Ideagen Radio
Ideagen Radio
2025 Global Leadership Summit: Sharon Price John — Leading with Heart at Build-A-Bear Workshop
A wish on a tiny plush heart became the spark for one of retail’s most unexpected transformations. In this episode, Sharon Price John, President and CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop, traces how a brand once seen as “mall-bound” reframed its identity around purpose, turned a tactile ritual into a global IP engine, and built the habits to weather everything from the retail apocalypse to a full pandemic shutdown. The throughline is simple: strategy only works when people believe in it, and belief is earned with clarity, courage, and a mission that travels.
Sharon shares the pivotal meeting where she laid out an honest trajectory—eight years of contraction and a road to bankruptcy—then invited the team to choose: get on the bus or step off, but no backseat driving. That moment unlocked a new model: Build-A-Bear as a brand-led, experience-rich company with vertical retail, e-commerce, entertainment, and licensing as coordinated streams. We unpack how the “heart ceremony” evolved into stories like Glisten and the Merry Mission, why fans return year after year, and how meaning—not margins alone—guided expansion without losing soul.
The conversation also goes inward. Drawing from her book Stories and Heart, Sharon makes a case for rewriting the narratives leaders tell themselves: dismantling perfectionism, flipping negative self-talk, and using setbacks as fuel. The lens widens to the toy industry at large—its role in learning, empathy, and early systems thinking—and the real-world headwinds of tariffs, tight margins, and global interdependence. From $1 a share during COVID to consecutive record years, this episode is a field guide to resilient, purpose-first leadership that audiences can feel.
Back at the Idea Gen Global Leadership Summit live here at the NASDAQ. Well, live here at the NASDAQ, and our next interview is with a dear friend, a global leader, someone who understands how to navigate and make a company successful. Sharon John, CEO of Builder Bear. You know, Sharon, here we are in New York City. Um on the sidelines of Unga. Uh we've been in Unga together.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, we have.
SPEAKER_00:And um it's just a moment where you reflect and think about, you know, 2030. We were talking about 2030 and 2020, and we were talking about 2030, 2015, and here we are now. And your leadership is more profound and important than ever. And I stand in awe of that. Uh you've evolved, Build-A-Bear, from a mall-based real retailer into a brand with incredible global reach. You've diversified retail formats, and you've even grown an e-commerce presence. Sharon, you are that leader that we talk about. You're that you that global leader, and I'm so proud of you. What has been your approach to identifying the new opportunities that have expanded Build-A-Bear's global footprint?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it might not be exactly what you're expecting, um, because I think that uh sometimes people think about uh companies as what is your product or what is your service, but you really have to get to the place of what is your purpose? And um, Build-A-Bear had a much bigger purpose than making teddy bears for kids in malls. And when we were in a situation where we were challenged significantly from a financial position, we'd lost$50 million, we contracted for eight years in a row. I was asked to come in as a toy and turnaround person to find the path. And of course, as a turnaround person, you usually have a playbook, and that playbook often has something to do with cost cutting, rationalization of the retail footprint, all these fancy terms to try to like save money and uh stabilize the company, which you have to do when you're a publicly traded company, it's not an option. But that was not going to move the organization forward. In a big company meeting, there was a lot of stares, and uh, yeah, no, we're not doing, we don't get that, that's not gonna work. So that's when the hard work began about what do we really stand for? And there's a lot of, I think, um, some analogies here to what everything we're talking about today. And what we had to do in the process of finding our purpose was really think about well, what do we mean? And at the end of the day, we're memory makers, we're we're purveyors of joy, um, we create furry friends for kids and adults alike. Um, we we share through gifting, we share wonderful meaning with each other. So that was the impetus for the creation of the strategy. The strategy was not going to be about how can we save money to survive for no end. The strategy was going to have to be about why do we matter? Is the world a better place with or without Build-A-Bear? And if you can say with with all your heart, then you can get people to move forward. And the interesting piece, if you've never been to Build-A-Bear, you make a bear and you make a wish on a heart and you put it inside the teddy. And that's where we found our purpose was right inside that teddy bear. It was all about heart. And we created a mission statement said we add a little more heart to life, and we got to work. And that mission statement is what highlighted the idea of Build-A-Bear's workshop is a place, but Build-A-Bear is a feeling. And now I'm gonna speak more business-y for a second because it did end up we were successful doing this. But Build-A-Bear, the company, the feeling, had every right in the consumer's mind to monetize that extraordinary equity, not just in the vertical retail that we started in, but across the globe, in e-commerce, in outbound licensing, in entertainment. And so we pivoted from a little retailer that happened to build a brand, accidentally, mind you, 250 million hearts ceremonies later, to a branded intellectual retail, uh, re intellectual company that just happens to have vertical retail as one of its revenue streams. So that was a massive transition sidebar. We've been in the news lately as being one of the fastest growing stocks over the past five years.
