by Mel Ziegler
We finished only a few loads before we had to take a break and prepare for a long-arranged dinner party scheduled that night at our home. Our friend Herbert Gold, the novelist, was one of our guests. When Herb asked the way to the toilet, we directed him downstairs to the only bathroom in the house, which happened to be next to the washer-dryer. A few minutes later, he rushed back up the steps, beaming a broad, impish smile, and interrupted the patter at the dinner table by presenting, as a matador might hold up a cape, one of the Spanish paratrooper shirts.
“What is this?” he demanded in his deep baritone voice.
I told him.
Had I said it was the shirt Ernest Hemingway himself had worn while covering the Spanish Civil War, I don’t think he would have been happier.
“I want one,” he said. “How much?”
The words “Take it, Herb, it’s yours,” were about to come off my lips when Patricia interjected:
“Six fifty.”
But he’s our friend, my eyes pleaded across the table. Her eyes brushed me off.
“Plus tax,” she added sweetly.
Banana Republic was born.
An exultant Herb took off his trademark denim shirt and put on his new Spanish paratrooper shirt right in front of us. We were all smiling until he slipped his arms into the sleeves. The cuffs fell well above his wrists. Patricia ran downstairs to get him another, but the sleeves on that shirt were also too short. And another, and another, and another. Every single one of the shirts was the same. So this is why the Spaniards had declared them surplus, I thought.
By this point, nothing was going to deter Patricia.
“Nobody would think of keeping the sleeves on a shirt like this rolled down, Herb,” she said with an almost scary authority, rolling them up for him until they rakishly clung to Herb’s elbows. She stood back, touched a finger to her chin, and nodded her head to show how pleased she was.
Herb caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
“Fabulous!” he declared.
Six miles from San Francisco, off the 101 freeway, is Marin City, where every Sunday a huge, dusty lot was transformed into a thriving flea market. We would sell the shirts there, we decided. Over the next few days, we washed, ironed, and folded every one of them. Sunday morning, off we went, sign in hand:
Short-Armed Spanish Paratrooper Shirts $6.50
There was no lack of curiosity. Many people stopped to touch the shirts and ask about them, but by the end of the day, we’d sold barely enough to pay the $30 booth fee.
We had a problem.
A Chronicle paycheck flashed in my mind for a second, though I knew I could never go crawling back there.
Patricia had a better solution. “We need to double the price,” she said. “The shirts are too cheap. People can’t appreciate the value.”
The next Sunday, we went back to the same flea market. This time Patricia herself wore a Spanish paratrooper shirt belted at the waist with tight jeans and heels. She also dressed me in one with the collar slightly raised and the sleeves, of course, rolled up. Same table, same spot, same everything except the sign, which now read:
Short-Armed Spanish Paratrooper Shirts $12.95
It was a new day. By the end of it, we sold more than a hundred shirts. One hundred and two to be exact. Times 12.95 equals one thousand three hundred and ninety dollars. We had a good laugh. No one would ever believe us.
We decided to fast-track. It was time to graduate from flea markets. With more than $1,000 in the bank, Banana Republic needed a store.
I knew a real estate agent in town. Sure enough, he had a spot in our price range—if we didn’t mind something a little unconventional. He showed us a four-hundred-square-foot space a few blocks from downtown Mill Valley. The rent was $250 per month. The unconventional part? The store had to remain unlocked at night because there was an aikido studio upstairs with classes at all hours, and the students needed access to come and go through the store space. “But they’re honest,” the agent said.
We took it.
It was early November. We made a list of the things we would need to do:
1. Find merchandise. We had only around 390 Spanish paratrooper shirts remaining, and besides, even we knew you can’t have a store that sells only one item.
2. Print a catalogue. This might have seemed a bit excessive for our budget, but being an artist and a writer, we needed the comfort of doing at least something we knew how to do. Also, we must have realized that if we had any chance of selling this stuff, we’d have to explain what it was. I’d write the catalogue, and Patricia would draw it.
3. Decorate the store (though there would be little money left to do it).
4. Make a sign and hang it.
The more we thought about it, the catalogue struck us as key to the whole endeavor. What we were doing was unlike anything we’d ever seen in retail, and people would need a little help from us to catch on. Otherwise, who knows, they might think we sold bananas.
Oh, and that presented the next problem to be solved . . .
5. What exactly was the concept again?
3
Twists and Terms
Who could have known that $1,500, no matter how far we stretched it, wasn’t going to make it? Not when you added up buying all the merchandise, paying the rent, fixing up the store, and getting a catalogue in the mail.
We figured we needed another $1,500 at least.
Perhaps figured is too precise a term. Since we had little clue as to what anything would actually cost, it was the number that “sounded right.” We crumpled up the napkin on which we’d been jotting calculations and stopped guessing.
It was time to pay a visit to the bank where we had deposited our Chronicle paychecks over the years. The manager, Fred, was a pleasant man with red hair and an easy demeanor. I handed him the business card we had printed for the occasion and told him we had come for a loan for our new business. He looked at the card.
“Banana Republic?” Up went Fred’s eyebrows. “Really?”
