"Three women running retail businesses in the San Gabriel Valley are bucking trends and defying conventional wisdom," Pasadena magazine reported in showcasing this year's Women in Business, including Vroman's Bookstore CEO Allison Hill. The three executives "love what they do, understand the challenges of staying relevant in an increasingly online world and believe in creating a unique retail experience with great product, great people and great customer service.... [T]hey share a key characteristic in leading their profitable businesses: constant personal growth that they can bring back to the company."
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| Allison Hill | |
Hill has been the CEO of Vroman's for the past 14 years, running three stores--the main store, Vroman's Hastings Ranch and Book Soup in West Hollywood, acquired by Vroman's in 2009. She is also the v-p of Vroman's Real Estate. Pasadena magazine noted that the "last five years have been the best in Vroman's history, a testament to decisions Hill and her team have made."
"You're always thinking about how to move forward while honoring that sense of tradition," she said. "We wouldn't be surviving and thriving if we weren't constantly changing. It's a balance.... The landscape has changed so dramatically over the last twenty years. You just always have to be moving."
Hill, who enrolled in the Fully Employed MBA Program at UCLA Anderson School of Management in the fall of 2017, said she has a natural curiosity about business, picking up the phone and seeking answers to problems from new contacts: "But you still only reach for things that are comfortable. The book business is isolating and I was seeing everything through that lens. I wanted to get out of my own head.... It's humbling to sit down and take a three hours statistics exam as a book nerd."
Conversations with classmates and professors have prompted her to walk the floor at Vroman's and think, "What are our underutilized assets and how could I be monetizing them?"