The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  Though thrilled at the prospects of idyllic cruises once the Creole had been restored, Patrizia worried that the tragic deaths of Niarchos’s wives had cast a negative aura over the boat. An attentive client of astrologers and psychics, Patrizia convinced Maurizio to go aboard with Frida, a psychic, to exorcise the evil spirits she was sure still haunted the sailing vessel. It had been taken out of the water for repairs and was propped up in a hangar in a La Spezia shipyard like an old beached whale. As they stepped aboard, Frida asked everyone, including two crew members who were guiding their tour with flashlights, to stand back. She went into a trance and started walking slowly along the deck, into the central cabin, and down one of the halls, mumbling incomprehensible words. Patrizia and Maurizio and the two crew members followed at a distance. The two workmen exchanged skeptical glances with each other.

  “Open the door, open the door,” Frida cried out suddenly as Maurizio and Patrizia looked at each other, puzzled. They were standing in the open corridor; there was no door. But the Sicilian crew member turned ashen. Before the reconstruction, there had been a door in that very spot, he said. The group continued to follow Frida, who walked in and out of the cabins, muttering. She stopped suddenly near the kitchen.

  “Leave me alone!” she shouted. The Sicilian crew member looked at her in horror and then turned to Maurizio.

  “That is where Eugenia’s body was found,” he whispered. Suddenly a rush of cold air swept through the vessel, chilling the small group.

  “What’s going on here?” cried out Maurizio, trying to figure out where the current of cold air had come from. The Creole was enclosed in the construction hangar, and there were no open doors or windows that could have caused the sudden draft. At that moment Frida snapped out of her trance.

  “It’s all over,” she said. “There are no more evil spirits on the Creole. Eugenia’s ghost promised me that from now on, she will protect the Creole and its crew.”

  5

  FAMILY RIVALRIES

  While Maurizio was a young man pursuing his law studies in Milan, the spectacular growth of the Gucci empire charged ahead. In 1970, Aldo had ushered in the new decade by opening a dramatic new shop on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. The new Gucci store replaced an I. Miller shoe store in the sixteen-story French Renaissance Aeolian Building at 689 Fifth Avenue. Aldo had called in the Weisberg and Castro architectural firm, known for its remakes of top-notch stores on New York’s fashionable shopping streets. The architects created a contemporary look by using plenty of glass, imported travertine marble, and stainless steel treated to resemble bronze.

  Casting around for new ways to finance further expansion, Aldo called on the board of directors in 1971 to reexamine an old principle established by their late father, that ownership of the company should never leave the family.

  “I think we should float part of the company, which is now worth some thirty million dollars, on the stock market,” Aldo said, as his brothers listened silently. “We could sell forty percent, keep sixty percent in the U.S. company. If we start at ten dollars, I bet in a year we will be at twenty,” he said enthusiastically.

  “The timing is perfect,” Aldo continued. “Gucci is a symbol of status and style not only with the Hollywood set, but also with traders and bankers! We must not fall behind; we have to keep pace with our competition. We can use this money to stay on top in our consolidated markets in Europe and the U.S., but also to move into Japan and the Far East.”

  Rodolfo and Vasco had exchanged long glances across the massive walnut conference table in the offices above the store on Via Tornabuoni where the directors had gathered. Neither was convinced, despite Aldo’s persuasive argument. Fundamentally conservative, they didn’t see the merit of their brother’s ambitious plans. The Gucci business was giving them a comfortable living and they didn’t want to put their incomes at risk. With their two-thirds majority, they not only turned Aldo down, but agreed not to sell any of their shares outside the family for at least a hundred years. Typically, Aldo didn’t waste any time sulking. His style, as he instructed his sons, was to push ahead.

  “Turn the page!” he would bark at the boys. “Go on. Don’t look back. Cry if you must, but shoot!”

  By “shoot,” Aldo meant act and react, which is exactly what he did. He accelerated Gucci’s expansion to high speed. New stores followed in Chicago in 1971, then in Philadelphia and San Francisco. In 1973, Aldo opened a third store on Fifth Avenue in New York, next to its shoe boutique at 699 Fifth Avenue. The new store carried fashion apparel, while the corner boutique at 689 Fifth Avenue carried luggage and accessories. Gucci also opened its first U.S. franchises, including Gucci boutiques in the Joseph Magnin specialty stores in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Aldo boasted publicly and privately about Gucci’s great strength: it remained an entirely family-owned business.

  “We are like an Italian trattoria,” he once said. “The whole family is in the kitchen.”

  Now Aldo could realize his dream of opening the next frontier for Gucci—in the Far East, and in particular, Japan. For several years, Japanese shoppers had flocked to Gucci’s stores in Italy and the United States. Initially, even the business-minded Aldo had underestimated the importance of the Japanese consumer to the Gucci business.

  “I was serving a Japanese gentleman who had come into the Rome store one day,” recalled Enrica Pirri. “When he wasn’t looking, Aldo waved me over. ‘Vieni qui!’ he said, ‘Come here! Don’t you have anything better to do?’”

  Pirri made a face at her boss and shook her head. The gentleman had been looking at a series of ostrich skin bags in bright candy colors.

