Jack Zhou

Jack Zhou Senior Financial Analyst, Pathmark

The Jack Zhou Phenomenon

The cottage industry making fashion accessories in Ningbo (near Shanghai) was lacking direction.  The leather handbags and women’s hats were of exceptional quality, but they needed someone to “make it happen”.  Enter Jian Ke Zhou—“Jack” Zhou.

An engineer by training from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, Jack realized that the ladies making the accessories needed so find themselves a market niche in the United States.  Jack’s goal was to find this niche in the US, develop the target market and adapt the product to US consumer tastes.  Finally when the moment arrived, Jack, with impeccable timing, had the Chinese manufacturers position the hats and handbags to a specifically targeted US market and, furthermore, he had them switch from leather to crochet---just in time to catch the late 1990s trend on the up-tick!

His first US distributor in Manhattan was skeptical—he bought only one container worth of accessories from Ningbo.  When these were snapped up within weeks, he called Jack and said, “ship as many as you can, as fast as you can!”  At one point Jack was shipping 1 million accessories.  His Manhattan distributor finally opened 100 new stores, and the product eventually made it to Payless Shoes, Target, and K-Mart.  The legend of Jack Zhou was born.

He graduated from the Rutgers EMBA program with the highest grade point average and tied with classmate Al Porcello (Novartis) for that distinguished award.  Fellow EMBAs still recall how Jack peppered the economists at the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt with high-powered macro questions to the extent that the ECB staff had to call in reinforcements to be able to answer him!

At present, in addition to running his company, SmartWorld, Jack, who graduated with a concentration in Finance from REMBA, is a senior budget analyst for Pathmark.