It was a circuitous path that brought Mr. Taylor to Gap. As a student at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., Mr. Taylor developed a passion for theater. He directed student productions and interned at professional theaters in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and New York City.
When he graduated, he entered a Ph.D. program in theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His dream was to teach theater at a college and also do some directing.
But in grad school, he began to realize just how many people wanted the exact same thing-and that few such positions exist. The school urged students to consider the program in terms of “self fulfillment,” rather than as a stepping stone to a job, Mr. Taylor says.
Despite this discouraging message, Mr. Taylor says, he wasn’t ready to give up. But he decided that he ought to be in New York, so after receiving his master’s degree, Mr. Taylor transferred to Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. At NYU, Mr. Taylor secured a fellowship teaching writing to undergraduates, which covered his tuition and provided a small stipend. The fellowship would turn out to be pivotal to Mr. Taylor’s future.
While Mr. Taylor enjoyed his theater classes, he says he also encountered the same pessimism about career prospects that he’d felt in Madison. He assumed that was just part and parcel of grad school-until he befriended another Tisch writing fellow, who was in a program called “interactive telecommunications.”
This was 1994, and the Internet was not yet mainstream, so the program seemed cutting-edge. It recruited students from different backgrounds to create new business applications, combining the technical-computer programming-with the creative, thinking up new things to do with emerging technology.
Mr. Taylor says he thought the students in the program seemed not only passionate about what they were doing, but optimistic about job prospects.
“Their job board and the job board in the theater department were like night and day,” he says. “Companies were coming to them. There was more demand than there were students.”
Mr. Taylor was sold. He thought this program would enable him to be creative-he’d be writing-but it would also lead to gainful employment. He transferred.
“I loved the idea of creating interactive experiences,” he says. “I was in heaven.”
During his two and a half years in the program, Mr. Taylor interned in the brand-new new-media department at Hearst Magazines, which publishes 175 titles, including Cosmopolitan and Esquire.
‘A Real Job’
The summer before his final year at NYU, he was offered a fellowship at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, Mo. Hallmark, like many companies in 1996, had yet to finalize an Internet strategy, Mr. Taylor says.
Enter Mr. Taylor, who says he was given freedom to try out different ideas. In addition, he says, he was better able to implement his ideas, because he had access to the company’s artists and photographers and studio space.
“I had many more resources than I was accustomed to having,” he says. “The fellowship totally exceeded my expectations.”
He says he focused on interactive designs, such as an anniversary card that quizzed recipients on how well they know their spouses. After he completed his degree, Hallmark offered him a position as a creative-interface developer in Kansas City. He took it.
“It was a real job with benefits,” he says. That was something that had seemed out of reach when he was a theater student, he says.
In 1999, he was promoted to senior information architect. He worked on both Hallmark’s e-card program and online-shopping efforts.
A year later, he read about an opening at Gap on the Web site of a professional association. He applied and was offered the position-manager of usability for the company’s Web sites.
Although Mr. Taylor enjoyed his time at Hallmark, Gap offered certain advantages. “I have a personal passion for the product,” he says. “There was more of a disconnect at Hallmark-I wasn’t their target audience.”
So he took the job, and he and his wife moved to San Francisco.
At Gap, Mr. Taylor worked on improving the company’s e-commerce sites. In five years, he has had several promotions and his responsibilities have expanded to cover direct-marketing and credit-card programs.
When he looks back over his career, he’s glad that he followed the “buzz” to a job that’s fulfilling creatively-and materially. He still loves theater, but feels fortunate he took a different direction.
“I went where there was energy and opportunity and excitement,” he says.