SELF PORTRAITDate and place of birth: Aug. 20, 1951, Indianapolis Family: Husband Don, daughter Clair, stepsons Brian and KevinFavorite old movie: The Women, the original one with Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford If I were marooned on a desert island, I’d have to have wine and chocolate.
One fashion trend I never fell victim to was grunge.
A fashion trend I wish was still in style: big fancy hats When I’m on a plane, I like to meet the person I am sitting next to.
A place I’d like to visit: a luxurious private island People in high school thought I was competitive.
Fantasy dinner guests: Edith Head (Hollywood costume designer), Walt Disney and Paul McCartney Little known fact: I once owned an interior design business called Sew What.
One word to sum me up: persistentSPRINGDALE - Claudia Mobley was 9 years old when she saw the dress in a storefront window of Nordstrom in California. She begged and bargained with her mother, intent on that pale blue nylon frock with pleats down the front. It wasn’t until Easter that it arrived, crafted by her mother’s agile hands.
It made her feel like the belle of the ball.
Though that dress wasn’t single-handedly responsible for her entrance into the world of fashion and retail, it was the beginning of something.
Mobley’s love affair with fabrics, textiles and patterns gave shape to her young life. She had an advantage as the daughter of a seamstress and she could barter - household chores in exchange for dresses.
As a California girl, she spent her growing-up years surfing, swimming on the school team and making “crafty” things, like rugs. Her craftiness was rewarded with a scholarship to a university in Arizona to study textiles, but she declined it and chose one of the few practical paths available to career women at the time. She earned a two-year degree in nursing, and began to work in a hospital ward for terminally ill children.
“When I got out of high school and went to college, there were pretty much two professions that women did - nursing or teaching,” says Mobley, now 62. “I cry when I read books, so this [nursing job] was not a good thing.”
When it came down to it, what she really loves is clothes. Her unique style is something that sets her apart, even now.
“She’s stylish; it adds to her influence,” says Rich Lawrence of Idelle Labs, a member of the board of directors at the Center for Retailing Excellence, where Mobley is director. “She has a sense of economy and style, stepping out onto that stage, it helps her be persuasive. That’s no indication that she flies without substance. She [just] knows that’s a part of [business], that you can’t look like you stepped out of backwoods Arkansas.”
Some might even say her distinct style sense helps her make and retain connections in the business community.
“She’s always so well put together, she has the most wonderful outfits,” says Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas, where the Center for Retailing Excellence is located. “She uses that knowledge of fashion, not for its own sake, but to be memorable for the business community andin sharing her expertise. It makes her identifiable, and [that] takes a particular knack.”
At Texas Woman’s University, Mobley learned alot about how a fabric can make or break an outfit, the qualities of each material, the process to make them and how to design clothing for various body types.
Her natural love of the subject didn’t carry her all the way to graduation without a fight, though. The first men’s dress shirt she ever made had the buttons on the wrong side, and while others were better at designing garments, she realized that she was better at selling them.
She came away with a bachelor’s degree in home economics, with focus on clothing and textiles, and a master’s degree in textile science, as well as the unforgettable experience of Hollywood costume designer Edith Head judging her in a garment competition.
“I did learn really fast, though, that people who design are very creative and talented and they had quite a lot more ideas than I had, but I certainly could sell it and market it, and I could recognize it,” she says.
The give and take of these talents made sense, so she left others to the design process and started selling.
Mobley entered the corporate world through J.C. Penney Co. with the intention of becoming the junior buyer in apparel, and was discouraged to be given the lawn and garden department, but she soon saw the silver lining.
“What I learned is that it doesn’t matter what the product is,” she says. “You can learn the product, but the marketing, merchandising … all those things apply no matter what the product is.”
That ability to put her feelings aside and focus on getting the job done makes her an ideal business partner and friend.
“She’s never told me [that] she has had her feelings hurt,” says Jill Jacoway of Jacoway Law Firm, Mobley’s friend of 20 years. “That’s phenomenal. She looks at the happy things in life and doesn’t take offense.”
“She cultivates the best in everyone,” says Nina Brackeen, team president of production, design and marketing company Goodmark USA, who is on the center board of directors. “She is always uplifting and constructive and finds what is good in any situation. Her entire life is focused on positive outcomes.”
Her job at J.C. Penney, though not what she had initially imagined, ended up being just the retail management training she needed. While there she worked in all departments - lawn and garden, stationery, candy, record albums and eight-tracks, luggage, cameras - determined to climb the ladder.
Meanwhile, a company named Margie’s was rising in the ranks of retailers, the first of its kind to buy lots and irregular items and selling them for up to 70 percent off. It was a stunningly different business style from J.C. Penney and Mobley jumped at the chance to work for the family company. She flourished in the hands-on learning environment and became a store manager, then a division manager, and eventually a buyer.
By the time she left, the number of stores had doubled.
IN HOG HEAVEN
It wasn’t until 1992 that Mobley considered moving to Arkansas. Her husband, architect Don Mobley, was a Razorback alumnus eager to take advantage of a business opportunity in the town of his alma mater. His first client would be his first college roommate, and he was looking forward to returning.
