For his day job, Pete Sickman-Garner manages marketing for the
Zingerman's stable of businesses, including the destination-trip-worthy deli in Kerrytown (the
oldest and best-known business under the Zingerman's label) and Zingerman's Roadhouse restaurant and catering outfit. The various epicurean charms have helped make the Zingerman's name (and mail-order goods) familiar to foodie palates far outside of Tree Town. (Legendary
New York Times writer R.W. Apple called it "
the deli of my dreams". Which means watching over the Zingerman's brand is no small chore.
As marketing manager at Zingerman's Service Network, or ZingNet for short, Sickman-Garner helps "connect the dots" between each of the individual Zingerman's businesses, of which there are seven. Within the Zingerman's family is its mail-order and catalog venture, the deli, Bakehouse, ZingTrain, catering, creamery, Roadhouse and coffee roasters. If you think that's a lot, wait until 2020: the company plans to have between 12 to 18 separate businesses, not including such sub-entities such as the Bakehouse's popular BAKE! class series.
ZingNet, Sickman-Garner explained, is a separate corporate entity that serves the Zingerman's businesses, taking care of tech and HR-related matters, and coordinating marketing efforts. Each individual business also has its own marketing staff.
"We're working for all the businesses," Sickman-Garner explained. "We're not brand managing the way a larger company would. It's not about controlling the mark … but being able to communicate with everybody at everybody's [individual] understanding of who we are."
But when he's not in his ZingNet marketing manager role --a brand-new position when he joined Zingerman's in 2006-- Sickman-Garner crafts comics. He's the creator of the Hey, Mister series, which Details magazine once declared "America's funniest comic book," and currently working on a project that follows the on-earth pursuits of Satan and Jesus, among other characters.
"It's no new thing to treat Satan as an interesting literary character," Sickman-Garner said, noting the tradition exemplified by Milton's Paradise Lost (whose Satan has been referred to as a "Romantic hero" and "the world's first Republican" by literary critics) and Goethe's Faust. Historically, in various literary representations, the devil's had all the fun — and Jesus, not so much. "But part of the aim of the story is to make Jesus as funny and interesting as I can."
Writing this new comic, of which he said he's now drawn and inked 30-odd pages, is also Sickman-Garner's opportunity to weigh in on mainstream religious discourse.
"I do take issue with the way religion has been commercialized and commodified," he said. "Big churches have taken these symbols and taken these stories and [turned them] into commercial entities. Well, then I'm going to go live in their world: ‘Jesus is just a guy.' "
In a 2002 Comicreaders.com interview, when he was the-then marketing director at the University of Michigan Press (the position he held before his current gig at Zingerman's), Sickman-Garner said that he was "patterning my career and artistic life after Wallace Stevens," the much anthologized businessman-writer.
It's an appropriate analogue, touched with Sickman-Garner's quirky sense of humor — though some of his job responsibilities are arguably more delicious. The "Emperor of Ice-Cream" poet spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company, where understanding company product most likely did not involve eating mouth-wateringly spicy Nashville Hot Chicken, --one of Sickman-Garner's current favorites off the Roadhouse menu.
The Roadhouse, which opened in 2003, is the seventh member of the Zingerman's business family. The growing number of businesses under the Zingerman's umbrella make it tricky to refer to just "Zingerman's" as some monolithic entity — though people invariably do, and if any specific image comes up, it's usually that of the tightly packed deli. Sickman-Garner jokes that Zingerman's mail-order is not actually run out of the deli's basement, as some customers might think.
"But if they think that, that's fine," he said, as long as the focus remains on fulfilling Zingerman's bottom lines of service, finance and food. "If all our effort is focused on improving those bottom lines, then to some extent the brand will take care of itself."
The brand has grown over the last 27 years by emphasizing its local feel and staying in Ann Arbor. Cheeses and oils may be imported from all over the world, but somehow it always feels like the deli around the corner. Zingerman's emphasizes spreading the word by word of mouth, starting small and building up over time. You won't see the company taking out billboards to advertise a new product, or wrapping a bus in Zingerman's logos and illustrations (though Sickman-Garner says advertising companies have come to him with the bus-wrapping suggestion).
"Even though we're local, there are so many people that don't know about us, or have a perception of us that's incomplete," said Sickman-Garner, who himself is a very local guy. (Born here, then raised in State College, Pennsylvania, he attended the University of Michigan from 1984-1988 before moving to Arkansas for a spell while he wife completed studies at the University of Arkansas.) "There's always going to be people in this town we need to reach, work we need to do."
Kimberly Chou is a freelance writer living in Ann Arbor. She is a frequent contributor to both Metromode and Concentrate. She recently left to intern at the Wall Street Journal. Her previous article was Learning From Ann Arbor's Big Sister.Photos:
Peter Sickman-Garner at Zingermans Mail Order Warehouse-Ann Arbor
Zingermans Roadhouse-Ann Arbor
Hey, Mister-A PSG Cartoon
Nashville Hot Chicken
Mister Guilty T-Shirt-Modeled by Peter Sickman-Garner
All Photos by Dave Lewinski