SPEAKER_00:So you know, that's not a sidebar. It's all about leadership. This is about, this is what leadership looks like. That's your leadership defined because you're able to solve problems, you're able to see the vision, you're able to create the vision. Isn't that what a leader does?
SPEAKER_01:I cannot take entire credit for that without being pushed by my organization. The organ you have to pay attention. Are you touching people's hearts? I mean, I don't mean to be using the heart analogy, but it's perfect for build-a-bear. Um in fact, now our mission statement is to add a little more heart to life. But it does not matter. Is it, you know, people ask the question, well, isn't strategy more about smarts than heart, let's say? And the truth is it doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how brilliant your strategy is, it doesn't matter if you're a financial uh, you know, like genius. Nothing matters if people aren't going to come with you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And if people aren't going to execute.
SPEAKER_00:That's where leadership starts.
SPEAKER_01:That's and that's where you really, I will call it, grow up as a leader.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. That's the intersection where it changes. Yes. Wow. That's an important, that's such a valuable. We go through life just thinking about what is leadership? What is, you know, and you're defining it in a way that I think is tangible and and really uh in a way that can be implemented. Because you you have to pay attention, right? Yes. So those that don't, they're no longer in business.
SPEAKER_01:It you can say whatever you want on a podium, but that's not the way business is done. Particularly when you're uh, I would say a company where you know we have multiple retail stores, so we're uh disaggregated, we have people all over the world, very, very difficult to get people to follow you sometimes when you're so far apart. So that strong message has to be strong enough to reach to 4,000, 5,000, you know, thousands of people and not just those people, your partners. And now we're in 32 countries. So how impactful, think about how impactful that has to be to be passed through multiple people and multiple, you know, um venues to keep that same mission statement at the center.
SPEAKER_00:Now you wrote a book. I did. You wrote a book, an incredible book. I want you to actually wrote it too. And you actually wrote it.
SPEAKER_01:Everybody does, mind you.
SPEAKER_00:Another secret. Another secret. Not everybody writes their book. So you wrote the book. I I want you to talk a bit about the book. Why write a book? Why did you write the book? Why why do you think it's changing the world and changing lives and inspiring people?
SPEAKER_01:I I didn't, I I uh I didn't plan on writing a book. Somebody asked me to do it, but um, it's called Stories and Heart, and it was intended to uh capture some of the emotional hurdles and insights and aha moments that the things that had happened to me through my childhood and career that caused me to think differently, that allowed me to have some monochrome of success at some point in my life. Um, and most of those things have to do with you, not the world, not what somebody did or didn't do, or this job that did or didn't happen, or what you got this promotion or you didn't. That it that is a very, very long arc. The question really becomes in each one of those situations, what's the story you then tell yourself about that situation? How are you gonna take that information and use it to the good and spin, and I'm just gonna say, spin a good story. Here's the truth. We're all constantly telling ourselves stories. We're rationalizing things. It is part of our brains. We cannot help it. Um, but the truth of the matter is, there's been a lot of research about this. About 60% of what we continue to reinforce in our minds about what happened in our life, it's not even true. Some of it didn't even happen. So, what I'm asking you to do, and this is what I take people through about having dreams and getting over perfectionism and stopping negative self-talk, these things will change your life. But you have to be willing to weave your story in a way that it's empowering. If you're making it up anyway, heck, do something that's good for yourself versus something that's bad. And that's and it and the things that had happened in my career helped me to get to that place. And that that positive reinforcement and that positive experience is really in some ways what Builderbear's all about, too. So um it was uh almost um fate in some ways that um it's the industry of the toy industry, which I'm now the chair of the toy association, but and this company was perfectly aligned with uh what I learned to hopefully or what I'm still becoming. Right. Um, and um, but that's all about a lot of work inside.