I nodded.
“And why the red star?” Fred asked.
He thinks we’re Communists?
“I thought it went well with the yellow bananas and green leaves,” Patricia replied, as any designer would. “It’s meant to be a crest.”
His thin smile came slowly, with evident effort.
Fred asked: Did we own a home? No. Did we have a business plan? Working on it. Did we have a regular source of income? Not since we left the Chronicle.
“I see,” he said, nodding.
A kind man at heart, he proceeded gently. “To make a loan, we look at your three Cs: Capital, which is your collateral. Capacity, which is your income. And Character. You have no collateral. You have no income. But I’ll hand you this: you two are characters.”
We must have looked like two sad puppies. He found a bone he could throw us.
“Look, you don’t qualify for a loan,” he suggested, “but have you thought about asking for terms from your suppliers?”
Patricia and I looked at each other. No, we hadn’t.
“Net thirty is typical,” Fred offered. “That means your supplier gives you thirty days to pay. It’s common practice in established businesses. Doesn’t hurt to ask; you never know. Good luck.”
Thirty days’ credit would do just the trick, we decided. It would give us a chance to get the store stocked and open, put a catalogue in the mail, and start selling before we had to pay. All we had to do was talk Zimm into giving us terms.
But if terms were “common practice” and we hadn’t even thought to negotiate them in our initial transaction, why would Zimm take anything less than cash on the spot from us now? I decided the best plan would be to get somebody else to give us terms first. Only then might we have a chance to talk the tough old geezer into doing the same. I remembered that at one point Zimm had asked me, “Where else you been?” Instinctively, I knew it would be a bad idea to tell the truth and say, “Nowhere.” I just shrugged
in a way that implied “Around.”
“Well, let me give you a piece of advice,” Zimm blustered. “Don’t buy anything from that swindler Shapiro1 in Sacramento.2 “I don’t trust that son of a bitch as far as I can throw him. I haven’t talked to him in ten years.”
Leaving the bank, we headed to Sacramento to find Shapiro. His warehouse was smaller than Zimm’s, but the piles of surplus were arranged on shelves in an orderly fashion, and the lighting was better. Nonetheless, Shapiro’s prices were higher, and the items he had in stock were mainly U.S. issue and not that interesting to us. However, we did find some old leather belts in a box stenciled with an address in Argentina, as well as a few Swedish gas mask bags, minus the gas masks, and some American M16 field jackets in good enough condition to sell. We haggled and reached the best deal we could.
“How you paying?” Shapiro asked as he finished writing the invoice.
“We usually pay net thirty,” I said.
“You got a D and B?” Dun and Bradstreet is an agency that provides credit information on businesses.
I was still formulating an evasion when Patricia rejoined, “The family prefers not to reveal its assets.”
“So who else you buy from, then?” Shapiro asked.
“Zimm,” we both said at the same time.
“That stingy bastard gives you credit?”
We both nodded solemnly.
“Well, okay, thirty days, sign here.”
Now we were ready for Zimm.
I had imagined there would be more great stuff in Zimm’s sloppy bins than there was. The more we dug, the more I suspected we were unlikely to find any other items as good as the Spanish paratrooper shirts. Instead I found lots of unwearable items: arctic pant liners, mosquito nets, mattress covers, sleeping bag liners, and asbestos fire coats. I was growing discouraged, and then I realized that many of these discarded oddities were made of premium vintage fabrics. I could take them apart and make other wearable things from the materials. The fabrics themselves were treasures at below-bargain prices. This way we could get some more merchandise in time to open.
“I’ll figure out something to do with this stuff,” I whispered to Mel.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Like they say, when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade.”
“So thirty days?” I said to Zimm when he added it all up.
“Your husband’s got a sense of humor,” Zimm remarked as he turned to Patricia.
“Shapiro gives us thirty days,” Patricia said matter-of-factly.
Zimm glared at us. Then he unplugged the cigar from his mouth and discharged a burst of obscenities about his competitor.
We said nothing.
“Alright already,” he agreed grudgingly. “Thirty days. And I don’t mean thirty-one.”
On the way home, we were so giddy that it did not occur to us that Zimm might be having the biggest laugh. He had unloaded on us a pile of otherwise worthless surplus that had been collecting dust for decades.
4
Finding Assets Hiding in Liabilities
There wasn’t a minute to waste. We blocked out the windows of the tiny store on East Blithedale Avenue with butcher paper and went to work. We tracked down a few more dealers by phone, had them send us samples, establishing small “accounts” with any dealer who’d open one for us. Surplus dealers sold mostly to surplus stores, which specialized in hardy wear for hunting, fishing, camping, and other rugged outdoor adventures. What sold best in surplus stores were fatigues, military sweaters, jackets, hats, socks, and combat boots, all of it U.S. issue, in men’s larger sizes. The stores didn’t particularly care if the fabric was natural fiber or if an item had an interesting heritage, leaving a few gems for us.
