by Ed Stack
Those meetings helped establish a pattern that we’ve followed ever since: we forged personal relationships with our vendors. Sometimes, as I’ve described, our close ties prompted them to steer us away from trouble or to give us a hand when we needed it. In some cases, we were able to help them when they were new at the game and needed outlets, or were having trouble with a line of merchandise and needed a push.
In a few instances, we partnered with unknown brands that later blew up into major players, and they did it with our help. But they didn’t need to be big to earn our attention. We always agreed to meet with a vendor, always took the time to talk with and get to know the people. We tried to show respect to both the reps and their product. And in return, they always respected us.
In the beginning, we needed the brands a lot more than they needed us. That shifted over time. But from the beginning, we always tried to treat them as partners. If you go into a deal looking at it as a partnership, it almost always works out.
* * *
With my dad back in Florida, I made my first stabs at broadening the array of merchandise at Dick’s. As I mentioned, I wanted to carry Puma and Adidas, the two hot brands of the day. They were both German companies, started by brothers who’d been in business together before they had a falling-out after World War II. By the late seventies, they were at the center of a sneaker-as-fashion craze that continues today in the United States. The Adidas Superstar and the Puma Clyde, named for NBA star Walt “Clyde” Frazier, were among America’s most popular basketball shoes, and sought after by status-conscious high schoolers. People came into Dick’s asking for these shoes. It was obvious we’d sell as many as we could get our hands on.
Sporting goods vendors displayed their wares at two big trade shows each year, in New York in October and in Chicago every January or February. We’d go see the new products, talk to the management teams at each of the brands, buy some closeouts, and sometimes place orders. Starting in 1978, I sought out the Puma and Adidas booths and asked them to sell to us, or “open us up,” as we say in retail.
I couldn’t get either company interested. They were already selling to other stores in Binghamton—Irv’s Champion, of course, and Allen’s, a combination sporting goods store and jeweler that was our fiercest competition—and they wanted to protect these retail partners with whom they had long-standing relationships. Plus, they saw Dick’s strictly as an outdoors store, which they considered a weird fit. We went back and forth with them for three years. Between shows, I’d call them on the phone. More often than not, I didn’t get a call back. When I did, they still said no. We couldn’t get the slightest bit of traction.
Meanwhile, we had better luck with a newer company. Nike had been around for a while as a distributor for a Japanese brand before it started making its own shoes in 1971. Bob Aiken bought some basketball shoes from them while I was still in school; they were building a distribution network, and they were happy to sell to us. Here was an example of a vendor that was virtually unknown when we partnered with it. In 1978, I added their running shoes to the mix. We put them on the shelves and they sold great. We ordered more and sold those. In no time we were selling a lot of Nikes, and those sales were moving the needle on our overall business. By 1980, Nike had swallowed up half of the US market for athletic footwear, and we rode that wave with them.
It was at that point, with Nike ascendant, that a conversation with Puma’s rep took an unexpected turn. When I asked him again to open us up, he said: “I think we can do that now.” Stunned, I made my way to the distributor’s Adidas rep. “You know,” I told him, “Puma’s going to sell to us.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” I showed him the Puma rep’s business card.
“Well,” he said, “if they’ll sell you, we’ll sell you.”
I went back to Puma. We wrote a small order for Puma shoes. I returned to the Adidas rep, showed him the order, and with that, Adidas opened us up. With a catch. When this rep came to Binghamton to take our first order. Jay Mininger was with me in the office overlooking the Court Street store as we listed the shoes we wanted to buy. “What about apparel?” the rep asked.
I’d always sought just footwear from Adidas—sneakers, baseball cleats, football cleats. We had no room in the store for their clothing line. “We’re not really interested in apparel,” I told him.
He shut his folders and packed up to leave. “If you’re not buying apparel,” he said, “we’re not giving you shoes.” It was a heavy-handed way to handle the situation, and it ticked me off. It was also clear that if I didn’t agree, three years of legwork had been for naught. “Okay,” I told him. “We’ll buy some apparel.”
I was still annoyed after he left. “Someday,” I said to Jay, “those guys are going to be begging us to buy from them.”
* * *
You know what? That apparel blew out of the store. Running was becoming a national passion, and runners needed shorts, shirts, and socks to go along with their shoes. We sold a ton of Adidas apparel, even more of Nike apparel, and the margins on such sportswear were far higher than they were on fishing, hunting, and camping gear. The clothes made Dick’s a much more profitable company. So the Adidas rep did us a favor. He helped create the Dick’s we’d become. And in the process, he helped bring about the scenario I predicted. Because today, next to Foot Locker, we’re Adidas’s biggest account in North America.
That’s getting ahead of the story, though. The immediate fallout of having apparel in the store was that my dad wasn’t happy about it. Fortunately, he did most of his yelling over the phone, from Florida. By this time, Bob was deferring to me in many aspects of the business. “Youngblood,” he’d say, “you do what you think you should do.”
