by Mel Ziegler
“You don’t expect this to sell anything, do you?” she asked, checking to assure herself that it was just a literary exercise.
He said, “You sure you want to mail this?”
Sure?
We left awkwardly.
“Do you think they might be right?” I asked Mel as soon we were out the door.
“No!” Mel said. “Absolutely not . . . or at least I don’t think so.”
“So . . . maybe?” I asked him.
“Look,” he said, “it doesn’t make any difference anyway, does it? We can’t turn back now. It’s as if we’re swimming across the bay, and halfway across we realize there are sharks circling. We’re no safer if we swim back than if we keep going to the other shore.”
Failure was not a possibility. Not ever. The catalogue had to work, the store had to work, the whole idea had to work. There was no other way.
We hand addressed four hundred of the catalogues to everyone listed in both of our Rolodexes and as many people in the media we could think of or whose names we could get off mastheads. We licked the stamps and found a mailbox.
A day later, Mel came home with a book he had just found that was considered the bible of direct marketing. According to the bible, we had done just about everything wrong. We had no products in any of the traditionally high-yielding spots such as the cover, back cover, and page 3. Worst of all, based on our list of non-mail-order buyers, we could expect no more than an average 1 percent response, with an average order of 2.5 items. By those averages, we could expect to receive four orders of $30 each for a grand total of $120. That wouldn’t even pay for the postage.
“What if what the book says about the averages is true?” I asked, feeling queasy.
“If we’re average,” Mel said, “we’re screwed.”
6
Going with What We Got
Even if we’d known axiom number one of retail, “location, location, location,” we could not have heeded it. Our store at 76 East Blithedale Avenue in Mill Valley, at $250 per month, was already more than we could pay. It was situated on the ground floor of a two-story Tudor-style building, on the dark side of a side street two long blocks from the edge of the retail center of Mill Valley. In its prior incarnation, it had been the entrance to a 1960s head shop. The head shop had closed a few years earlier, and an aikido studio, run by former Look magazine editor turned human potential guru George Leonard, occupied the space.
Next door was a Laundromat, and on the corner, a small health food store. Our best hope was that we’d benefit from the foot traffic of people who were grocery shopping or doing their laundry. Perhaps they would need some safari clothes (we decided our sign would read SAFARI AND SURPLUS CLOTHING CO.). To catch the attention of drivers, I painted the door with a bold black-and-white zebra-skin pattern—heresy on the order of neon in this low-key town. Still, no one seemed to notice.
The funky knotty pine walls, which our lease dictated would remain unpainted, and the low ceiling, kept the space dark even when all the lights were on. The ceiling, which I covered with bright white butcher paper painted with a canopy of leaves, was supported by several old sawn-off immovable telephone poles. The chunky poles made it difficult to arrange our merchandise in a cohesive manner. “Going with what we got” (our mantra by now), I drilled holes near the top of each pole and glued in palm fronds from the flower mart to simulate palm trees. They were a bit stocky in the trunk but not altogether unconvincing. We painted the only Sheetrock wall, in the rear of the store, with leopard spots. We removed the interior shelves of a small closet and replaced its door with a curtain made from a camouflage tent, transforming the tiny space into a dressing room. Our largest expenditure was a floor-to-ceiling mirror on an eight-foot section of the side wall. In front of the mirror, we ripped out a grimy section of old carpet and replaced it with bright green Astroturf.
As soon as we took possession of the space, I submitted a sketch of our sign for approval to the fearsome Mill Valley Sign Commission, which enforced the town’s lofty aesthetic standards by dictating the precise dimensions, shapes, and colors permitted for signage. By the beginning of Thanksgiving week, we still hadn’t heard from them despite Mel’s repeated calls. Mill Valley is a quaint small town, and we had been led to believe that the Sign Commission took its guardian role as a solemn oath.
