Wild Company

by Mel Ziegler

  Zimm said he had 1,500 and wanted $2.50 apiece. We must have betrayed ourselves, because despite our hemming and hawing, frowning, and head shaking, he would not budge on the price.

  “What sizes are they?” Patricia asked.

  “What sizes?” Zimm said. “Thirty-two, that’s what sizes.”

  “Only thirty-two?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  I took a breath.

  “We’ll take them all,” Patricia said.

  My brain went into the red zone, but I knew better than to doubt my wily and inventive wife.

  “We’ll need sixty days,” I interjected.

  Zimm threw up his hands in a mock gesture intended to convey, at great reluctance and against his better instincts, “Alright, already.”

  As the week passed into a new one, the newspaper story became history. Business slowly tapered off. The weather again grew cold and rainy, with frequent squalls. For the next few days, nobody came in the store for hours at a stretch. Some days there were no sales. Only the rare enthusiastic customer who got what we were doing with the clothing and the concept kept me going. Frustrated, chilled, and weary from standing in the freezing store day after day, I went home early one night for a hot bath and a glass of wine with Mel. Whenever we relaxed together, we traded assurances about how it would all work. I found my energy again and went in very early the following morning with ideas to rejuvenate the store by changing the window displays and creating a few new signs.

  As I opened the door shortly after six o’clock, the phone was ringing. Wrong number, I assumed, answering “Banana Republic” with as much gusto as I could before my morning coffee.

  “Good morning, Banana Republic! This is John Gambling live on WOR Radio in New York. You are on the air!”

  That jolted me awake.

  “Hello, John,” I exhaled. The line crackled.

  “I’ve just been reading to my listeners from your Banana Republic catalogue number one,” John Gambling said. “Tell us more about how you find these unusual things.”

  Twenty minutes flew by in an instant as I, looking out the window at the driving rain, fielded one playful question after another.

  “And tell us why there are no hoods on those Italian camouflage jackets?” John Gambling asked.

  I recited Mel’s catalogue copy, which by now I knew by heart. At times I got carried away and went even further than Mel had in the catalogue. Where did we find the Spanish Paratrooper Shirts? We bought them by the pound in a back alley in Madrid.

  “By the pound?” baited my interviewer.

  “When the container arrived, we found some heavy old airplane parts buried at the bottom, packed in with the shirts.”

  John Gambling chuckled.

  “Thank you Patricia of Banana Republic!” he said. “And if our listeners in the tristate area would like to get their very own copy of Banana Republic catalogue number one . . . ”

  He paused for a beat.

  “All they need to do is send one dollar to post office box seven seventy-four in Mill Valley, California, nine four nine four two,” I finished on cue.

  The rain went on for another three days, keeping away shoppers, but on the fourth day, the postman came in dragging two massive sacks of mail from the post office across the street.

  “These wouldn’t fit into your box,” he said wryly, “so I thought I’d bring them over.”

  That night Mel and I opened the envelopes. There must have been a thousand of them, each with a catalogue request—and a dollar bill.

  Mel twinkled.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We not only have ourselves a business,” he said, “we have ourselves a meal plan.”

  We grabbed a bunch of dollar bills and went out to dinner to celebrate.

  9

  Propaganda: Handle with Respect

  Up until we jumped into business, I wrote stories about other people. Suddenly things were different. I wasn’t reporting the story anymore. I was the story. Banana Republic was the story. Seeing it from both sides of the reporter’s notebook wasn’t like looking into the mirror—it was being the mirror. As every journalist knows, you are only as interesting as your subject. As an entrepreneur, it was my job to be interesting. What reporter doesn’t appreciate it when you help him do his job by being quotable?

  Once John Gambling opened his WOR radio microphone to Patricia, media became the petroleum that powered our growth. Media loves media, and media is where media often goes to get story ideas. The more press we got, the more press we got. We happily played our part and accommodated each new media query with a press packet stamped “Propaganda: Handle with Respect” filled with all the other media stories. John Gambling had delivered us a marketing campaign we never could have bought.

  Banana Republic’s story landed on the chattering teletypes of the Associated Press, and newspapers everywhere scooped it up. All over America, readers were taking a last swig of their morning coffee and performing the ancient version of today’s mouse click: finding a piece of paper, a stamp, a dollar, an envelope, and a mailbox to mail a catalogue request to a post office box number they had scribbled down.

  Best of all, the ongoing deluge of catalogue requests generated lots of orders. All the books I’d read on mail order had made the same depressing point: up-front costs to get your catalogue into a customer’s hands dictated that you’d lose money on the first orders. There was no possibility of a profit until you converted the customer into a repeat buyer. Yet we were generating orders at zero cost to us; the dollar sent with catalogue requests even covered the cost of the catalogue and the stamp. If I had read and followed the how-to books beforehand, I might still be collecting a paycheck at the Chronicle.

