can literally select drinks, food, whatever you want to order, pay with your preferred sort of payment method and then actually go pick up the order in the store. How many people have actually, like, used MOP?

Jeff: Everybody.

Ryan: Nice. See, I have a different thing about the difference between analytic data and, like, survey data, because that was really interesting. But, yeah. So, as MOP got more and more successful, obviously, we’re all really thrilled by it. But as we talked about it on our investor call a couple of months ago, there was sort of a downside to that, which is sort of a…it’s so much increase in the traffic in the stores. But that traffic wasn’t traffic that was standing in line to order drinks. It was traffic that was sort of just waiting for their drinks. Like, they wanted to come pick it up and were just kind of like at the store, maybe not at the right point.

So, what that had an impact on was potentially you open the door and there’s all these people around you. You figure that’s the line and you’re like, “That’s okay. I’ll peace out.” So, what that really has done is pushed us to really strengthen that relationship with our partners in-store, to really think about how we can use the digital experience to smooth out the line, how can we be more accurate with our wait time data, for example? How can we be more clear to the customer when their drinks are ready?

We just launched a great pilot which is rolling out to stores, where we do this very…it was a very simple A/B test, actually, to start. Where we just say…we have a little notification that comes up that says, “Your order is ready.” And like, that simple thing sort of alleviates a lot of anxiety on the customer behalf and they actually know, “Okay. Now I can sort of stand up from my table,” or “I can come in the store and pick up my drink.” So it’s pushed us to just really understand the store operations a lot more.

Emily: That’s really smart. And Jeff, I’m curious, so you’ve also launched Buy and Pick Up in-store.

Jeff: Yup.

Emily: So can you talk about what learnings as you have from the Try On, to Buy, kind of any different hurdles?

Jeff: So it was actually reverse. So we enabled buying…We call them BOPIS. It’s Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store. It’s not a great moniker.

Ryan: BOPIS.

Jeff: Yup. Super awe-inspiring. But it was different, right? Actually, it’s so funny, the code name for the stores experience was ROTIS, Reserve Online Pick up at the store. Anyway. Not interesting to anybody but me. So, they definitely helped inform each other. I think we learned a ton about the in-store experiences from a technology standpoint, from the BOPIS work that we did.

And then again, as both of us have mentioned a couple of times, doing A/B test to figure out locations within the store, where it makes the most sense to pick up items. Which type of in-store employee should be working with a customer at any given time? Like, all that experience, it’s really hard for me to pin-point one right now, but there was a ton of data amassed during the BOPIS work that really informed a lot of the roadmap for what we did with Reserve Online.

Emily: Awesome. So, Ryan, Starbucks is a global operation. You have thousands of stores. So how do you think about global scale with mobile innovation?

Ryan: Man, another, like, huge question. There’s the obvious ones, right, which is like technology at scale, millions of customers using the app every day. Like, how do we expand that out to some of our major global markets? So I think some of the more interesting challenges that I think this is what really makes being a digital product team within this big retail company so interesting, is we have to pay attention to things like cultural nuances and differences in the way that other countries sort of think about their morning coffee habits and everything like that.

So, without diving into too many details, like, even the way that we express our loyalty and rewards program, it’s very different culturally. Like, sometimes you may have a culture that redeems rewards in a different way or they don’t see it as sort of wanting to get a free drink, but maybe they want a different sort of input into Starbucks, for example. Customer experience is king. I think if you think about Starbucks, we try to create sort of a very welcoming and consistent sort of brand experience across the world.

When you walk into a Starbucks in any country, it is both familiar and it’s that third place that we invite you to come in and sit and enjoy. But it also has sort of the cultural distinctions. Every country has their own sort of look and feel at Starbucks. We must take those as part of the digital experience as well. I think it’s really that customer experience angle that’s the most interesting approach to that, in addition to making sure it all scales well.

Emily: One thing you mentioned in the prep is that you actually have multiple apps across the world. From a technology perspective, how do you keep the apps consistent? Is it all based out of headquarters? Do you have teams abroad that are working with your team?

Ryan: Yeah. Current state, we work with a variety of our international partners to do the development work. It’s one of the stronger goals of our technology teams right now, to just look out at the globe and see what doesn’t make sense. In full honesty, it’s one of these things that we’re just trying to make the right plan for right now. I wish we had our grand plans for the global takeover, but we don’t. It’s definitely still something we’re learning. But it’s, again, part of the fun challenges.