Somehow even Mel and I knew that the day after Thanksgiving was the first day of the biggest shopping season of the year. Black Friday, as it has come to be called, was the day we planned to open. With only two days remaining, Anna was still sewing furiously. For extra last-minute help, I called my mother. She had a great eye and, conveniently, lived in San Francisco. The day before Thanksgiving, she walked into the store with an iron and two bags full of hangers. She took a look at the boxes and piles of khaki still spread all over the floor and said, “Okay, honey, what’s the plan for all this?”
Uh-oh. In our rush to complete the merchandise, we had forgotten about display racks and shelves.
I remembered seeing some wooden fruit crates earlier that morning behind the Mill Valley Market. I asked and was told I could take them. Mel went in search of dowels and brackets at a hardware store. The dowels were reasonable enough, but the brackets cost more than $35 per pair, which eliminated them as a solution. “There must be something we can use,” Mel said when he came back. I looked around and there was the box of old Argentine belts we’d bought from Shapiro, now dubbed “Gaucho Belts.” We buckled a belt around each end of the dowel and nailed it to the ceiling. Perfect hanging racks. To complete the ad hoc displays, we tore the fruit labels off of the wooden crates from the Mill Valley Market, stenciled on the words “Imported from Banana Republic,” and stacked them against the wall. We had shelving.
We worked late into the night and came back again on Thanksgiving morning to put things in final order. Somewhere around midafternoon, Mel went home to tackle the turkey. On his return, he found us scratching our heads over where to display the hats—the only new, nonsurplus merchandise that we had bought. We found them at a fifty-year-old hat company across the bay in Oakland. The styles included pith helmets, which worked perfectly with our assortment, and Humphrey Bogart–style fedoras. Mel grabbed a hammer and drove a series of long nails into the beams, and one by one hung a hat on each nail, the finishing touch that brought it all together. Except that the Humphrey Bogart–style fedoras, hanging up there on the nails, now looked distressingly new. The three of us pondered what to do for a minute or so, and then—voilà!—I pulled off the new, clean ribbon hatbands and replaced them with . . . Gaucho Belts! Now the hats oozed character and looked like they had just returned from a safari.
Only the sign remained to be hung.
“Have we heard from the Sign Commission?” Mel asked.
I told him we hadn’t.
“We can’t open without a sign,” he said.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “The sign needs to be approved.”
“No problem,” said Mel. “I approve it.”
He carried the ladder out to the sidewalk and hung the sign himself. By nightfall, the store was ready to open. We went home and enjoyed the turkey.
The next morning, Mel and I, dressed head to toe in our khakis, drove down to the store and opened. Everything was in place—perfect.
We waited, and waited . . . and waited. And waited. For the first few hours, even though people came and went from the health food store and the Laundromat, nobody came in. Finally, a man stuck his head in the door. We both exhaled when he entered. For a few minutes, he wandered around, asked a few questions, and picked up one of the Swedish Gas Mask Bags for $6.50, plunking down a $20 bill on the zebra-striped cashwrap we had built.
In that moment, we realized there was one more thing we’d neglected to get: a cash register.
Mel made change from his own wallet.
A few more people stopped in that afternoon. One asked, “Where is the Banana Republic?” and someone else said, “Oh,
it’s down by Costa Rica. My cousin went there on his vacation.”
There were no other sales.
7
Tropics in the Cold, Hard World
If this was the busiest retail season of the year, we were in trouble. We had miraculously managed to get our merchandise cleaned, remade, tagged, hung, the store opened, and even the catalogue printed and mailed in three weeks, but the moment we opened the doors, thud.
Store traffic the first few days after Thanksgiving was next to nil. Pedestrians passing by either didn’t notice the store at all or didn’t bother to come in. Two deadlines were beginning to look insurmountable. The December rent had to be paid in less than a week, and the first invoices from our suppliers—our magic “terms”—would have to be settled in a few days. If we were late to pay Zimm and our other dealers, we’d lose our credit and would not be able to keep the store stocked. I’d barely slept since we signed the lease, working around the clock to get the store open and the catalogue in the mail. Now Mel wasn’t sleeping at all. He was the worrier.