  My serendipitous mail-order education got even more illuminating when a woman named Mary Lou Luther found us. She wrote a fashion column for the Los Angeles Times. She spotted and praised the 1949 Ghurka shorts. The Times pushed her column across its wires to scores of other newspapers from Maine to Arizona. These were the “size-32-only” shorts we had found in Zimm’s musty coffers. We’d since learned the shorts had been issued to the Ghurkas, an elite Nepalese brigade employed by the East India Company who later served in the British Indian Army. But it was not their exotic lineage that charmed Mary Lou. She deemed the Ghurkas to be the single most chic short of the summer, fitting all men and women up to size 32, due to the adjustable waist, and told her readers where to send their checks to secure their own pair. For weeks afterward, the letters that flooded in no longer held just a measly dollar but checks for $15. Even better, with every pair of shorts, we sent the customer a catalogue in the box (called a “bounceback” in the mail-order parlance we were fast mastering). Many customers then placed additional orders.

  We worked late into the evening and sometimes all night to fill the tsunami of orders and to put together a second catalogue, which proved even more successful than the first. According to the mail-order experts, a good response was 2 percent, but we were getting more than 10 percent. We were starting to think maybe there was something to being accidental professional amateurs.

  It would have been heartening if our promotional skills were matched by our operational skills. Since I was by nature impatient and therefore hopeless in the store (“Come on, lady, make up your mind!”), it became Patricia’s turf. In between waiting on customers, she also took phone orders. Meantime, I cobbled together a Rube Goldberg system to process the mail orders. The accounting, the invoices, the back orders, the inventory, the shipping, the sales taxes or no sales taxes, the deposits, the credit cards—paper was flying all over the place. There had to be an easier way, but I was too overwhelmed just processing the business to figure it out. Patricia was overwhelmed tending to the store and keeping it stocked with fresh merchandise.

  And then Tess Gowins walked in the store. Blonde hair worn in a burst of curls, lovely in every way, soft, faded flannel shirt belted over cutoffs, and long, tanned legs in cowboy boots.

/>   “Are you hiring?” she asked Patricia.

  “Do you have any retail experience?” Patricia asked her.

  “No,” she said, “I’m an artist.”

  An artist, no experience. Perfect.

  “We can only afford to pay minimum wage,” Patricia apologized.

  “That’s okay,” Tess said. “I like your store.”

  “Can you start tomorrow?”

  After a week, we promoted Tess to store manager, freeing up some of Patricia’s time to tackle the other hundred-plus things on our to-do list.

  With Tess on board and sales depleting inventory faster, it seemed like a good idea to take another crack at the military auctions and do some bidding ourselves. We headed up to Travis Air Force Base for the monthly auction. As we entered the massive hangar, a uniformed man handed us a mimeographed list on a clipboard and a bidder’s number. He directed us to the pre-auction viewing area. What we saw was more than a little disorienting. Piles after piles of weird and preposterous “surplus” had been dumped in evenly spaced heaps along a concrete walkway. Each pile was cordoned off with a rope and marked with a huge number. It was impossible to make out exactly what was in each lot, but the mimeographed handout spelled out the contents in prosaic military-ese: “U.S. Army Fatigues, olive drab, size 46XL, new; Combat Boots, size 16EE, used,” and so on.

  “Bureaucracy meets merchandising,” quipped Patricia.

  Something in lot 79 caught my eye: white satin fabric ending in rib-knit cuffs. I tugged on a sleeve. It was attached to what seemed to be a jumpsuit.

  I pointed for Patricia to have a look. She grabbed my arm and pulled me away.

  “Don’t act so interested,” she whispered, pushing the clipboard under my nose.

  Her finger pointed to number 79 on the mimeographed list: “Typewriter ribbon, black, 1 gross. Tarp-OD-20 x 40. NASA-05571 flight suit-4 dozen . . . ”

  Indeed—NASA flight suits!

  We took our seats on the cold metal folding chairs in an audience of fifty or so dealers, some of whom recognized us. A few eyebrows went up.

  The bidding started, and went quickly. After each lot sold, there was a bit of noisy squirming in the room, as the dealers did some fast trading among themselves. Then came lot 79.

  “Do I hear one hundred?” called the auctioneer.

  My hand went up.

  “One hundred and fifty?”

  No other hands.

  “One hundred twenty-five? Do I hear one hundred twenty-five?”

  Nothing.

  “Sold for one hundred dollars!” boomed the auctioneer. Patricia squeezed my knee.

  We unloaded our cache as soon as we got back to the store, pulling out the boxes of typewriter ribbons to get to the flight suits and their helmets tangled in yards of clear plastic tubing. Impatiently, I started cutting off the tubing to free the flight suits. But it was soon apparent why we were the only bidders. These were authentic flight suits indeed, but a little too authentic for our customers or anyone else who might entertain the idea of wearing one on terra firma. At the breasts and groin of each suit were large rubber gaskets where the tubes for oxygen and vital functions were attached.

  “A hundred dollars down the tubes,” Mel joked.

  But wait a minute!

  I remembered the failing American space station called Skylab that had been in the headlines almost every day. I had just read in a July 1979 issue of Time magazine:

  The world this week awaits an unprecedented event: the fiery fall of the largest machine man has ever hurled into space. The American Skylab vehicle, nine stories tall and weighing 77.5 tons, is expected to slip into the earth’s upper atmosphere, then disintegrate into a celestial shower of flaming metal . . . Somewhere . . . fragments, each weighing 1,000 lbs. or more, will crash to earth at speeds of up to 270 m.p.h. with the force of a dying meteor.

