Tony Hsieh might seem like a low-key guy, but when it comes to being a great leader, he's a "shoe in."

Hsieh, 33, is the chief executive officer and director of Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer that carries more than 1,000 brands, more than 90,000 styles and 3.5 million pairs of shoes in its warehouses, ready for immediate shipment.

Hsieh joined the Henderson, Nev.-based company in 2000, and under his leadership Zappos.com has grown gross merchandise sales from $1.6 million in 2000 to $597 million in 2006. The company is on track to reach $800 million in gross merchandise sales in 2007.

It also has more than 1,300 employees (350 customer loyalty/call center employees, 600 warehouse workers and 350 other employees), as well as warehouse space in Kentucky " near major FedEx and UPS hubs " with a total area equivalent to 17 football fields. Zappos.com also has three outlet stores in Las Vegas and one in Kentucky. Not to mention more than 6 million customers, which is close to 2 percent of the U.S. population. One of the reasons Zappos.com is so successful, Hsieh says, is its focus on customer service in lieu of marketing and advertising.

"The way we've gown primarily over the past eight years is through repeat customers and word-of-mouth," he explains. "Our philosophy [is] 'Any money that we would have spent on marketing, let's instead put it back into the customer experience and the customer service level we provide.'" And it's working: On any given day, 75 percent of Zappos.com's customers are repeat customers, according to Hsieh.

Examples of Zappos.com's stellar customer service include free, overnight shipping. Unlike with most e-tailers, orders placed before 1 p.m. PST Monday through Thursday for delivery within the 48 contiguous United States ship the next day. Orders placed after 1 p.m. Thursday through 1 p.m. Monday generally ship the first Tuesday after the order, in some cases sooner. "We believe that the speed at which a customer receives an online purchase plays a very important role in how that customer thinks about shopping online again in the future," Hsieh says. "So at Zappos, we have put a lot of focus on making sure the shoes get delivered to our customers as quickly as possible.

"In order to do that, we warehouse everything that we sell and, unlike most other online retailers, we don't make an item available for sale unless it is physically present in our warehouse," he adds. Other examples of great customer service at Zappos.com include free return shipping, a 365 day return policy, 24/7 operations at its call center, and its large, efficient warehouse.

"All of those things are very expensive to do, but our business model is, Let's invest as much as possible into the customer experience and customer service, and let our own customers do our own marketing for us through word-of-mouth," Hsieh says.

"Our goal is to position Zappos as the online service leader," he continues. "If we can get customers to associate the Zappos brand with the absolute best service, then we can expand into other product categories beyond shoes."

A bit of history
Zappos.com "the name is based on zapatos, the Spanish word for shoes" was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn, who was walking around a mall in San Francisco, looking for a pair of shoes. One store had the right style, but not the right color. Another store had the right color, but not the right size. Swinmurn spent the next hour in the mall, walking from store to store, and finally went home empty-handed and frustrated.