I kept assuring Patricia that there was no reason whatsoever to worry. I licked every last stamp and took the catalogues to the post office the evening before Thanksgiving. The reason we had yet to see a response, I told her, was that they were stuck in the Christmas mail. When the catalogues hit in a few days, orders would flood in. So what if people in Mill Valley didn’t get what we were doing? Our friends in New York would open their mailboxes. They would love it.
Meantime, with nothing else to do, since Patricia was handling the nonexistent store traffic by herself, I made myself useful by nailing down all the necessary but boggling legal and accounting particulars of the company. We had no money to waste on lawyers and accountants. We’d hire them to clean things up when the money came in. For now, Mom and Pop Inc. would have to do.
The mental logistics required to sort out this byzantine stuff wasn’t the kind of thing that came naturally to me. Filling out incorporation papers and forms was drudgery, but nonetheless I managed to stay awake long enough to get the necessary documents delivered to Sacramento. Mastering the difference between an invoice and a receipt took some doing. Library books were instructive on how to set up the accounting, but for now, we’d just put the money in the bank and leave the balance sheet–payables–cash flow–income statement busywork for future development. Computers? Forget it. Jobs and Wozniak were still tinkering in their garage.
I waited. For the next couple of days, I stood in the store from ten until six, waiting for someone to come in.
I tried to keep busy rehanging and rearranging the skirts, dresses, and sheepskin vests into ever-new displays. In any event, I had to do this anew each morning because before going home in the evening, I hid much of the merchandise. I didn’t want to tempt aikido students who nightly used our unlocked store as a hallway to and from their classes upstairs. I also busied myself sweeping the sidewalk out front, straightening the stacks of bags, and aligning the credit card forms and catalogues behind the counter. Waiting, waiting. A double album of Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter songs, which we had recorded because Mel and I loved the romantic lyrics, played again and again all day long and then played all night in my restless sleep. Cole Porter, zebras, palm trees, Swedish Gas Mask Bags, old army sleeping bags born again as sheepskin vests—it was dreamlike anyway. Mel and I kept assuring each other that it was just a matter of time, just a matter of time.
Now and then a passerby peeked into the window, but when I tried to catch his or her eye, I rarely got back more than a fleeting glance. Even though it was quite cold outside and the store was unheated, I opened the door to make it easier for people to fall in, fortifying myself against the cold with a sheepskin vest over a wool fatigue shirt over a sweater and a T-shirt, as well as wool pants, boots, and a beret.
And then a woman wandered in, full of interest and questions. She began talking about troubles she was having with her husband. I listened while she tried on almost everything in the store. A few hours later, she bought an Andalusian Militia Vest for $19.50.
What’s going on in the world gets inside us, and what was going on in San Francisco at the time was casting a dark pall on the whole Bay Area. The Monday after we opened, San Francisco mayor George Moscone and a councilman, Harvey Milk, were assassinated by another councilman, a former police officer. The assailant, Dan White, later claimed he was crazed on Twinkies. The week earlier, after assassinating Leo Ryan, a Bay Area congressman who had come on a rescue mission, an outsized San Francisco character named Rev. Jim Jones led more than nine hundred followers of his religious cult to commit mass suicide on a brew of arsenic-laced Kool-Aid in the jungles of Guyana. It wasn’t exactly an opportune time to start a whimsical company. But here we were.
Little by little, people trickled in. I chatted up everyone, not only because it was lonely being in there all by myself but also because I began to see that the longer someone remained in the store, the better the chance that she or he would buy something. When no one was in the store, I tried creative visualization, counting the hours we’d be open until we had to write checks to Zimm and Shapiro and the landlord, and then calculating how many vests, skirts, and shirts that translated to per hour. This exercise made me even more determined never to let anyone who came through our door leave empty-handed. Even if they left only with a $6.50 beret or a Gaucho Belt, they were buying into our store. They were our best chance to get out the word.