Emily: Awesome. So I got this question when I asked folks around what they’re curious in. And a lot of people would like to know, like, “What’s the decision-making process before launching a new feature?” Like, what are kind of some of the things you have to go through internally before you decide something like Mobile Order & Pay, or Reserve & Try on In-store?

Jeff: So, depending on the feature, there’s various maturations you have to do to get something to actually see the light of day. From a Nordstrom standpoint, it can range from a board decision. But typically, it’s something that lands in the product team, an ideation process happens. They go through and they test it. They come up with comps to see what makes the most sense. You’d write out a business plan and you’d find what business KPIs you need to achieve to have this thing actually make sense and spend money on. Then if all those things turn out to be positive, then the project is scoped and handed to the engineering team to execute on.

Ryan: Yeah. I think it comes from a variety of sources. I think more and more, we’re trying to be a data driven digital products team, which means a lot of the product decisions we make are driven very concretely by the analytic data. But it really can…there are multiple influences. It may be that we’re making changes to our Starbucks rewards program, our loyalty program. And that necessarily needs to have its front face in the mobile experience.

And so, that the…it may be sort of a new program from our loyalty team and then that gets…between our engineering and product management team, sort of worked out, designed, all that. It could be something wholly internal. So it’s something that we know we wanna either improve in the app. Or we’re seeing analytic data that says, “Oh, man, we can probably improve some customer experience and really shorten the time through the Mobile Order funnel,” for example. Or Erick has sort of alluded to this, sometimes you just get a call from Howard and there’s some changes to make. Thankfully, he’s an incredibly sharp dude. So if he says he wants something in the app, there’s usually a good reason.

Jeff: I think it’s a pretty interesting time to be alive in this space right now. Because the process I just described sounds very long and onerous. There’s a strong desire within Nordstrom to shorten that as much as possible, and not spend a lot of time trying to figure out the exact right thing and get things out as soon as possible. So you can then get it in the customers’ hands and then figure out whether it resonates or not.

It was a huge pain point for my engineering team early on, to where we would do all this work. We would release the experience and then it wouldn’t have any needle moving business KPIs. So we did all this work and we tested it and we looked at all the data, but we nev

[darincjohnson]

How Nordstrom and Starbucks Approach Customer Love

We had the pleasure of hosting Ryan Bruels, Director of Engineering at Starbucks, and Jeff Raffo, Director of Engineering at Nordstrom, for a fireside chat on customer centricity at our 2017 Customer Love Summit.

Nordstrom and Starbucks are the gold standard for building exceptional customer experiences that transcend digital and in-store, and we got the inside scoop on how they decide what to build next to stay cutting-edge, how they successfully roll out new features globally, how they provide their world-famous customer service across channels, and how they use mobile to foster customer loyalty. As department heads for two of the most customer-centric engineering orgs that exist today, Ryan and Jeff have unique perspectives on what it really takes to put customers at the heart of a business.

Specifically, Jeff shares how Nordstrom approaches:

Personalization through bridging the gap between digital and in-store experiences through paying attention to cultural nuances and solving the top in-store challenges through digital channels.

Aligning internal teams to focus on the customer through empathy, knowing the data, and balancing the speed of their digital experience with their culture of connecting with customers.

And Ryan explains how Starbucks thinks about:

Improving user experience by getting in front of customers as much as possible, eliminating assumptions, and allowing yourself to be surprised by how people actually use your ditigal experience.

Loyalty starting with partners (employees), and including a seamless digital experience that brings customer and company together.

Whether your company is early in its mobile innovation journey or consider yourselves seasoned pros, we can all learn a thing or two about #customerlove from Nordstrom and Starbucks. Watch the complete talk with Ryan and Jeff to learn how their teams approach customer love and put the customer at the center of their product roadmaps. If you prefer to read rather than watch, we’ve included the transcription below the video.

Transcription

Emily: Awesome. So who’s excited for this panel?

Crowd: Woo.

Emily: Woo.

Ryan: Right, good.

Emily: So let’s get right to it.

Jeff: Sure.

Emily: What the heck does the director of engineering do at each of your companies? What do you guys do all day long?

Jeff: Very little.

Ryan: Right. Advocacy is a good one. I think…when I think of our roles, certainly my role at Starbucks, it’s about, how do you create an engineering culture? How do you create a culture around, like, great software engineering and customer-focused experiences, in the context of a big retail company? I think that’s a huge part of it. So, relationships with business, tech, to kind of get great things done.

