It would be hard to match the design of Oakley Inc.’s eerie, fortress-like headquarters atop a hill in Foothill Ranch—a building that merits its One Icon address.
Chief Executive Colin Baden thinks shipping containers are a start as Oakley adds to its campus.
Baden had the steel industrial crates on the brain lately, when he figured 30 into a design scheme that will turn a warehouse across from One Icon into a different sort of space for the employees handling Oakley’s company-owned retail business.
“It’s like an eccentric, giant warehouse turned into a playroom,” Baden said casually, as though such a concept is run-of-the-mill stuff at Oakley. “It’s not easy to work with shipping containers.”
Indeed, everything from the fighter jet ejection seats in the lobby of One Icon to the name of its new health and wellness center—O Positive—screams the Oakley brand. It’s one based on a corporate culture that goes against the grain in search of something beyond being different just for the sake of it. The goal is to make different synonymous with better and to reap continuous improvement as a byproduct of what some might see as eccentricities—stuff like shipping containers in the middle of a warehouse.
The challenge of making sure Oakley’s headquarters remain fertile ground for the brand’s culture has grown along with the company itself. Oakley, with nearly $1.2 billion in 2012 sales, is one of the largest brands of Italy-based Luxottica Group SPA. Luxottica itself capped 2013 with $10.1 billion in net sales, a 7.5% increase.
Oakley consistently tops the Business Journal’s annual list of foreign-owned companies, with a workforce of more than 2,300. About 1,000 of those jobs are manufacturing, with the company’s sunglasses, prescription frames and lenses and some goggles made at headquarters. The rest of the jobs run the gamut from engineering and sales to design and marketing.
The company outgrew the 31-acre, 550,000-square-foot One Icon several years ago, spreading out to another warehouse that also houses an employee gym at 20081 Ellipse, less than five minutes away from headquarters by car—or a brisk walk with the right shoes. Some finance and customer service staffers are about 15 minutes away at 25361 Commercentre Drive in Lake Forest.
It recently added the warehouse across the street, where the shipping containers are going into place for the retail employees. It could be ready as early as next month and will free up room for finance staffers to move back up the hill to One Icon. Customer service will remain at Commercentre.
It’s a quasi-campus lacking in the connectivity that defines true corporate grounds—the reality of real estate constraints tied up in the existing leases, although Baden said future building purchases are “absolutely possible.”
That could take awhile, and Baden takes that in stride.
“We all accepted several years ago that we can’t all fit in this facility, and so the second best option is the proximity,” he said. “And then wanting to reinforce the culture through architecture, we do things with those buildings to create an environment that reminds people that they work for a disruptive brand.”
That nontraditional approach—combined with perks such as an employee gym and free yoga and kickboxing classes—has been the currency that has helped Oakley retain its talent.
The latest example of that is the O Positive health and wellness center.
“This facility is important to us because of how it fits into our brand and what we do,” said Caroline Starner, Oakley senior vice president of global human resources.
Teresa Deal, Oakley director of total rewards and Human Resources Information System, said O Positive is a project three years in the making and the result of lots of research into how the company could reduce its healthcare costs.
Deal declined to disclose how much the center cost; the company’s insurance carrier, Aetna, helped fund it.
“I thought, if we could have a clinic and people could come here and get not just the biometric screen but the whole physical, and then have a place to come back to when there is a problem, that’s easy and convenient and doesn’t stress them out because they’re trying to get an appointment during work hours,” Deal said. “Then we can get after people’s health in a preventative way, catch things early on so it doesn’t turn into something more serious, and the [return on investment] is eventually our health claims should go down or stabilize.”
Oakely executives believe things like O Positive also help woo new workers.
Then comes the hard part.
“The challenge is, how do we filter through that to find those people that are uniquely qualified to work for Oakley?” Starner said.
One answer: Surf and Turf, a recruiting event at the San Clemente Pier that lets job applicants network with recruiters.
The first one, held in October, attracted more than 100 people, and four positions were filled. The second Surf and Turf, held this month, drew about 400, with four now going through the interview process, according to John Seever, Oakley’s head of talent acquisitions.
“Most of the time, the recruiting event is about building a relationship with somebody,” said Seever, who added that employee referrals are the company’s main source for finding new prospects, followed by LinkedIn.
The next Surf and Turf will likely be in June.
“We’re an organization that’s never really satisfied with the status quo,” Baden said. “We’re very curious and like to innovate each and every day, and don’t feel satisfied unless we’re changing the conversation on this campus.”