Still, our best finds continued to be in the underlying fabrics. The bureaucrats who commissioned these items spared no expense in fabricating them in the highest-quality materials. There were Spanish Army sleeping bags with real sheepskin liners, British Army mattress covers made of pure Irish linen, French Army firefighter coats lined with exquisite quilted black satin, even ridiculous arctic pant liners made of a pricey windproof blend of wool and silk chenille. Since it seemed nobody else wanted this stuff, we often walked away with it for pennies.
There’s an adage that journalists on deadline follow: Go with what you’ve got. And did we ever. We brought what we bought from Zimm back to the store and dropped it all on the floor to be cut apart and resewn into new designs. Fortunately, Patricia never lacked ideas. All we needed was a seamstress or two. A one-line help-wanted ad in the local paper elicited exactly one response. But she did the work of three. Her name was Anna.
She appeared like Athena, tall, dark, Sicilian, and silent. She brought with her an ancient black iron Singer sewing machine that I would soon learn held magical powers. I sketched, draped, cut, pinned; Anna sewed. This arrangement was sweetly familiar to me, having spent many contented hours as a child piecing together doll clothes from scraps of fabric on the floor while my Italian mother and grandmother sewed clothing. Before long, the pile of surplus became Irish Linen Blazers, Basque Sheepskin Vests, Arctic Chenille Jackets, Black Satin Quilted Handbags. I also had Anna improve the few items we deemed possibly salable “as is.” Dark green wool fatigue jackets were given new horn buttons and leather elbow patches. We sewed our red, yellow, and green embroidered logo onto caps, bags, jackets, and shirts. Some of the paratrooper shirts were combined to make Safari Dresses, to be worn cinched at the waist with ammo belts. Others were “disarmed,” given a waistband and a second life as a skirt. We sewed our bananas-and-star-crest label into everything.
Lacking sewing skills, I began writing the stories for the catalogue that would have to sell this fast-mounting heap of khaki waste—or else. No longer did it represent only our life savings. By now we’d taken on a pile of debt, buying anything we could get on terms. Late at night, it sometimes hit us. If this didn’t work, we would not just be broke but down there deep below broke.
5
The Tao of Averages
Rubes of retailing we may have been, but we had no illusion about one thing: our eclectic cache of surplus, no matter how much we cleaned it, altered it, and reinvented it, could not tell its own story. Websites hadn’t even been dreamed up yet. Only with antediluvian moveable type and images could we get out the message.
I appointed myself Minister of Propaganda and went to work. However, this time in setting out to “go with what I got,” I found there wasn’t much “got” to go with, which put me in a position of having to go with what we didn’t “got,” such as the missing hoods on Italian camouflage jackets we’d found. On the back of the collar were prominent horn buttons for hoods that originally came with the jackets. Somewhere along the way, the hoods disappeared. In my copy I was left to conjecture about where they might be—still on back order from a factory in Turin that had been on strike since 1949.
Defects, I saw, could be worthy sources of inspiration. As for those short-armed Spanish Paratrooper Shirts, the time had come to expose a dirty little secret of history: Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s paranoia of long-armed Spaniards.
So it went, Andalusian Militia Vests to Ammo Belts. I typed furiously, never missing a chance to dwell on what was wrong, what was missing, what made the item useless to the army or navy or air force that had declared it surplus. The few things I had an opportunity to write about that were new and in perfect condition were the kinds of things most people could not even conceive of needing—a crepe U.S. Infantry scarf, for instance. We renamed the scarf a Safari Ascot, as if anybody wore ascots on safari. The catalogue mused about the good gentleman buried in the bowels of the Defense Department who initially had requisitioned them. Dispatching infantrymen to the front lines in crepe ascots, he must have hoped, would fortify them with a touch of class in their bleakest hours.
As a writer and an artist feeling our way into business, we could take no chances. If customers didn’t get the merchandise, maybe they
’d buy the story. Thus, our dyslexia on the matter of assets and liabilities would be excused. We’d be able to pay for all the treasure we’d snatched on “terms.”
While Mel wrote, I did a quick line drawing of each item. When all the copy and drawings were pasted down into hand-ruled boxes, our twenty-seven items filled two sheets of 81/2” × 11” paper, both sides. For the cover and an order blank, we still needed one more side of a third sheet. This left one side, or two pages, blank when it was folded in half, to make a 51/2” × 81/2” twelve-page catalogue. Mel filled one page with his idea of an interview with me. On the other, I drew a cartoon telling our story “from the steamy jungles of South America to the icy wastes of Siberia . . . ” even though we had yet to leave Northern California.
Next stop, the local instant printer, where we specified tan paper—two sheets regular, one card stock for the cover—black ink throughout, plus one color, sienna, on the cover only. At seventy-five cents each, we had enough money left to print five hundred copies but not enough to staple them. We figured we’d do that ourselves at our kitchen table.
Once we had the finished catalogue, we couldn’t wait to get some reaction. We rushed over to see two friends who lived close by, a couple who were also writers.
We handed them each a copy. They stared at the leopard print cover. We beamed.
“Go ahead, read it!” Mel said as we plunked ourselves down on their sofa.
Quietly. Watching them. Turning the pages. We waited for laughs, smiles, wows. But when they finished, they looked first at each other and then at us. Uncomfortably puzzled.