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. And the fact that you recognize that goes back to your leadership style and your ability to uh you know think through and implement the changes that have been so necessary to make Builder Bear so successful. You've you've launched, you've gone into entertainment Builder Bear. You've gone into entertainment content and other non-retail initiatives. How do you decide? And I think I know the answer, but how do you decide we're gonna create, you know, this type of entertainment or we're gonna, you know, a license, or we're gonna do X? How do you make those decisions?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that again is recognizing, and this is um in pure business sense, what is your what does your brand really mean to consumers? Um and you usually are not trapped in a preconceived business model or construct if you really break that down. Um build-a bear means love and hugs and friendship and memories, and and if you mean those things, we don't mean teddy bears and stuffing machines and leases. We mean something bigger to people. It's truly remarkable to me. It never ceases to amaze me how build-dears are used. It's and having worked at both Hasbro and Mattel, I've worked on a lot, almost every major toy brand. And even in it, and I'm not going to name those brands, they are beloved to me, but I have never gotten the emotional responses that I get when I tell someone that I work at Vildebert. Sometimes they think that I'm working at a store, though, on an airplane, like I work at Vildebert, they go, oh, which one? Which one? Well, there's there's a few in St. Louis, I move around. And the truth is I can't stuff there to save my life. But I tried, it goes everywhere. It's harder than you think, it's a skill. Um, but the the idea that we mean more than that allows you to go in all sorts of areas, right? So if you mean more than that, of course you can create a holiday story about heart. Of course you can have um create an entire intellectual property about Glisten and the Merry Mission, and we create a snow deer that saves Christmas, and you come in every year and you stuff the snow deer, still our number one selling item during the holiday, which is saying something ten years later. So um there's that that's not in a that's really not a stretch.
SPEAKER_00:It's not. It's not a stretch. I recall taking our daughter to Build a Bear and the emotional component to it. I mean it's it's a very emotional thing. And you you've you've captured it. Um and I want to talk a little bit about, we talked about a lot of positive things. Let's talk about failure. One of your favorite things in terms of recognizing and how it can serve as a catalyst for change. What is an example of a time when you build a bear where in your role you you suffered a setback, a failure, whatever you want to refer to it as? And how did you take that and then put fuel behind it to have it serve as a catalyst for greater change?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that was the impetus for the entire turnaround ultimately, was to, and this sounds incredibly antiseptic, I apologize for that. Um, but to take the the eight years of contraction and the failure to point out to the team that if we stay on this trajectory, it it's a road to bankruptcy. And if you care about this company, if you believe that it matters that we exist, we have to change. And I'm not gonna tell you that there's not a hundred different ways that change agency can evolve a company, there are, but I am gonna say to you that I've done this before, and I'm giving you a path, and what I need you to do is believe in this path, and I'm open if you have some other options, but let's talk about it. But the one thing that we can't do is continue to do what we're doing, or we will go out of business. If you care, you have to change. So get on this bus with me or don't. And if you don't, you're not here. And I'm okay with that because we cannot have backseat drivers on this trip, right? And we can put everything that we loved about this company that still works. I'm not talking about ripping the heart out of the organization, but we have to change the way we operate. Put it in the rearview mirror. You can glance up there. I'm not throwing it out the window. Glance up there, remember what we are, that's okay. But if we don't have a vision that sits in that out in front of us, and if we don't put a strategy in that GPS, we are going to drive in a ditch. And they got on with that. They got they got that. And I think that the key there again in the catalyst for change is just failure. All it is is saying, I need to change or I'm going to drive down this path. Anything that you can first, I hate when Wall Street particularly does a straight line trajectory, but sometimes it's handy. And in this case, it was handy for me to say, if we stay on the same path, here's you can see what's in the in the windshield.
SPEAKER_00:The reality.