My dad really lost his mind when I made some changes in our advertising. Dick’s had always bought space in the Binghamton paper. My dad had taken out display ads to announce sales since the 1950s, and he had been pretty clever about attracting customers with special events, too. “Are you puzzled about the many conflicting claims about insulated underwear?” he’d written in a come-on for a two-day “insulated underwear clinic” in November 1959. “You hear that one is so much superior or less expensive than another. Now is your opportunity to learn from factory representatives all that you should know when you go to buy your insulated underwear.” Not sure how many people turned out for the clinic, but it lasted eighteen hours.
These ads weren’t small. Many occupied a half page, and some a full page. Dick’s maintained a regular presence in the classified section of the paper, too. My dad advertised there mostly for guns. “Need money for your vacation?” one typical example from June 1964 read. “We need 100 Used Guns and will pay CASH NOW! Don’t delay—Take advantage of this opportunity to convert ‘Old Betsy’ into Vacation Cash.” Regardless of their size, the ads were always rendered in black and white, and always ran in the sports section. Back in the days when Dick’s catered strictly to men, that made sense, but no longer. Now our ads were unseen by a lot of female readers, a significant percentage of the market.
With my dad away, I oversaw the stores’ ads myself, and I wasn’t satisfied with the results. I noticed that a few retailers had bumped up their presence in the paper with eight-to-twelve-page, tabloid-size inserts. Many were in full color. They definitely caught your attention, and you didn’t have to wade through the sports pages to find them. I decided we needed to try this. I built our first tabloid ad myself—laid it out, with stick figures and primitive renditions of the products we wanted to feature—then turned it over to the advertising department at the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin. They took my layouts and photos I brought in of the clothes I wanted the figures to wear, and turned my scrawls into a crisp, colorful, eight-page tab. From the moment the first one ran, our business went through the roof.
I realized that, because these tabs were very expensive, we needed a strategy for them. Some focused on hunting. Some targeted back-to-school shoppers with eight pages
of sneakers, cleats, jackets. Jerry Harper, who was Bill Colombo’s brother-in-law, was our Nike rep. I worked with him on ads that emphasized our footwear, and we did tremendous back-to-school sales. We added radio and TV to our marketing, too, and the combined effect of this blitz was so good that when Jerry walked into Irv’s Champion and asked a kid working there how back-to-school business was going, he answered: “It’d be a lot better if we weren’t getting Dicked to death.”
This success came at a cost—to run a tab every couple of weeks boosted our annual ad budget from $40,000 to $100,000—but the increased traffic more than made up for it. We scrambled to secure enough inventory to meet the new demand. I knew there’d be hell to pay when my dad returned from Florida. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before he reviewed our expense statements and flipped out when he saw that I’d boosted our ad spending by sixty grand. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked me.
His accountant and friend Bill Humston interceded on my behalf. Look, Dick, he told him. Yes, Eddie spent more, but the sales—check out the sales.
We’d done just over $2.7 million in business the year before. Now we were pulling in $3.1 million. We’d doubled our net earnings. “They spent a lot of money,” Bill told him, “but they made a lot more. The kid is onto something.” My dad was stubborn and averse to change, but he couldn’t argue with the numbers.
The storm quickly passed, though he still bitched at me about the tabs. But his complaints were so half-hearted that I took them as a compliment. And in the months that followed, my dad backed away from the regular operation of the stores, even when he was in town. He remained the owner of Dick’s, but at twenty-six, I was running the business.
CHAPTER 7 “WHO DO I THANK FOR THE DRINK?”
When I say that I was running the business, I mean that I didn’t have to run most things past my dad before I did them. I do not mean that he didn’t get in my face on a regular basis or block me outright from the more ambitious changes I wanted to make. My dad and I had very different views of the company’s future. He remained pretty conservative and was content to imagine Dick’s as a two-store venture for the rest of his life. He considered it an almost mystical success story as it was. “Where else but America,” he was fond of saying, “can a dumb kid who got out of high school by the skin of his teeth make it like this?”
I wasn’t at all satisfied with things as they were. Since I’d graduated from Fisher I’d read everything I could get my hands on about business success—by or about Sam Walton, John DeLorean, and other captains of industry. And one lesson that came through in such books was that fortune favors those who aren’t satisfied with the status quo—those who are hungry, who have a vision for where they’d like to be and the confidence to get there. You might say that the recipe is boldness mixed with a healthy dose of caution.
Having had a taste of success, I was feeling hungry. I wanted to do more—add more product, increase sales, and ultimately, open more stores. I thought that with care, we could grow the company far beyond Binghamton. There was more than just blind ambition at work. I was paranoid, too: Big national retailers had started to materialize across the country. Small department stores were the first local businesses they steamrolled. Soon, local lumberyards were gone, too, replaced by big-box hardware chains, and mom-and-pop pharmacies were under siege from chain drugstores that multiplied at major intersections. It was only a matter of time before the same thing happened in sporting goods.
