New position: Executive vice president and general manager, HSN.com, St. Petersburg. Previous position: Senior vice president of e-commerce, Park Place Entertainment, Las Vegas
By FRED W. WRIGHT JR.
Published June 9, 2003
As a leader in strategizing the future of e-commerce, Frank Han said the move from Las Vegas to Tampa wasn't difficult. "I wanted to move to a great place to raise my family," he said. "I'm now at that demographic."
Demographics are key to Han's new role as executive vice president and general manager for HSN.com. His job is to get HSN viewers to turn on their computers and visit the television retailer's Internet retailing division, HSN.com.
"Online retailing requires a strange blend of consumer-minded merchandising and marketing in addition to understanding the technology," he said. "There's a huge technology element to this job. In order to manage it, I need to understand it."
Han has been involved with making the Internet consumer-friendly for most of his career. After earning a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics in 1985 from Yale University and an MBA from Stanford University in 1991, he went into banking. As vice president of interactive markets for Union Bank of California, the third largest bank in the state, he inaugurated that institution's online access for its customers.
"I built an online bank. I realized computers were taking off in the home," he said. "One of the things people wanted out of an interactive society was control of their finances."
Since then, Han has been involved with "the online interactive space" for nearly a decade. He was co-founder of Etoys Inc., an Internet retailer of children's products. "We grew it from zero revenue to $225-million in revenue in three years, from zero employees to 1,000," he said. But Etoys "didn't make it through the downturn that hit consumer e-commerce in 2001," Han said. "We, quite frankly, grew too aggressively."
For the past 18 months, prior to joining HSN.com, Han was senior vice president of e-commerce for Park Place Entertainment, which owns and operates 18 domestic casino hotels, including Caesars Palace, Bally's Atlantic City and Paris Las Vegas. He was responsible for online room distribution, marketing and online gambling and served on the board of LasVegas.com.
Han said HSN.com has enjoyed strong growth, 30 to 40 percent a year. The challenge, he said, is "We're tied to this powerhouse TV broadcast retailer that gives us all sorts of interesting opportunities to reach customers, driving people who watch TV to the Web site."
For example, while consumers can see only one product at a time on HSN, they can see an entire product line on the Web site, Han said.
Also, Han said HSN.com will continue to expand its customer service options, allowing customers to track packages, review order history, check the status of an order and check their accounts with HSN.
"I just think people like control," he said. "They like to do it on their own time, on their own terms." HSN.com's customers tend to be "a little younger but still predominantly female," he said. "They don't look very different from the person buying from the TV and telephone."
Han, 39, said he uses his academic math skills daily. "I'm a very analytical guy. A lot of what it takes to be successful in the Internet business is to be able to let the numbers tell you a story.
"When you get 100,000 unique hits a day, and 7,000 are buying, the trick is to figure out where those people are clicking, what they're looking at, what they're buying - and what's happening with the other 93,000."
Han lives with his wife, Cindy, in Tampa. They have a 2-year-old son and another child due in a few weeks.