At the time, Claudia Mobley worked in wholesale for the Dallas Apparel Mart and was keenly aware that her particular job wouldn’t be easily retrievable in Northwest Arkansas. She made some calls, including one to UA and was told that there were no jobs open in the apparel program. So she put thoughts of the university aside until a colleague at Texas Woman’s University insisted she check again. The second time, a resignation was submitted on the day she called.
“The whole thing was magical,” she says. “We were meant to be here.”
She came onto the University of Arkansas campus as a faculty member in the apparel program, which was in the home economics department of the College of Agriculture at the time, and earned her doctorate in curriculum and instruction while teaching. She found a bird of the same feather in Kathy Smith, a professor in the School of Human Environmental Science.
“We worked together to develop the apparel studies program, revamping the clothing and textiles program into that,” Smith says. “We saw it from the business vantage point and were able to build this program based on that practice, as well as the academia side: what courses were important for studentsto graduate, etc.”
They were similar enough in their combined expertise that one would start expressing a thought and the other would finish it. They would trade off, and the result was to build something new.
CEOS AND STUDENTS
It was a paragraph that changed her career.
In the early 1990s, the Walton Family Foundation donated $50 million to the business college and the funds came with a thick document stipulating the details of the arrangement. One little paragraph requested the creation of a center for retailing. At first, the college administration didn’t know what to make of the request, but Dean Doyle Williams took his time and decided that Mobley wasthe person for the job.
“He saw something that I had no idea existed in me,” she says. “He hired me to create that center and gave me literally free rein. Figure it out. That’s such an amazingly freeing thing to have happen - that you can take all your expertise and all the years of retail and buying and merchandising and so forth and focusing it toward ‘how do we connect industry and academics to create tomorrow’s leaders?’”
At the center, they focus on changing the perceptions of retail in the eyes of students and on shaping those scholars into the next executives and managers of some of the most powerful businesses in the country.
The money from the foundation was to get the organization started, so Mobley created a self-sustaining model.
She began her journey by touring similar centers in the United States to come up with the most efficient organization possible. From a buyer’s perspective, she was getting an inside look at the competition and they offered her tips for what they would do differently if they could start from scratch.
She recruited the help of six companies to form a board of directors to power the organization with fresh ideas. In meetings, they were required to leave their business hats at the door and think only of what could make students more successful in the professional world. The originalsix companies have remained on the center’s board of directors, along with 59 other companies - a testament to the strength and innovation of its operation.
“She has an uncanny ability to seek out excellence … talented board members, and she works closely with them,” says Eli Jones, dean of the business college. “That, by far, is her biggest strength. She solicits feedback, engages them very well and is able to work with members of the faculty to build programs in retailing.”
“Her ability to first group diverse egos and to build a coalition out of all these groups [made it successful],” Lawrence says. “To get all the companies that would see each other as competition and get them together and focus on something outside of them.”
“It was her genius - how she organized it … is a hugestrength. That’s where most fall flat. She does it so effortlessly that people don’t even recognize it.”
“Claudia is a trusted resource, friend and confidante to all CRE members past, present and future,” Brackeen says. “No one intimidates her, and she has a very discerning mind. It’s been a joy to watch her drive the CRE to new heights.’’
EXPANDING THE PROGRAM
Then, as now, the ideas change from year to year, forming a conglomerate of new programs, unofficialtraining and opportunities.
Many programs have stemmed from the board under Mobley’s direction, such as the Emerging Markets Retail Executive Forum, in which business executives lend insights from the field to students. They created Vendors Fore Education, a corporate-focused scholarship fundraising golf tournament and one of the main reasons the center has been able to award $5 million in scholarships in just 15 years.
Recognizing the need for a student group that could sharpen their professional and networking skills and show employers they’re going beyond classroom learning, the board created Students of Retail Excellence (STORE), which requires them to do additional work with the reward of attendance at professional conferences around the country, like the National RetailFederation in New York. The center also created a conference of its own, the annual Emerging Trends in Retailing conference, which brought once again those high-level company executives to the students’ backyard.
Over the years, more Walton College alumni became board members and helped pool energy to further the student effort. With Mobley’s help, they created a mentoring program to connect professionals and students and a study-abroad program with destinations of China and Japan, and formed the firstretailing major and retailing minor at the University of Arkansas.
Making the center different from all the others in the country was just a matter of time, since it sits in close proximity to the world’s largest retailer and the growing number of its vendors.
“She took this in a direction no one else went in,” Lawrence says. “That’s why it’s so robust, growing and reinventing itself.”
In her years as the center’s director, she has provided business students with a way to gain practical experience and apply the theories they learn in the classroom.
“In developing the center, she just took off,” Smith says. “She knew the right people. She’s helped it be very successful and set the standard for other centers on campus.”
If she has her way, Mobley will continue those efforts in a similarly eclectic, creative way by bringing fresh ideas to the table early and often. For now, she’s focusing her efforts on the Business Leadership Academy, which selects 25 of the brightest incoming business freshmen to learn about retailing opportunities before beginning their collegiate career.
And when they return years later, with some of the same retailing experiences she had and thank her for the connections to successful leaders of businesses worldwide, she leans back with a knowing smile, content to have aided their success.
Northwest Profile, Pages 27 on 01/26/2014