On a recent afternoon at the Henderson, Nevada, headquarters of Zappos, America’s leading online shoe retailer, Katrina Jadkowski, a member of the company’s three-hundred-and-fifty-person Customer Loyalty Team, was on the phone with an elderly woman named Susie, from Aurora, Colorado, who wanted to exchange a pair of too-snug New Balance sneakers. “I just got back in town and I have an orthotics appointment,” Susie said, sounding a bit anxious about this newfangled shopping experience.

Thanks to Zappos’s yearlong return policy, we can all be Imelda Marcos. Illustration by Jean-Philippe Delhomme

Jadkowski, a British-born, divorced former showgirl whose colleagues have nicknamed her Hurricane, arranged to have a UPS return label printed and a replacement pair, size 5½ EE, shipped free, overnight. “That’s just beautiful—I love this company!” Susie shouted.

Typing in the order rapidly, red flower decals on her fingernails, Jadkowski told Susie that it was Zappos’s tenth anniversary and upgraded her to V.I.P. status—which pretty much any Zappos shopper can attain, merely by asking. (The URL of the V.I.P. site is intended to encourage the intimate act of bookmarking, since a Google search for “sensible black pumps” or “running shoes” will also turn up the company’s competitors.) Male callers in particular seem to enjoy the upgrade, with its suggestion of velvet-roped back rooms. Susie, too, was pleased. “Oh, that’s fabulous!” she said. “This is super.”

The two women giggled conspiratorially for a few moments, and Jadkowski asked if there was anything else she could do.

“No,” Susie said. “Oh, I’m tickled.”

Jadkowski wished her a nice day and disconnected the call. “Sometimes you just need to let them natter on,” she said, not unkindly.

The Customer Loyalty Team, or C.L.T., is the nerve center of Zappos, whose thirty-five-year-old C.E.O., Tony Hsieh, has earned a zealous following by imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet. He talks about being the architect of a movement to spread happiness, or “Zappiness,” via three “C”s: clothing, customer service, and company culture.

“Eventually, we’ll figure out a way of spreading that knowledge to the world in general, and that has nothing to do with selling shoes online,” he told me after I visited the company over the summer.

Owning a large collection of shoes in various styles and colors has, in the past decade, gone from being considered a sign of ultimate imperial excess (Imelda Marcos) to a constitutional right of the average American woman, and Zappos is at least partly responsible. (So is “Sex and the City.”) Hsieh (pronounced “shay”) has changed the business so radically that, in July, Amazon.com, after trying to compete with Zappos by starting a shoe site called Endless.com, as if to sanction the new insatiability, announced plans to buy the company for ten million shares of stock (worth $790 million at press time) plus $40 million in cash. In an S.E.C. filing, Amazon vowed to leave Zappos’s management structure intact.

“There’re plenty of companies that don’t grow, and that’s fine for, like, your mom-and-pop corner store,” Hsieh said to me two weeks later, over the phone from Minneapolis, where he was addressing General Mills. (He has become a coveted “get” on the motivational-speaker circuit.) “But, for me personally at Zappos, the company needs to grow in order for the movement to happen.”

When he was asked how he and Amazon’s C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, will share power in the new order, he said, “Yeah . . . we’ll see.”

At its most rarefied, shoe shopping still takes place in hushed, pastel-carpeted salons, with salesmen (they are usually men—one doesn’t like to think too closely about why) staggering under stacks of boxes and kneeling down to insure the perfect fit before whisking away the charge plates of their waiting Cinderellas. Some people still consider pawing through the sale racks at Bloomingdale’s or the fluorescent-lit aisles of the Designer Shoe Warehouse an enjoyable contact sport. But Zappos and its imitators—shoes.com, heels.com, and the Gap’s inexplicably named piperlime.com—are shifting this public transaction into the comfort and privacy of customers’ living rooms. There, thanks to Zappos’s three-hundred-and-sixty-five-day return policy, we can all be Imelda Marcos, sifting through ceiling-high piles of boxes, and waiting in sweatpanted indolence for the UPS man to pick up our rejects.

Unlike most Web sites, including Amazon’s, which seem to be operated by spectral forces rather than by human beings, Zappos prominently displays a toll-free customer-service phone number. There are no limits on call times, and the resulting sessions occasionally resemble protracted talk therapy. On July 5th, a twenty-two-year-old C.L.T. member named Britnee Brown, who has been with the company for a little more than a year, took a call that was a record five hours, twenty-five minutes, and thirty-one seconds long, from a woman on the East Coast interested in Masai Barefoot Technology shoes, which purport to mimic supposedly salubrious barefoot-on-the-beach walking with curved rubber platforms. “We started talking about her sister,” Brown said. The call that set the previous record lasted more than four hours, with a woman afflicted by peripheral neuropathy who had trouble feeling her feet. “She told me childhood stories, things like that,” Jennifer S., the operator who handled that one, said in a video posted on YouTube. Zappos has advertised sparingly thus far, preferring word of mouth, and (unlike most companies) encourages employees to let it all hang out on Twitter and Facebook.