Whenever I raised the subject with my dad, however, he got worked up. You could see his anxiety in his body language, hear it in his voice—the ghost of Hillcrest haunted him as powerfully as ever. One thing I suggested was that we try a store in Cortland, a town about forty miles up Interstate 81. The location made sense to me: we’d have no competition there, for one thing. It was close to Ithaca and its college students, as well as to Syracuse. It was in the heart of upstate New York’s hunting and fishing country, too. None of that swayed my dad. He shut me down. He wanted nothing to do with the idea. If I pushed the matter, his Irish temper would surface, and he’d start sputtering in incomplete sentences and one-syllable words.
Still, he got his point across: he wouldn’t allow it. He was scared to death that any new venture would fail and take everything down with it. I sympathized with him, but I also believed that if we didn’t take on this risk, it was only a matter of time before someone else would. It was eat or be eaten.
We went back and forth on the Cortland idea for months, until finally, completely exasperated with me, he stopped in the middle of one of our spirited conversations and said, “If you think you’re such a goddamn smart son of a bitch, go down to the bank and get your own line of credit and buy me out.”
So… I did. As I’ve said, I was a dutiful son. I went to the First City National Bank in Binghamton and talked to the lenders about buying Dick’s. They studied the numbers, figured what it would take to complete the transaction, and told me that yes, they’d finance it. We didn’t prepare any formal papers; we simply shook hands, and they verbally committed to a credit line. I went back to my dad. “We’re ready to go,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘We’re ready to go’?” he asked.
I can get the line of credit, I told him. I’ve talked with the bank, and they’ll back me up. I can buy you out. At which point I learned in no uncertain terms that no, I could not buy him out. That would not be happening that day or any time soon. He was surprised I’d called his bluff—very surprised. And he was indignant. “This is my business,” he said, “and it’s going to stay my business.”
In part, he wasn’t ready to retire because he didn’t think I was ready to take over. “Do you really think you can buy all the product we need to keep this business going?” he asked. Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I did. I was already buying pretty much everything but guns and fishing tackle, and I had plenty of help with that.
My feeling was that if he hadn’t meant it, he shouldn’t have said it.
* * *
While I struggled with my dad over every little thing, changes were coming to some of the other Stacks that would eventually ripple into the store. The most profound involved my sister Kim. Maybe because we were our parents’ first two kids and came along before there were so many others in the house that keeping the peace was a job in itself, Kim and I had been held to a different standard than our younger siblings, and we’d both turned out serious and ambitious. And while the drinking in our house turned me away from any real relationship with alcohol, it had an even more profound effect on Kim: she’s never had a drink in her life.
We’d been close since we were little kids. Gramp and my grandmother liked to tell the story about the day I ran away from home at age five or six. I told Kim I was leaving and asked if she wanted to come. She said yes, so I put her in my red wagon, along with a few of my toys. The belongings of hers we packed: one shoe. We set off.
My mom watched us leave, then called over to my grandparents. “Eddie’s on his way over,” she said. “He’s run away. He has Kim with him.” Gramp and my grandmother met us at the door and told us they were in the middle of dinner, and that we’d have to wait outside until they finished. They apparently savored every bite, because it seemed that hours passed. Running away lost a lot of its appeal, so I pulled Kim home.
As we got older, Kim would sometimes play sports with me and my friends. She even attempted to play football with us once: I can still picture her in a yellow helmet, no chin strap, getting submarined by a couple of guys as she carried the ball; that was her first and only day as a running back. Mostly, she put up with a lot of the teasing you’d expect from teenage boys. She finished at Binghamton North two years after I did and attended a couple of junior colleges before enrolling at the State University of New York at Cortland, a.k.a. Cortland State, with plans to be a schoolteacher.
After graduation, she returned to Binghamton for the summer and started spending time with Tim Myers. Over the seven years that he’d
been with the company, Tim had gone from the warehouse to the sales floor, where he specialized in archery. He’d done some buying, and then, in his early twenties, had been named manager of the Vestal store. We remained great friends.
They’d been circling each other for years. Kim had long counseled Tim on his various girlfriends, and while she was at Cortland State they’d see each other when he came up on weekends to ski; she and her roommates let him crash on their sofa. My dad detected early on that there might be more to their friendship than met the eye. “What’s going on with you two?” he’d ask her.
“Nothing, Dad,” she’d say. “We’re just friends.” And she probably meant it. But she wasn’t speaking for both of them.
At a party after her graduation, a singing telegram showed up. The guy sang a song about Kim and her achievement, and when Kim asked who’d sent him, he answered that it was anonymous. A few minutes later, Kim was wondering aloud about who might have sent the telegram when a friend—Carol Hillis, whose kids Kim had babysat—blurted out: “It’s the person who loves you so much he can’t even stand it!”
“Who?” Kim asked, mystified.
“Oh my God,” Carol moaned. “It’s Tim Myers!”
Kim had accepted a teaching job in Denver even before she left school, and at summer’s end, just as their romance was getting into gear, she left for Colorado. They stayed in constant touch by phone and letter. My dad thought a lot of Tim (actually, of his whole family, because once Tim’s dad retired from the US Postal Service he came to work for Dick’s, drilling bowling balls and repairing fishing rods). Now Tim and my dad commiserated on how to get Kim back home, and in the process became a lot tighter.