Jason Zambuto grew up on Long Island in New York, graduated from a local prep school and continued his education at Boston College and the London School of Economics. Zambuto met his wife on Oahu while he was working for Royal Copenhagen/Georg Jensen; he had come to Hawaii to be the firms’ director of sales and marketing and was later promoted to managing director. She acclimated well to life in New York when his career took him back east, but after 13 years there they decided their children should grow up in Hawaii. Honolulu has been home since 2013.
Zambuto spent most of the next six years working with Tori Richard. He left to concentrate on some investments, but a conversation with Reyn Spooner President Rob Tolleson brought him back into the clothing business.
Zambuto, 46, begins his new position as Reyn Spooner’s Hawaii-based head of retail sales Monday.
What brought you to Reyn Spooner?
I really missed being in retail. To go through a Black Friday and not be in a store with the customers is something I really missed out on, and Reyns had always been a company I respected — I wore Reyns before I wore Tori.
How are you going to handle the new normal for retail?
Obviously the safety of our employees and our customers is most important. We’ll be encouraging social distancing and increasing the cleaning of the store and the sanitation of the store after each customer is there. Fitting rooms will probably continue to be closed, and we’ll be implementing things like curbside pickup and shopping by appointment. We want to make the experience as seamless for customers as possible, as well as taking into consideration all of the necessary protocols.
Are you going to continue to make masks in your major aloha print patterns?
Yes we will. We’ll have them in our stores and in stores like Macy’s as well. And we’re giving them to our employees.
The Reyn Spooner Christmas aloha shirt — a different pattern each year — has been a must-have for many Reyns fans for decades. In 2005 Reyn made a matching teddy bear. Any chance of a bear this year?
I’m not sure, but it’s something we’ll be looking into.
What are the plans for 2021 and beyond?
Reyns is looking to get back to its roots in Hawaii and is making that investment in Hawaii. So my goal over the next year — in addition to getting retail back to as normal as possible — is integrating retail and wholesale and guiding that shopping experience for the customer to be a seamless one. Whether they shop for us at Macy’s or the Navy Exchange, or come in to one of our retail stores, at the end of the day the label inside the shirt says Reyn Spooner, and it doesn’t matter to them where they buy it.
What do you enjoy doing for relaxation?
The most important thing is time with my family. I have a son who just graduated from high school; he’s going to start college in January so I get some extra time with him. I have a daughter who’s going to be a sophomore (in high school), so I like to spend a lot of with my family.
Is there something about you that might surprise people who know you as a retail executive?
I enjoy long-distance running. I started running in 2007 and ran my first marathon in Honolulu. I spent about five years getting my marathon time down to about 2:50. Then I realized that I wasn’t going to beat that 2:50 so I put a new goal ahead of me and that was to run a 50-mile race. I did that in October of 2018, and ever since then I’ve enjoyed running 20 or 30 miles at a time. It is probably the only selfish thing that I do.