  “They were really horrible, but they were in style back in the sixties,” Pirri recalled. “The man kept looking at the bags and saying, “Ahem, ahem, ahem.” I told Dr. Aldo I wanted to finish the sale. I went back to the man and he bought about sixty bags! It was the biggest single sale we had ever done,” Pirri said.

  Aldo soon changed his tune. “They have excellent taste!” he told the New York Times in 1974.

  “I tell my staff that the Japanese are the aristocrats of customers,” Aldo told a reporter in 1975. “They may not be very good looking, but right now they are the aristocrats.” He also instituted a rule that the sales staff could not sell more than one bag to any one customer—he had figured out that Japanese buyers had been coming to Gucci, buying large quantities, and then reselling the bags in Japan for many times what they had paid in Italy. He realized he needed to find a way to take Gucci directly to the Japanese.

  Aldo received a proposal from a Japanese entrepreneur, Choichiro Motoyama, for a joint venture to operate a string of shops in Japan. The relationship was to become an important and lasting one, paving the way to Gucci’s overwhelming success in the Far East. Motoyama opened the first Gucci shop in the Far East in Tokyo in 1972 under a franchise agreement. The first Hong Kong store opened in 1974, also in partnership with Motoyama. The Gucci empire now numbered fourteen stores and forty-six franchised boutiques around the world.

  In just twenty years Aldo had built Gucci from a $6,000 corporation and a small shop in the Savoy Plaza Hotel into a glittering empire spanning the United States, Europe, and Asia. Gucci’s biggest presence was in New York, where Gucci now had three boutiques on Fifth Avenue between Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Streets in what the New York Times called “a sort of Gucci city.”

  By the mid-seventies, Aldo’s early philosophy that “the customer is always right” evolved into a kind of autocratic rigidity that quickly got attention. Aldo laid down his own policies, whether or not they were in step with what other merchants were doing. He did not accept returns, for example, or give refunds or discounts. At most, a customer could exchange merchandise with the receipt within ten days of purchase—this while most other luxury names, including Tiffany and Cartier, offered full refunds within thirty days. Anyone wishing to pay by check had to wait while the saleswoman called the bank to confirm that t
he funds were available. If it was a Saturday, she simply informed the customer she would hold the merchandise in the store and have it delivered on Monday after the bank approved the check. The sales staff also griped about an internal Gucci practice: at the end of the day, employees had to pick marbles, all white except for one, out of a hat. The person who picked the black marble had to have her bag searched before leaving the store.

  What infuriated customers most of all was Aldo’s insistence on closing the store for lunch every day between 12:30 and 1:30 P.M., a practice he instituted in 1969. The custom was a carryover from Italy, where even today most stores still close between 1:00 and 4:00 P.M.

  “The people would line up outside and start knocking on the door to get us to open,” recalled Francesco Gittardi, who managed the New York store for several years in the mid-1970s. “I would look at my watch and tell them, ‘Five more minutes,’” Gittardi recalled.

  Aldo claimed that after experimenting with lunch shifts, he preferred to let all of his employees eat at the same time. By doing so, he said, he could simultaneously promote the family-style management he was so proud of and avoid the risk of slow service because of rotating lunch breaks for the sales staff. He also said he hoped to avoid having customers come in and not find their favorite salesperson.

  “We would stagger the lunch hours for some of our employees, but some wouldn’t have lunch until late in the afternoon,” he explained to the New York Times. “So I decided that the customers would understand and now everybody eats lunch at the same time.” Instead of hurting business, the practice only seemed to raise Gucci’s cachet.

  “What is the Gucci mystique?” queried the New York Times in December 1974, describing how customers lined up three-deep at counters as Aldo stood, “fingering his blue tie with the famous horse-bit pattern, beaming at the mink coats jostling the blue jeans at the counters.” The crowds swelled during the Christmas season, when Aldo himself would hold court in the store, personally signing gift packages.

  Customers continued to crowd into Gucci—and leave irate over the service. One of the reasons was Aldo’s practice of hiring the sons and daughters of prominent Italian families with little work experience. He inspired them with the intriguing offer of a glamorous job in New York and offered to put them up in one of the apartments he had rented nearby. But as the long hours, low pay, and Aldo’s strict supervision took their toll, the inexperienced young people became more abrupt and less courteous with customers. Sometimes they would snicker behind customers’ backs, or deride them in Italian—not unlike Aldo’s own behavior—thinking the customers couldn’t understand them.

  My-Gucci-story-is-more-outrageous-than-yours became one of the more popular forms of local one-upmanship among certain New York circles. By 1975, Gucci’s service had become such an issue that New York magazine dedicated a four-page cover story to Gucci titled “The Rudest Store in New York.” “Gucci’s staff has mastered the art of the drop-dead put-down and the icy stare, flashing signs that the customer is unworthy,” wrote the author, Mimi Sheraton. Despite the rude treatment, she said, “customers came back for more, and paid handsomely for it!”