  There was much discussion and more than a little panic about where Skylab pieces would fall. I grabbed the phone to call every local TV station. Banana Republic in Mill Valley had a limited supply of “Skylab Protection Suits” that it was selling on a first-come basis, I disclosed anonymously.

  That night we were on nearly every local station at six and eleven.

  Not a single flight suit sold, but the store was packed for two weeks afterward.

  10

  Pros and Cons

  At the SOP (Seat of the Pants) School of Business, we took help wherever we could get it. Shortly after the Skylab incident, we exhumed Italian Army Bersaglieri shorts from the bins of a Brooklyn surplus jobber, Schwartzman. The Bersaglieri were an elite group of sharpshooters. After paying wistful homage to the bygone quality of the fabric and the expert workmanship in the shorts’ construction, the catalogue mused, “Italians may not be much on the battlefield, but when it comes to style, they conquer all.” The serendipitous law of unintended consequences elevated that throwaway sentence into a small international incident.

  Who knows what odd chance brought the catalogue to the attention of the Italian consul in Los Angeles, but fate did, and he was insulted. He was outraged. He was fuming, and he was . . . right! Who were we to use our catalogue to disparage the Italian Army, which for all I knew (basically nothing) may have the bravest, most fearsome, formidable soldiers in the world? As his protest fed the airwaves beaming radio talk shows for hours one morning to commuting Angelenos, I cheered him on. He had no more fervent supporter than I, applauding his every righteously scornful word, so laden with . . . publicity! The incident brought us four times as many orders to fill as we had shorts, again confirming the adage “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”

  Thanks to one stroke of luck after another, the publicity kept coming as the catalogue found its way across America. The pace quickened by the day. I believed the best way to ensure our long-term survival was to overdeliver. Go above and beyond and, most importantly, make a human connection with customers. I scribbled notes to customers and put them in the boxes. The notes, on official khaki stationery, were signed by a random minister of the Republic: sometimes Minister of Finance, others the Minister of Progress, but usually the one truest to me, the Minister of Propaganda. I had stamps made to stencil sayings—“In Surplus We Trust,” “One Man’s Bush Jacket Is Worth Two Designer Jackets”—on the tissue paper in which we wrapped all orders. Nothing was too silly. Checks written to Banana Republic were stamped “Warning: contributions to struggling young countries are not tax deductible.”

  The publicity made it a challenge to keep the shelves stocked. At any given time, one or the other of us had to be out prowling dealer warehouses around the country while trying to juggle all of our other responsibilities. I was shipping foreman, mailing list coordinator, errand boy, accountant, window washer, legal counsel, floor sweeper, marketing guy, copywriter and president, not to mention husband of the co-owner, who herself was parallel drowning.

  My territory was the visual realm: store design and display, clothing redesign, catalogue illustration and design, and the miscellaneous logos and graphics on our labels, T-shirts, bags, signs, business cards, and so on. I was also part-time salesgirl, janitor, laundress, bookkeeper, shipping clerk, vice president, and wife of a partner with a new idea every minute. Each morning, I’d iron the merchandise we’d washed the night before, sew on labels, write up hangtags, and on many mornings open the store by ten o’clock. In between waiting on customers, I wrapped and shipped packages, took phone orders, and tried to analyze our sales to see how much merchandise to buy. When I got home, there was more book work, banking, and endless laundry. We were perpetually running out of catalogues as well as merchandise. Our pillow talk was strategic planning.

  Meanwhile, at the store, we were nearing the midterm on Retail 101.

  With more store traffic and more store hours in a week than one employee could work, we were on the lookout for a second salesperson. As if on cue, Miss America came through the door asking for a job. Perfect teeth, perfect skin, perfect nose, perfect hair, pe
rfect figure attached to a perky personality. Annette looked good in the clothes and said she had experience at a boutique back east. We hired her. For the first couple of weeks, she worked hard at selling, kept the store in good order, and closed out the register every day. The aikido studio had found a way to use a back staircase, allowing us to lock up at night, so we gave Annette a key for when she needed to open or close the store on her own.

  One morning she called Patricia. Sobbing, she said we’d been robbed. She had found the door jarred open when she arrived, and “the box with the receipts” gone. The box, stuffed in a hiding place that only she, Patricia, Tess, and I knew, was where the cash, checks, and credit card receipts were held until we deposited them the next day. This particular day’s receipts, now missing, represented one of the best days we’d had in a while.

  Patricia: “Everything’s gone?”

  Annette: “Everything.”

  “Even the checks and credit card receipts?”

  A beat, then: “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right down,” Patricia said, hanging up.

  She headed for the door.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Get it back.”

  When I got to the store, the door was locked. Annette wasn’t there. I glanced around. The leather jackets were still hanging on the rack, and nothing else seemed out of place. I dialed Annette’s home number. She answered.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I didn’t feel well, so I just came home,” she said. “I was about to call.”

  “You need to take care of yourself, then. I’ll check on you later.”