Nygard’s Golden Jubilee Review

It’s not an everyday occurrence to discover an individual who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps to achieve phenomenal success with a business that’s still breaking barriers, still achieving firsts, and still innovating fifty years later. What does it take? How did he achieve it all? And how can we achieve similar successes?

That’s what we’ll explore in this tri-weekly series. We’ll break down fashion mogul Peter Nygard’s achievements and look at how his accomplishments can serve as practical applications to others in business and life.

Nygard Seeks To Improve Lives Of All People 

You know a person has a good heart when they want the same for you that they want for themselves. And that appears to be what motivates fashion mogul Peter Nygard.

He fully practices the biblical principle ‘do on to others as you would have them do on to you.’

One of the things that drives Peter Nygard is his desire to always be the best at everything he does. Because of this, he has an exceptional commitment to continuous improvement.

Continuous improvement is such a dominant force in his life that he focuses on it in every area of his life and it influences everything that he does.

And he’s not selfish about it either. If he cares about you at all—and it doesn’t take much; he cares about strangers enough to give away lots of his money to them—then he also wants you to continuously improve to be your best.

We don’t just know this from the countless Bahamians who have been on the receiving end of his generosity to help them improve their lives; we see it in other actions that he has taken.

One example of this is how in every facility he owns in every location around the world, Nygard has invested in two things for his associates that he believes are foundational to good health and a long life: exercise and healthy eating.

He wants all of his employees to live long healthy lives. His workplace cafeterias are all mandated to serve healthy meals only, and he has set up a gym in every NYGARD facility around the world. 

The setup is not limited to one or two treadmills and cycling machines. Each facility has a complete gym, and he’s always encouraging his staff to use the exercise machines. 

In fact, Nygard has been known to pull out his blood pressure machine on any given day and take the blood pressure of a management associate he happens to be having a meeting with.

Also, he’ll hear about the mother of an employee with heart problems, or a brother of an employee with multiple sclerosis, and pay for treatments for these individuals, often very quietly.

He is committed to being the healthiest person he could be and wants the same for the people he interacts with andtheir loved ones. 

With any scientific breakthrough that he hears about, if there is someone in his orbit that can benefit from it, he doesn’t just tell them about it; he pays for the airfare to fly them there and back; he pays for the accommodations; and he pays for the medical treatment.

Everyone knows about his cancer eradication commitment and the millions of dollars he donates to that cause. However, these good deeds that happen to a number of his line and management staff and their relatives are fairly unknown. 

Bahamians are not the only ones benefitting from Nygard’s desire for the best for all people.

With all the challenges the world faces today, where people don’t seem to care anymore about the suffering of others, Peter Nygard is a breath of fresh air. 

It is inspiring to see an individual like that not just care about his own health and wellbeing but of everyone else’s around the world. 

You may think that a ‘principle of caring’ is not an important business principle. If you did, you would be wrong. Remember, it’s Nygard’s treatment of the workers in factories throughout China and other countries that garnered him loyalty for twenty and twenty-five plus years.

It’s Nygard’s commitment to improving the lives of not just the workers but the communities the workers live in that gained him the respect of world leaders in the various countries.

So if you think caring is not an important business principle, think again and look at how caring has contributed to Peter Nygard’s exponential business success.