Our first catalogue order came from a man in Bend, Oregon. I have no idea how he got the catalogue, since I hadn’t mailed it to him. I was so ecstatic at the sight of his check, I sent him, along with the Short-Armed Safari Shirt he ordered, a certificate embossed with our corporate seal appointing him Honorary Consul of Banana Republic in Bend, Oregon. I decided to appoint the first customer in every town to be that town’s Banana Republic honorary consul.
When the phone rang that first week, it was usually a wrong number. But in our circumstances, even wrong numbers were potential customers. I never let a caller hang up the phone without first informing him that he had just won a free Banana Republic catalogue, which I then promptly mailed if he gave me his address. But this time, it wasn’t a wrong number. It was a woman asking to speak to the proprietor. She had noticed the unusual sign above the zebra-striped door.
I winced, put my hand on the receiver, and whispered to Mel, “It’s the sign commissioner!”
But it wasn’t the sign commissioner. It was Joan Lisetor, a reporter for the countywide daily newspaper, the Marin Independent Journal. Could she bring a photographer by and interview us about our unusually named company? She arrived later the same afternoon. Mel and I answered her questions. The photographer snapped a few shots.
It was Tuesday. We had enough money to meet the rent due Friday, but coming up with the $2,000 we owed Zimm less than a week later would take divine intervention. Early that Saturday, Mel and I went to the store. There was a crowd milling outside the door! A woman, seeing that I was puzzled, held up a copy of the Marin Independent Journal.
“Haven’t you seen this?” she asked.
There it was: a full page—an entire page!—the front page of the Living section, with huge photos of Mel and me dressed head to toe in all the clothes we were selling in the store. The story began, “From the steamy jungles of South America to the icy wastes of Siberia . . . ”
8
In Surplus We Trust
Patricia cut to the front of the line and opened the door. The waiting folks swarmed into the tiny space. I watched as they read the hangtags, sorted through racks, searched the shelves. They held things up in front of the mirror and waited their turn for the dressing room. Several people started piles on the counter. Then the credit cards and checkbooks began coming out. They didn’t stop for the rest of the day and the day after.
Patricia stationed herself on the floor, refolding and finding sizes, while I was at the register grabbing the loot. Questions came from all sides:
“Does this come in any other colors?”
“Are these men’s or women’s?”
“Are the sleeves this short on all of them?”
Patricia was everywhere at once: No, only khaki, but it looks great on you. Men’s, but they look so chic belted on women. Yes, but the sleeves are meant to be rolled up.
Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching!
The sight of Mel dressed head to toe in khaki, as he was in his picture in the newspaper, coupled with their own Hemingway complexes, inspired the men. Everything in the store except the Spanish Paratrooper Shirtdress was men’s clothing. The women were perplexed at first, but the times—the late 1970s—were in our favor. A subtle shift in women’s fashions, spawned by the decade’s flourishing feminist movement, made menswear influential in the styling of women’s clothing. I guided the women in the store along. As soon as I found the first woman willing to try on one of our men’s shirts, I double-belted it on her, and the other women in the store took it all in. Soon a second woman came out of the dressing room, laughing at herself in oversized men’s pants. I was quick to cinch them with yet another two Gaucho Belts.
“Those look amazing on you,” I said, and meant it. The khakis, oversized and masculine, emphasized her delicate frame and were surprisingly slimming.
Several husbands or boyfriends, themselves busy trying on pith helmets and safari hats, gave nods of approval.
By Monday, the shelves were looking bare, so before opening the store, we wrote out a check for the total we owed to Zimmerman and Sons, drove to Oakland, gave it to him (two days early), and went for another dig through the piles. Way down deep in the back, we unearthed brand-new shorts in bundles of twelve. They had wide-cut legs and buckles hanging off both sides of what looked like extremely wide waistbands that tapered into straps. The material was unmistakably the same fabric and the same deep khaki color of the British Burma jacket I had found in Sydney. Their labels: “British 1949.”