Emily: Awesome.

Jeff: Yeah, I think developing a culture of engineering is ultimately important, especially in the enterprise space. Also, I spend a ridiculous amount of time meeting with my peers, to make sure that I am in the loop on what they’re doing, and vise versa, to make sure if there’s some huge crosscutting project, that we’re ready to go and we don’t stub any toes.

Emily: That’s perfect. Well, that leads right into my next question. So, we all know that technology is constantly changing how we live our lives, and customer behavior. So, how do you decide what to build next and stay cutting edge and ahead of it all?

Jeff: So, for us, we have an insanely talented product and user experience team that really helps and does a good job of guiding us on where we need to go. That combined with an emerging culture of test and learn and doing things like A/B test, to figure out which experiences resonate the most with our customers couldn’t be more important to us at this point.

Emily: Awesome.

Ryan: Yeah. I think one of the really interesting challenges for any company in our space, is like not only are we paying attention to the digital analytics and the stuff that comes in from our mobile applications, and then web applications. But we have to pay attention to store logistics too. I mean, we have to pay attention to what’s happening in our stores, and the recent examples around our mobile ordering system is a great example. How can we use our digital experiences to make that in-store experience, like, really, really good and minimize chaos and everything? I guess, it’s just constantly listening to customers by way of data or actual store logistics, I guess.

Emily: So that’s a super hard problem. Can you dig in a little bit more about how you do the digital and in-store, how you keep track of all of that and all the tech stack that you’re working with? How do you do that?

Ryan: Yeah. That’s a big one.

Jeff: That’s a tough one.

Ryan: It’s a multi-headed hydra. Analytics are huge. As we’re talking today about customer data and the kind of metrics that we pull off our digital experiences, that’s a huge part of it. But there’s numerous other ways for us to get ahead of customer insights. We are constantly in front of our customers. We’re doing customer insights kind of research. We are putting A/B test into the app – Jeff kind of mentioned that – to really test, “Is this something that’s gonna help our customers through the funnel? Is this something that’s helping them get even through the line faster at the store?” Things like that are the daily part of our work.

Jeff: Yes. So, organizationally, we have…so we have a mobile apps business unit and we have a nordstrom.com business unit. We also have an omnichannel business unit that looks across those experiences for opportunities to use both of those platforms, to enable things within the store. I think that’s fairly new for Nordstrom, but it’s been really, really successful so far.

Emily: How did it go about…I know you guys have changed quite a bit the structure.

Jeff: Yes.

Emily: How did this come about?

Jeff: How did this come about? That’s a really good question. I’m not totally sure, to be quite frank. The omnichannel, like, anybody with a brick-and-mortar presence and an online presence, omnichannel is a huge thing for them. But yeah, I’m not completely able to comment.

Emily: Okay, fair. So, Jeff, this Reserve & Try on In-Store feature is super hot right now. I’m sure a lot of you guys have tried it, especially the women in the room. Can you tell us about it and how you rolled it out and how you worked with the stores, how you tested? Tell us a bit about it.

Jeff: Yeah. So the experience…So, currently, it’s only released in western Washington. It’s going to expand nationally here in a couple of months or so. But the experience, for those of you who don’t know about it, essentially…So, two of the biggest complaints we have about stores is it’s really hard to find inventory, and it takes a really long time to do anything in the store. So we’ve allowed customers, using the mobile app, to search inventory in their store, on the app, and then reserve it. To where the store will then accept the reservation, figure out where that merchandise is, and send a text back to the user saying, “We found your item. Please come to the store when you have time.”

And then the user comes in to the store, we have it staged in the waiting room for them, the dressing room for them. They can try it on. They can decide if they like it. They can also decide if they would like other things with it, and then check out right there. So, the ultimate business KPI for this experience is, “Will we be able to get people in and out of the store within 10 minutes?” And, yeah, like you said, it’s been a very, very hot experience for us and one that we’re really, really excited about.

Getting it enabled in the store hasn’t been necessarily a seamless experience. If you grew up in technology like me and I think Ryan did as well, so the cultures around the store are very different than the cultures around the technology group. Though it’s changing pretty quickly. But historically, that’s very much the case. So the way we think about problems and the way the store thinks about problems couldn’t be more different in a lot of situations. So, one, developing an application that is store-centric was a challenge for us early on.

