Meet The Disruptors: Leslie Dotson Of Swiss Precision Active On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Desire. Always do something that you desire in the heart that makes you feel like you are giving back to humanity. That leaves a footprint of responsibility, duty, and honor to humanity. I only like to do things that will make me a better person or allow humanity to evolve. The desire drives me and fuels me to be the best of the best.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Leslie Dotson.
Leslie Dotson is co-founder and CEO of Swiss Precision, an Eco HealthTech apparel brand for the medical scrub, uniform, and accessories market. He is a designer and innovator with almost 30 years of experience and an award-winning product designer. He has invented or developed over 500+ products and won the Good Design Award in 2007 and 2008 for the SwissGear Mouse design and the Editor’s Choice award for the ChillCase in 2010.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I’m a father and a grandfather. My daughter is in the top 40 in the industry for marketing, which she does for Mattel, Inc., running the Disney toy line for Target. I couldn’t be more proud of her.
As for me, my backstory is all about developing products and services for humanity by understanding what people’s pain points are, then providing a solution. That allows them to have the best customer experience they possibly can. I believe that to be the best inventor, I have to be the best humanitarian so that I can understand people’s lives and help them become peaceful and tranquil. I always think of this in the design. How can this make somebody’s life better? How can this take the pain point away?
I found my career path in an interesting way. I used to work in the marketing department for Seiko watches, and one day I was to approve the golden samples from our artists. They were from Taiwan and were in an exclusive area of the factory that I had access to. I was 23, and it was the first time in my life that I had seen such complex artistry. I was fascinated by the discipline among these people making Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck watches by hand. It gave me the bug to understand how it all worked — how marketing worked, how production worked.
The company decided to move to the East Coast from California, and I didn’t want to live 3,000 miles away from my family. Luckily, they had an opportunity with a sister company, so I went for an interview. There were 600 other people in line for that job, with only 10 openings. I was one of the 10 who got it, and they told us that out of 600 people they interviewed, we had one unique trait: the ability to see a situation and find the solution. They said that less than one percent of the people in the world have that sort of vision. They wanted to take us into a new organization called Epson Direct and start this new entity, and that’s how I got into the IT and consumer electronics business. I saw the first laptop. I saw how networking was structured years before Compaq and Dell and Gateway had even formed. It was a fascinating journey, and if I hadn’t seen those Taiwanese artists making watches, I might never have found this career path.
Read full article on Medium
