A Birthday, the Ocean, and a Lesson in Strategy

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I turned 55 a few weeks ago.

Birthdays have a way of making time visible. I took a few days off to be with the people who matter most to me — my wife and my kids. We stayed near the ocean, and on the morning of my birthday I woke early and walked down to the water.

The ocean at that hour feels reflective. Quiet. Patient.

I swam for a while and found myself thinking a thought that seems to arrive more often with each passing year.

How did time move this fast?

One moment you are raising young children and juggling flights, meetings, and deadlines. The next moment they are nearly grown and building lives of their own.

The decades that once stretched endlessly ahead now sit clearly behind.

And yet something unexpected has happened.

Instead of feeling less curious, less ambitious, or less energized by new ideas, I find myself feeling more inspired than ever.

A few days before my birthday I had the opportunity to sit down with ​Lew Frankfort​ for an upcoming episode of the ​Outthinker CSO Podcast​. Lew is best known for transforming ​Coach​ from a $6 million leather goods company into a $5 billion global brand.

But the conversation reminded me of something more profound.

Great strategic thinking travels. It travels across industries, across careers, and sometimes across entirely different phases of life.

Strategy Begins with People

One of the most striking parts of Lew’s story is where it begins.

Before Coach, before fashion, before global brand building, Lew was a civil servant.

He worked in New York City government during the 1960s and eventually became Commissioner of Head Start and Day Care Services, helping oversee programs serving tens of thousands of children and families.

That experience shaped the way he would later approach business.

Looking back on that period, he explained: “When I went to Coach with no background in fashion or product, I focused first on who is the Coach customer and why does she purchase Coach.”

That sentence might sound obvious today. Customer centricity has become one of the most overused phrases in business.

But in the late 1970s, that mindset was far from universal.

Coach was primarily a wholesale company selling through department stores. The relationship with the end customer was indirect. Many brands at the time thought primarily about distribution, merchandising, and production.

Lew started somewhere else entirely. He started with anthropology. He talked to buyers. Shopkeepers. Merchants. Consumers. He wanted to understand not just what people bought, but why they cared.

What he discovered fascinated him.

Coach had a small but intensely loyal following. One retailer described the brand as having a “cult following.” That word stuck with him.

How could someone feel that much passion for a leather bag?

The answer revealed something important about strategy.

Customers do not form relationships with companies. They form relationships with meaning. And when a product becomes part of daily life, meaning compounds.

The Hidden Intimacy of a Handbag

One insight Lew uncovered early in his research was almost poetic in its simplicity: people interact with their bags constantly.

“Bags are very personal items … people open them 30, 50, 70 times a day,” Lew told me.

That frequency creates intimacy.

Bags carry everything from wallets and address books to makeup, notebooks, and keys. They’re extensions of daily life.

Coach’s glove-tanned leather bags did something unusual over time: they developed a patina. The leather softened, burnished, and aged along with the owner.

That physical evolution created something emotional.

Ownership became a brand relationship.

As Lew explained, “When we talk about brand and brand equities, we use basically a triangle which we divide into three parts. There’s underlying equities, foundational equities, and emotional equities.”

In other words:

1. Underlying equities: Trust in the company and its intentions
2. Foundational equities: Functional value: durability, reliability, craftsmanship
3. Emotional equities: Identity, attachment, and pride of ownership

Trust leads to function which leads to emotion.

Many brands attempt to start with emotion, but Coach built it in reverse. First they earned trust. Then they delivered enduring functional value. Only then did emotional attachment naturally emerge.

That structure aligns closely with something I have written about frequently: ​simple strategic logic​.

If a company wants to maximize ​Customer Lifetime Value​ (CLV), the path is not through marketing alone. It begins with trust, reinforced through product experience, and compounded through emotional connection.

CLV is not just a financial metric.

It is a measure of relationship durability.

The Magic and Logic of Scaling

Another idea Lew shared during our conversation struck me as particularly relevant for strategy leaders today. He describes leadership as the blending of magic and logic.

Magic includes:

• Vision
• Curiosity
• Instinct
• Imagination

Logic includes:

• Operational discipline
• Financial rigor
• Structured planning
• Execution excellence

Too much magic creates chaos. Too much logic creates stagnation. Coach succeeded because it institutionalized both.

That balance allowed the company to evolve without abandoning its identity.

When Lew hired ​Reed Krakoff​ as executive creative director in the mid-1990s, for example, it marked an inflection point in Coach’s brand evolution … new categories and colors that appealed to new generations. But the goal was not to reinvent Coach. It was to add personality while protecting the brand’s foundation.

As Lew explained during the conversation: “We weren’t changing identity. We were building personality.”

That distinction is strategic gold.

Identity is what must remain constant. Personality is where evolution happens.

The brands that scale successfully learn to protect one while experimenting with the other.

The Transferability of Expertise

Perhaps the most inspiring lesson in Lew’s story is how unlikely his path was.

He did not start in fashion. He did not train as a luxury brand executive.

He came from public service.

Yet the skills that made him successful transferred perfectly.

Why? Because they were rooted in principles, not industry mechanics.

Curiosity. Anthropological listening. Respect for customers. Long-term stewardship.

Those ideas work in handbags. They work in software. They work in healthcare. They work in strategy offices.

I was reminded of a ​conversation I had previously​ with ​Dr. Marcus Collins​ about emotional connection in brands. Marcus often talks about how meaning and belonging shape consumer behavior.

What Lew discovered through leather bags was essentially the same idea.

People buy objects. But they stay loyal to stories.

The leaders who remain curious about those stories, about customers, about how the world is changing, often find that their expertise travels farther than they ever expected.

It also reminds you how quickly the chapters of a career pass.

Decades of experience compress into a handful of lessons. Industries change. Roles change. The context shifts.

But curiosity has a way of carrying those lessons forward. That idea stayed with me long after our conversation ended.

Turning 55

When I finished my swim on my birthday morning, I sat on the sand for a while watching the sun rise.

I thought about how fast time moves.

But I also thought about something more hopeful.

Curiosity does not have an expiration date.

I remember how Lew responded after our interview ended, off camera, when I shared how at age 55, I find myself counting backward rather than forward. And he responded “No … always think forward.”

At nearly 80 years old, with grown children, with grown grandchildren, he is still leaning forward. Still exploring ideas. Still thinking about brands, customers, leadership, and the future.

That energy is contagious.

It is also instructive.

The most valuable strategic advantage any leader can cultivate may be the simplest one of all.

Stay curious. Keep learning. Keep looking forward.

Because the leaders who keep asking questions long after others think they have the answers are often the ones who build the most enduring things.

To learn more about scaling by focusing on simple logic, CLV and curiosity, visit ​Outthinker.com​ today.