SPEAKER_01:This is not a hard thing to understand. We have to change direction. We have to change what we're doing. And the people that are in this car with us, it's all the kids. It's their parents, it's our factories, it's our partners, it's everybody here. It's all the guys that work out in our retail stores who aren't making as much money as you are. Is that not worth it? Can we not just give that a shot? And that that got us off of this trajectory. And we started to see some success. And that unfortunately, well or fortunately, depends on how you look at it, we then created our own playbook for change and how to use difficulty as catalysts, which became extremely handy as we then faced the retail apocalypse, then we faced Brexit, then we faced something called a global pandemic, where we shut down 100% of our stores around the world in 48 hours. I didn't know we could do it that fast. We did not have a playbook for that. And then popped out of that more stable than we had been. And we're now looking at our uh the fifth consecutive year of record results. Incredible.
SPEAKER_00:That deserves a hand. That that that I mean I get a chill because you and I had a we did a virtual interview that year, and uh and I recall that, and it was Oh yes, I was in my bedroom.
SPEAKER_01:I had like all I had like curtains up and oh, like it was terrible. You didn't know.
SPEAKER_00:I didn't know. I had no idea, now I know. But but now I do. But but that therein lies the leadership component, the lack of complacency, the ability to see around corners. These are things that not everyone takes with them on a leadership journey, and I think that's the lesson as we're talking again on the sidelines of UNGA. You've got all these world leaders coming in. Come on in, talk about what you're doing in your country, CEOs, et cetera. You are one of those CEOs that is looking and peering around the corner. You're not just sitting there driving along, you know who's in the car with you, too. It's a great analogy. Who's in the back seat? Who's next to me? Where are we going? Should we take that next turn? This is what this is.
SPEAKER_01:That's exactly what it is. And we also need to understand that even a company like Build Abear, we'll say that, that we're now approaching a billion-dollar market cap, but during COVID, we went to a dollar a share. A dollar a share. We were priced as if we were inevitably going bankrupt. And to fight back from that is it it takes a team to do that. But even a company, again, like Build Bear, we probably don't think about it that much. We are global. We're a part of this vast, interconnected world. Whether it's our what we're we're sourcing globally, we're selling globally, we're our partners are global. Again, I said we're in 32 countries, we have international people that work in my headquarters. You we can't un unravel that. And that's a part of one of the reasons why I was involved in the goals so early on. Um, that is absolutely critical. And our founder, uh, who started the company back in 1997, and this I think resonates now more than ever, her premise is that a teddy bear hug is understood in every language. We have more in common than we have that's different, and teddy bears are one of them.
SPEAKER_00:Teddy bears are one of them. Teddy bears are one of them, 100%. So you're chair of the Toy Industry Association, one of the coolest organizations in Washington, right? And you see trends. You're seeing trend lines, especially in the children's product uh industry, which are influencing leadership approaches. They're also influencing innovation strategies for companies like yours. So, how do you see these trends impacting all of these areas?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'll start with I think how important it is, again, what's the bigger meaning of things? There's clearly the toy industry, and for you, you might think of oh, that's a plastic importing industry. But I want you to think about your favorite toy as a child. Did you have one? Anyone have a favorite toy as a child? Yeah, maybe. So if you still remember it, did it matter? Did it impact your life? Yeah. It might have impacted your life in a way that you didn't even know it impacted your life. The toy industry is really about learning, imagination, childhood development, um, friendship, cooperation, toys and games. Play is the learning, play is the learning of children. We need to allow that, embrace that, encourage that. And the toy industry plays an incredibly important part of that. So, in that light, again, always level up, what does this really mean? It matters when this industry is disruptive. Disrupted rather. Um, and tariffs are disrupting this industry. And we're working closely uh to try to work through that. But that's a serious challenge for the toy industry. It's a tight margin industry. Um, and the and our organization is you know working with Washington to help mitigate some of those those uh difficulties. Um but that's a real challenge for the industry. And what's going forward will be we will play the same role that we've always played with the evolution of technology. How can we use that for oftentimes in a way that a child can uh prepare, you know, or think about the use of you know, some of the technology that we had even early on from electronic learning toys, so they sort of like understand if I push this button, this sound comes out. Never underestimate the power of what the toy industry is doing to prepare your children for opportunities further in life.
SPEAKER_00:It's such incredible perspective. Sharon John, you are that leader. So grateful to you, to Bill De Bear for the inspiration and the foresight and the lessons to other global leaders across the planet to say, wait, I can't be complacent. I need to look around corners. I need to understand who's in the car with me. What a great analogy. I mean, you need to know and you need to be able to move and to change and to adapt and to do all of the things that you do. Thank you so very much.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.