This marketing strategy seems to be working, up to a point. In the first half of 2009, not generally considered a bright spot for American retail, buyers of fashion footwear spent almost twenty per cent more through online-only channels than they had the previous year, according to the NPD Group, a market-research firm, while sales at shoe chains, department stores, and stand-alone shops were down about eleven per cent each. In 2008, Zappos surpassed a billion dollars in gross sales, an occasion that its fiercely clannish employees—who operate under a program of ten Core Values (No. 3: Create Fun and a Little Weirdness)—celebrated with clanging cowbells, followed by vodka shots at a local Claim Jumper restaurant. Because of the lenient return policy, however, net sales were only six hundred and thirty-five million dollars, according to the Amazon S.E.C. filing, and, after operating costs, net profits were $10.8 million, which explains why Hsieh, though he insisted that “the Amazon thing is not about the money,” might have been amenable to an infusion of capital.

The Henderson headquarters, three squat beige buildings surrounded by palm and flowering plum trees, have become an unlikely pilgrimage spot for businesspeople, tourists, and the odd celebrity, many ferried to and from their hotels on the Las Vegas Strip in a complimentary shuttle van. Inside, they are greeted by a concierge-like Help Desk of about a dozen support personnel, whose services include occasional free hugs. Apart from a smattering of shoe samples, there is no physical evidence of the company’s wares on the premises. (Merchandise is stored in and shipped from an eight-hundred-and-thirty-two-thousand-square-foot warehouse, roamed by robots, in Shepherdsville, Kentucky.) Visitors come to marvel at the spectacle of peppy, dedicated workers: a utopia of communal cheer and solicitude; trilled “Good morning”s and “Hi, pumpkin!”s; free vats of popcorn, nuts, and trail mix; and politely held doors. Entering the lobby, which was decorated with Christmas lights at the height of the desert summer, a stranger gets the feeling that amphetamines might be pumped through the central air-conditioning. On my maiden shuttle trip, the driver mentioned that the relentlessly upbeat vibe at Zappos—Core Value No. 7: Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit—had broken up her marriage. “My husband didn’t fit in with the culture,” she said. “He was too gangsta.”

Zappos was founded in 1999, during the first Internet gold rush, by a Bay Area entrepreneur named Nick Swinmurn. He’d been irritated when he couldn’t find a pair of brown Airwalks at his local mall. Hsieh, originally an adviser and investor through a concern called Venture Frogs, joined the company a year later. After graduating from Harvard, he’d operated an Internet ad-banner venture called LinkExchange with a classmate, Alfred Lin (now Zappos’s C.O.O.), which was sold to Microsoft for two hundred and sixty-five million dollars in 1998. Hsieh was rich, and bored. “I just liked working for Zappos,” he said. “It was about: What kind of company can we create where we all want to be there, including me? How can we create such a great environment, where employees get so much out of it that they would do it for free?” And, in fact, some Zapponians, as they are known, draw a wage as low as eleven dollars an hour.

“I’m not trying to be beautiful—I’m just trying to look better than everyone else there.” Facebook

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The company’s name comes from the Spanish word for shoe, zapato, a word that also turned out to be fortuitously evocative of the way goods are “zapped” to customers. (Core Value No. 1: Deliver WOW Through Service.) A C.L.T. manager named Jane Judd, her eyes damp, described a Q. & A. session she had heard Hsieh conduct with some visiting Time Warner executives. “Our service isn’t everything it could be,” he’d said. “If we didn’t have to think about cost, the reps would personally get on a plane today and deliver that box.”

“I always call him my little Dalai Lama,” Judd said.

Soft-spoken and introverted, Hsieh has become an unlikely business guru: a young philosopher prince of the middle-management set, to whom he is fond of distributing an annual “Culture Book” of warbling testimonials collected from Zappos employees, as if it were the Gideon Bible, and recommending titles on the science of happiness, like “The Happiness Hypothesis,” by Jonathan Haidt, and “Happier,” by Tal Ben-Shahar. He is also writing a book of his own for Grand Central Publishing, tentatively titled “Delivering Happiness”—“a combination of talking about Zappos, the culture, core values, and the science of happine_ssss_,” he said, stretching out the word. For Hsieh, happiness is a quantifiable quality that seems synonymous with “calm.”

“Generally, I associate drama with negative emotions, and I want to experience positive emotions,” he said.

It was a week before the Amazon deal was announced, to general shock within the company, where Hsieh, whose mother is a clinical psychologist, has promoted a culture of absolute transparency (Core Value No. 6: Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication). He was standing at the back of a classroom filled with twenty out-of-town businesspeople who’d paid five thousand dollars apiece for a symposium titled “Zappos Insights Live”: a two-day “culture immersion” into the company. They’d been instructed to write two truths about themselves and one lie on an index card, then stand up and name their favorite movie.