  When Aldo finally agreed to an interview with Sheraton, she was rather apprehensive about meeting the man she knew was called L’Imperatore in certain circles. She was ushered into his subdued, taupe-walled office. The Aldo who came to receive her from behind a semicircular desk had come a long way from being the shy, dark-spectacled young man who had given one of his first interviews to a journalist in his spartan office above the Rome store on Via Condotti fifteen years earlier.

  Dressed in a shimmering palette of blues—a bright hyacinth blue linen suit, powder blue shirt, and cerulean tie touched with red that accentuated his china blue eyes and flushed pink complexion—Aldo bowled her over with brio.

  “I was totally unprepared for the effusively charming, ebullient, vigorously well-preserved 70-year-old who greeted me,” Sheraton wrote. “He was far more colorful than his surroundings.”

  In his most operatic style, complete with changing voice parts, he recounted Gucci’s five-hundred-year history, including its supposed saddlemaking beginnings. He emphasized Gucci’s pride in the quality of its products and the attention to detail.

  “Everything must be perfect,” he said with a grand sweep of his arm. “Even the bricks in the walls must know they are Guccis!” he said.

  Despite his charming and magnetic personality, Sheraton concluded the Gucci stores’ reputation for snobbishness came right from the top: “Gucci’s rudeness…is undoubtedly a reflection of what Dr. Gucci considers to be pride, but which the rest of the world recognizes as arrogance,” she ended the story. Far from being offended or angry, Aldo was so thrilled with the article—he thought it was fabulous publicity—that he sent the writer flowers.

  Even as he continued opening new stores, Aldo also developed new Gucci product categories. He went back to the family boardroom and urged his brothers to consider selling a Gucci perfume. Again, Rodolfo and Vasco dragged their heels.

  “Our business is leather,” protested Vasco, who thought Aldo too impulsive and in need of being slowed down. “What do we know about fragrance?”

  “Fragrance is the new frontier of the luxury goods market,” Aldo insisted. “Most of our clients are women and everybody knows women love perfume. If we make a prestige scent that is expensive, our clients will buy it.”

  Vasco and Rodolfo grudgingly relented, and in 1972 a new company, Gucci Perfume International Limited, was born. Aldo had a dual motive in launching the fragrance business. He was convinced it was a potentially lucrative diversification that would complement their business in leather goods; he also wanted to use the new perfume company as a vehicle to bring his sons into the business—without giving them too much power. He found scant resistance from his brothers to his proposal to include the next generation of Guccis as a limited benefit for his sons. Vasco was indifferent, as he had no recognized heirs, and Rodolfo was battling Maurizio at the time over his marriage plans and was too angry to give his son a share in the new business.

  Another important category for Gucci came about when Aldo met a man named Severin Wunderman in 1968. Wunderman had grown up in the school of hard knocks and as a result his philosophy in life was “He who throws the first punch, wins.” The son of Eastern European immigrants, Wunderman was orphaned at fourteen. He grew up between Los Angeles, where his older sister lived, and Europe. At the age of eighteen he started working for a watch wholesaler, Juvenia, now defunct. Wunderman realized that the watch business could earn him a good living.

  At the time he met Aldo, Wunderman was working as a U.S. salesman on commission for a French watch company called Alexis Barthelay. On a business trip to New York, where he already met with the likes of Cartier, Van Cleef, and leading jewelers up and down Forty-seventh Street, he decided to visit representatives of Gucci, who were meeting at the Hilton Hotel. Unfamiliar with the new push-button telephone in the lobby, he dialed Aldo’s direct line by mistake. To Wunderman’s amazement, Aldo himself picked up the phone. The two men began to speak.

  “Aldo was waiting for a phone call from someone who was supposed to introduce him to a girl, and he thought I was stalling because I couldn’t speak freely,” Wunderman recalled.

  Not being a man of great patience, Aldo couldn’t figure out why his caller wasn’t getting to the point, Wunderman recounted. Finally, Aldo exploded in Florentine dialect with the equivalent of “Who the f——are you?”

  Wunderman understood him perfectly because at the time he was dating a woman from Florence.

  “I’m not the kind of person to take something like that,” Wunderman said, “so I dished it right back to him.”

  “Who the f——are you?” Wunderman said.

  “Where are you?” barked Aldo.

  “Downstairs!” Wunderman barked back.

  “Well, why don’t you come upstairs so I can beat the sh——out of you?”

 
; Wunderman marched upstairs, ready to throw the first punch.

  “So he grabbed me and I grabbed him and then we both looked at each other and started laughing and that was the beginning of my relationship with Aldo and with Gucci,” Wunderman said.

  Their relationship would go far beyond a business relationship. They not only became fast friends and sparring partners, Aldo became Wunderman’s mentor and Wunderman became one of Aldo’s closest confidants.

  In 1972, Aldo issued Wunderman a license to manufacture and distribute watches under the Gucci name. Wunderman established his own company, Severin Montres Ltd., in Irvine, California, and over the next twenty-five years built the Gucci watch business into one of the leading players in the business. With his street smarts and unpredictable, colorful personality, he had inched his way into the closed Swiss watchmaking establishment, securing production and distribution operations and the trade show exposition space he needed to become an industry player. Gucci became the first fashion label to become a significant Swiss watch business.