Respect isn’t a buzzword or a line in a mission statement. It’s a strategy, and one that I used to build an empire during my time leading Syms, the first truly off-price retail chain in America.

When my father, Sy Syms, and I grew our business from a single store in lower Manhattan into a 50-location national retailer, we weren’t just selling clothes. We were proving that dignity could be a competitive advantage.

We respected customers’ time by color-coding tags by size and keeping every store layout identical. Walk into one Syms, and you’d know how to navigate them all. We respected their intelligence by refusing to hard-sell. Our employees weren’t “sales associates”—they were “educators,” trained to answer questions about fiber content, tailoring, and fit. We respected their wallets wi

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