“ ‘Forrest Gump,’ ” one of them, a gangly young man named Eric James, from a company in Colorado called PosterBrain.com, said, to murmurs of approval. A “Zappos Insights” leader read James’s card: “Pickled pigs’ feet was my favorite food as a kid.” (True.) “My first business was inventing magic tricks.” (True.) “I’ve visited over 100 countries.” (Lie.)

“For favorite movie, I’m gonna have to say . . . my life?” said a perky auburn-haired woman, Camille Preston, who works in executive development at a company called Aim Leadership.

After about an hour of this, Hsieh glided to the front of the room, wearing jeans, a silky black shirt, untucked, and black shoes, and began a laid-back PowerPoint presentation.

“What would you be passionate about doing, even if you never made a dime?” he asked the assembled. “What is your goal in life? For almost everyone, it comes down to happiness.” He moistened his lips, and summoned a bouncing smiley face onto the screen. “What if you could go straight to the happiness?”

The visitors watched raptly, scribbling in white binders and drinking from bottles of Sparkletts water.

Later, after Italian food at the Palms hotel, the group repaired to the Playboy Club. As bored-looking Bunnies stood stiffly against pounding hip-hop music, James was having trouble finding the happiness.

“Steph, my ex-girlfriend—she up and left me,” he told Hsieh, who was standing near the bar, sipping a vodka-and-soda through a straw. “We’d just bought a car together and everything.”

“Well, what if you thought of a relationship as a corporation?” Hsieh said.

“Have you tested this, Tony?” James asked.

“No, this is theoretical. This is taking a logical approach. But it’s an interesting thing about companies and relationships. Maybe the only thing that keeps you together is the core values.”

James proposed that perhaps in the future Zappos might start an online dating service, like Match.com or eHarmony. Hsieh shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?”

“ZHarmony,” James said, with a hollow laugh. “Happiness in a box!”

The next morning, Hsieh met me in a small, colorful conference room nicknamed the Aladdin, for the casino. He was holding a can of sugar-free Red Bull in his left hand and a can of Pepsi One in his right. “I’ve always been a night owl—I never want to go to sleep,” he said. “It’s so hard to wake up.” He had on a T-shirt printed with the company’s logo—a graphic shoeprint—faded blue jeans, and black sneakers. When asked what brand the shoes were, he gestured helplessly and replied, “Just . . . sneakers.”

Hsieh’s success in the fetishized retail category of shoes is curious because of his utter disengagement from the product; when he talks about “platforms,” he is referring to a business framework, not to thick soles. As an undergraduate computer-science major, he worked as a software engineer for BBN Technologies, the company that, in the seventies, put the @ in e-mail.

“I’ve never been into shoes—and I’m still not,” he said. Zappos has begun to expand from shoes, as Amazon did from its base of books, into other categories of merchandise: handbags, clothes. “Kitchenware, housewares, whatever,” Hsieh said. But he’s not really interested in those things, either. “I much prefer experiences to stuff,” he said.

Hsieh drives a modest black Mazda 6. He used to go to raves; now he watches movies for fun. “I loved ‘Adaptation,’ ” he said. (Zappos Core Value No. 2: Embrace and Drive Change.) His one apparent indulgence is a baronial new house in the Southern Highlands, a gated golf community (although he does not play golf). It contains a panelled library with well-stocked, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves; a billiard room; and a pool, around which little puffs of mist hydrate the landscaping at regular intervals. This past Fourth of July, as the Amazon deal was percolating behind closed doors, he held a party for employees, with water guns. “Less raucous than usual,” the shuttle driver with the busted-up marriage reported.

(When I told Hsieh what the bus driver had said about her divorce, he remarked, “Maybe they weren’t the right fit and shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. But Zappos helped open their eyes. Like Plato’s Cave.”)

Each of his house’s five bedrooms, like the office conference rooms, is themed to a glossy Vegas hotel: the Mirage, Circus Circus. The master suite is a close replica of a room at the minimalist W: black and gray and silver, down to a pillow on the bed emblazoned with the word “Wish.” There is a walk-in closet filled with shirts and slacks, and one suit, which Hsieh said he shares with a brother and wears only to weddings. He lives alone, aside from a stray calico cat with matted fur, which he has named El Gato and sometimes feeds. “Not mine,” he stressed. In this isolated pleasure dome, littered with Gatorade bottles and pizza boxes, he seems to be evading traditional adult value systems, living in a sort of suspended collegiate state. (In a letter to Zappos employees about the Amazon deal, he compared his feelings about the sale to those he experienced on graduation day.) “I had this weird recurring dream where for some reason I just forgot that I had a place in New York, like an apartment or something, but it was a very cool place, like the W, and I tried to go visit it,” he said. “But I didn’t have the key, I didn’t have anything I needed.”