A native of Brownwood, Katherine Sayre, has co-authored a book about the founder of Zappos, the online shoe retailer.  The book chronicles the rise and fall of Tony Hsieh, the son of immigrants from Taiwan, who achieved tremendous success and wealth with Zappos, but whose life then spiraled out of control and who died in a fire in November 2020.

Sayre moved to Brownwood while in the fifth grade, and lived here through 2000, when she was graduated from Brownwood High School.  She attended college at the University of Texas in Austin, where she majored in Journalism and wrote for the campus newspaper The Daily Texan.

After college she moved to Longview and wrote for the Longview News-Journal.  She then attended Northwestern University, one of the top journalism schools in the country, and earned a Masters Degree.  From there she spent five years in Mobile, Alabama writing for the Mobile Press-Register.

In 2012 Sayre continued her climb up the professional journalism ladder when she moved to New Orleans, Louisiana and joined the New Orleans Times-Picayune.  At the Times-Picayune she was a business reporter before joining the investigative journalism department.  Her father Alan Sayre, who spent 30 years as a reporter for the Associated Press, lives in New Orleans.

Then Sayre made her biggest professional step.  In 2019 she was hired as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.  That’s about as high as it gets in the journalism profession.  That’s singing at Carnegie Hall!

Sayre lives in Los Angeles, California now, and her main beat for the Journal is the gambling industry, not only casino gambling such as in Las Vegas, but also professional sports betting, which has become a huge industry.  “It’s fascinating, the world of gambling, especially right now with sports betting being legalized in more and more states.  It’s a huge cultural shift for the United States.  Sports betting is changing a lot about media, entertainment, and sports for sure.”

In additional to writing about gambling, the Journal also assigns other stories to Sayre, such as the story on Tony Hsieh.  Her stories about Hsieh at the Journal inspired her to expand the research and write a book, which she co-authored with another Wall Street Journal reporter Kirsten Grind.

As mentioned above, Hsieh was the son of immigrants from Taiwan.  He was very smart, went to college at Harvard and then started an online advertising company called Link Exchange.  He later sold that company and became a multi-millionaire at the age of 24.  Hsieh did not start the Zappos company, but took control of it early on, built it into a billion dollar company, and sold it to Amazon in 2009.  His motto and management style at Zappos was “Create Fun and A Little Weirdness.”  His professional goal was not to sell shoes, but to make people happy, at any cost, which became the title of the book.

But behind the facade of “fun and weirdness” was a man with several mental issues and some poor life choices, which resulted in the collapse of his world and the loss of his life at the age of 46.  “Tony Hsieh was a very inspirational figure who influenced a lot of the ways that we work in America today, and he does not totally get credit for that.  He struggled, and we explore his struggles with mental health and addiction.  I think just continuing to lift that stigma about mental health is so important for all of us,” commented Sayre.

Katherine Sayre still speaks fondly of Brownwood, and was in town most recently at Christmas 2021, visiting her mother, Barbara Lindenmayer, who is a nurse.  When asked if any teachers inspired her to be a professional writer, Sayre immediately mentioned Frances Stovall and her AP English class at Brownwood High School.

The book “Happy At Any Cost” is published by Simon and Schuster, and can be purchased locally at the Intermission Book Shop, 203 Center Ave.  It is a fascinating story and very well written.