I think the biggest enabler in helping fix that was essentially sending, no joke, the VP, the director, the engineering manager and all the engineers, all the product folks, all the program folks into the store, talking with the people that are actually gonna enable the experience. To get a good idea, essentially building empathy for those people so we can build things that we knew they were going to need, as opposed to what we assumed they were gonna need. I think, if anything, that was one of the biggest things we did to help this become a seamless thing.

Ryan: That’s really…I mean, it’s really interesting. You have these…they’re not worrying worlds, but they’re not worlds that have necessarily always talked to each other. And that’s like the digital and this in-store thing. And so, on the one hand, you have pressures on the digital, which is like we wanna complete our order fast. We wanna get in and out. Like, we know what we want. We just wanna order. In the case of Nordstrom, you want to be able to try on the clothes. In the case of Starbucks, you have to go and pick up your coffee.

But it’s a very, like, rapid fire, in and out kind of thing. I wanna be done. And that clashes sometimes with Nordstrom and Starbucks, both value this customer connection. Like the salespeople at Nordstrom, the partners in our stores at Starbucks, part of the culture is all about this connection. So there’s a potential, if you don’t focus and really try to strengthen this relationship between your retail teams and your tech teams, that you could completely disconnect your salespeople and your partner, your in-store partners from the digital customers. Like, how can we create that connection while still achieving the goals of the digital experience? I think it’s just been a fascinating problem to work on.

Jeff: I totally agree. So one other thing I was gonna mention is that the nature or the culture of the in-store employee for Nordstrom is one of very much an entrepreneurial culture. So if these technology solutions we provide don’t meet their needs, they’re going to go right around them. So it’s really, really important to make sure you understand your customer in that situation, because you could spend millions and millions of dollars developing something that nobody ends up using very, very easily.

Emily: That reminds me of a couple of headlines I saw around Mobile Order & Pay being too successful. Can you speak to that and kind of how you bring that feedback back to the team? What changes do you make?

Ryan: Yeah, sure. A brief context, the Mobile Order & Pay, so this is an ordering experience within the app. You can literally select drinks, food, whatever you want to order, pay with your preferred sort of payment method and then actually go pick up the order in the store. How many people have actually, like, used MOP?

Jeff: Everybody.

Ryan: Nice. See, I have a different thing about the difference between analytic data and, like, survey data, because that was really interesting. But, yeah. So, as MOP got more and more successful, obviously, we’re all really thrilled by it. But as we talked about it on our investor call a couple of months ago, there was sort of a downside to that, which is sort of a…it’s so much increase in the traffic in the stores. But that traffic wasn’t traffic that was standing in line to order drinks. It was traffic that was sort of just waiting for their drinks. Like, they wanted to come pick it up and were just kind of like at the store, maybe not at the right point.

So, what that had an impact on was potentially you open the door and there’s all these people around you. You figure that’s the line and you’re like, “That’s okay. I’ll peace out.” So, what that really has done is pushed us to really strengthen that relationship with our partners in-store, to really think about how we can use the digital experience to smooth out the line, how can we be more accurate with our wait time data, for example? How can we be more clear to the customer when their drinks are ready?

We just launched a great pilot which is rolling out to stores, where we do this very…it was a very simple A/B test, actually, to start. Where we just say…we have a little notification that comes up that says, “Your order is ready.” And like, that simple thing sort of alleviates a lot of anxiety on the customer behalf and they actually know, “Okay. Now I can sort of stand up from my table,” or “I can come in the store and pick up my drink.” So it’s pushed us to just really understand the store operations a lot more.

Emily: That’s really smart. And Jeff, I’m curious, so you’ve also launched Buy and Pick Up in-store.

Jeff: Yup.

Emily: So can you talk about what learnings as you have from the Try On, to Buy, kind of any different hurdles?

Jeff: So it was actually reverse. So we enabled buying…We call them BOPIS. It’s Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store. It’s not a great moniker.

Ryan: BOPIS.

Jeff: Yup. Super awe-inspiring. But it was different, right? Actually, it’s so funny, the code name for the stores experience was ROTIS, Reserve Online Pick up at the store. Anyway. Not interesting to anybody but me. So, they definitely helped inform each other. I think we learned a ton about the in-store experiences from a technology standpoint, from the BOPIS work that we did.

And then again, as both of us have mentioned a couple of times, doing A/B test to figure out locations within the store, where it makes the most sense to pick up items. Which type of in-store employee should be working with a customer at any given time? Like, all that experience, it’s really hard for me to pin-point one right now, but there was a ton of data amassed during the BOPIS work that really informed a lot of the roadmap for what we did with Reserve Online.

Emily: Awesome. So, Ryan, Starbucks is a global operation. You have thousands of stores. So how do you think about global scale with mobile innovation?

Ryan: Man, another, like, huge question. There’s the obvious ones, right, which is like technology at scale, millions of customers using the app every day. Like, how do we expand that out to some of our major global markets? So I think some of the more interesting challenges that I think this is what really makes being a digital product team within this big retail company so interesting, is we have to pay attention to things like cultural nuances and differences in the way that other countries sort of think about their morning coffee habits and everything like that.

So, without diving into too many details, like, even the way that we express our loyalty and rewards program, it’s very different culturally. Like, sometimes you may have a culture that redeems rewards in a different way or they don’t see it as sort of wanting to get a free drink, but maybe they want a different sort of input into Starbucks, for example. Customer experience is king. I think if you think about Starbucks, we try to create sort of a very welcoming and consistent sort of brand experience across the world.

When you walk into a Starbucks in any country, it is both familiar and it’s that third place that we invite you to come in and sit and enjoy. But it also has sort of the cultural distinctions. Every country has their own sort of look and feel at Starbucks. We must take those as part of the digital experience as well. I think it’s really that customer experience angle that’s the most interesting approach to that, in addition to making sure it all scales well.

Emily: One thing you mentioned in the prep is that you actually have multiple apps across the world. From a technology perspective, how do you keep the apps consistent? Is it all based out of headquarters? Do you have teams abroad that are working with your team?

Ryan: Yeah. Current state, we work with a variety of our international partners to do the development work. It’s one of the stronger goals of our technology teams right now, to just look out at the globe and see what doesn’t make sense. In full honesty, it’s one of these things that we’re just trying to make the right plan for right now. I wish we had our grand plans for the global takeover, but we don’t. It’s definitely still something we’re learning. But it’s, again, part of the fun challenges.

Emily: Awesome. So I got this question when I asked folks around what they’re curious in. And a lot of people would like to know, like, “What’s the decision-making process before launching a new feature?” Like, what are kind of some of the things you have to go through internally before you decide something like Mobile Order & Pay, or Reserve & Try on In-store?

Jeff: So, depending on the feature, there’s various maturations you have to do to get something to actually see the light of day. From a Nordstrom standpoint, it can range from a board decision. But typically, it’s something that lands in the product team, an ideation process happens. They go through and they test it. They come up with comps to see what makes the most sense. You’d write out a business plan and you’d find what business KPIs you need to achieve to have this thing actually make sense and spend money on. Then if all those things turn out to be positive, then the project is scoped and handed to the engineering team to execute on.

Ryan: Yeah. I think it comes from a variety of sources. I think more and more, we’re trying to be a data driven digital products team, which means a lot of the product decisions we make are driven very concretely by the analytic data. But it really can…there are multiple influences. It may be that we’re making changes to our Starbucks rewards program, our loyalty program. And that necessarily needs to have its front face in the mobile experience.

And so, that the…it may be sort of a new program from our loyalty team and then that gets…between our engineering and product management team, sort of worked out, designed, all that. It could be something wholly internal. So it’s something that we know we wanna either improve in the app. Or we’re seeing analytic data that says, “Oh, man, we can probably improve some customer experience and really shorten the time through the Mobile Order funnel,” for example. Or Erick has sort of alluded to this, sometimes you just get a call from Howard and there’s some changes to make. Thankfully, he’s an incredibly sharp dude. So if he says he wants something in the app, there’s usually a good reason.

Jeff: I think it’s a pretty interesting time to be alive in this space right now. Because the process I just described sounds very long and onerous. There’s a strong desire within Nordstrom to shorten that as much as possible, and not spend a lot of time trying to figure out the exact right thing and get things out as soon as possible. So you can then get it in the customers’ hands and then figure out whether it resonates or not.

It was a huge pain point for my engineering team early on, to where we would do all this work. We would release the experience and then it wouldn’t have any needle moving business KPIs. So we did all this work and we tested it and we looked at all the data, but we nev

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