by Mel Ziegler
A few months after the post-Rio debacle, one night after a final postmidnight press check at the printer’s on yet another catalogue, having had no sleep the two prior nights, I was driving home. The blast of a truck horn startled me. I was drifting into the oncoming traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, where only plastic cones serve as a middle barrier. I had fallen asleep at the wheel. Were it not for the truck horn, I might have died in a head-on collision. It was a turning point. I decided the catalogue was too much. I could not do it anymore. The store itself was more than enough to handle.
At breakfast the following morning, I told Mel firmly of my resolution. “We have to stop the catalogue. We’ve taken on too much.”
He shook his head.
“We can’t go backward,” he said.
“Well, we can’t stay where we are,” I insisted. “I’m at my limit.”
“I know,” was Mel’s cryptic response. “I’ve been giving it a lot of thought.”
I looked at him and waited. He bit his lip. He looked at me, suppressing a smile.
“And? So?” I was not going to let it go.
“Our problem is that we’re going in circles. We need to bust out, make a go for it.”
“What? Bust out? How?”
“Open another store,” he said.
“What?!” I was furious. “You’re not hearing me!”
I got up to leave, angrily. Mel came after me.
“I do hear you,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this. We need to scale up so we can get the help we need to make all this work.”
He insisted that I take a few days off, all to myself, “even if it means things falling apart.” He promised to cover for me. It turned out all I needed was one day, a brilliantly blue Marin County day. I took a head-clearing, spirit-lifting hike to the top of Mount Tamalpais, the highest coastal mountain in California, and right in our backyard. I sat there for a while by myself and realized Mel was right: we’d feel defeated if we closed the catalogue. In the end, by contracting the business, we’d be constricting the upside and end up feeling even more trapped. We couldn’t go backward. We had to leap. Mel’s point was that if we could grow the company a little larger, we’d generate enough money to hire competent help to get organized. There was no other way out of our problem. I went back to work.
I knew Patricia didn’t mean it when she said we had to shut down the catalogue. It was just a cry for help. What she meant was that things had to change. She was right. We’d been doing virtually everything on the fly, without ever really “knowing” how to do any of it except as we had taught ourselves. As easily as we fell in love with each other, we fell into business with each other. We wasted no more thought on partnering in business than we did on partnering in life. We were natural soul mates, and from the start, we knew it. But we were reaching a place where what had worked for us in getting into business was now beginning to work against us. As much as we were empowered by and loved the idea of being professional amateurs, it was wearing us ragged.
As I saw it, Banana Republic was a product of us. It could not go down. It could only expand, never contract. Making business was not a problem, running it was. We didn’t have enough competent help. We needed better employees who had experience in mail order and retail. But smart and talented people did not work at the wages we could pay. Where to get the money—and yet stay free of obligations to anyone but ourselves?
Closing the catalogue was unthinkable. It held the key to our future. The store brought us to Mill Valley, but the catalogue took us to the world. Furthermore, as difficult as it was to keep going, the catalogue was our surest moneymaker.
Here was my plan: create the best catalogue yet, add another color, and quintuple the quantity we mailed to nearly a million. We would need to rent a lot of lists. I’d been testing most of these in smaller mailings, and I knew which lists could yield the best results. We had to draw out customers on a wider scale. Assuming that the response held close to what we had been getting on the smaller test mailings—now 6 percent, more than three times the average in the catalogue business—we would generate enough cash to open a second store. The second store, as a third profit center, would justify the cost of the warehouse and the extra level of management.
Granted, it was a loopy path: mail more copies of the catalogue to generate the money to open a second store that would scale us up just enough to hire the people we needed to keep the catalogue open. But it was a plan we could finance ourselves. Our only out-of-pocket expense would be the extra postage. The list-rental agencies, the printer, and the suppliers were by now all agreeable to “terms.” Only the U.S. Post Office required cash on the spot.
The plan worked. In less than two months, we generated the money necessary to open a second store in San Francisco, a half hour away over the Golden Gate Bridge. I felt certain that we would do three times the business there that we had been doing in Mill Valley.
We used our newfound logic to select a store location, pinpointing the San Francisco zip codes with the highest response to our catalogue. As we guessed, they were Russian Hill and Pacific Heights. A commercial section of Polk Street with a neighborhood feel sat in a valley between both. The rents there were reasonable. Serendipitously, a storefront opened on what we felt would be one of the best possible blocks. It was in a small building: twelve hundred square feet of retail space on the ground floor with a rented apartment upstairs. Unlike highly regulated Mill Valley, there was no design review board. To compensate for the subprime location, we painted bold black zebra stripes across both stories of the twenty-foot-high white building. Passersby could not ignore it.
In a welcome contrast to the dark, cramped Mill Valley store, the space was a big, empty white box, a blank canvas fifteen feet wide by eighty feet deep, with twelve-foot ceilings and two large display windows on both sides of the entrance door. After sketching several options, I settled on using the front windows to reproduce an inhabited scene similar to the ones I’d been drawing for the catalogue covers: an old typewriter, binoculars, and a few books on Africa cluttering an old, weathered rolltop desk, with a safari jacket hung over the back of the chair.
For the interior of the store, I sketched an exotic environment we could fabricate economically. Palm trees grew out of chicken wire and fabric. Papier-mâché begat colorful parrots. We painted a blue sky with clouds on the high ceiling and hung a camouflage net filled with palm fronds and leaves, simulating a forest canopy. In the middle of the store, we painted the floor with a resin-coated creek, and built a bridge over it to transport customers out of the jungle and into an Astroturf meadow with leopard print dressing rooms in the far back.
A smiling young woman, sparkling with charm, walked in the door.
“Are you looking for help?” she asked.
“Well, actually,” I answered, looking her over, “we’ve been looking for someone just like you.” (Intuition isn’t infallible, but on the other hand, logical thinking isn’t all it’s trumped up to be.) Randi Hoffman turned out to be the best salesperson, then manager, that we ever found.
The city store was bigger, lighter, and, from day one, way more profitable. We supplemented the surplus with some new merchandise found at trade shows that fit the concept: tropical-weight wool trousers, cotton safari jackets, T-shirts, and fatigue pants, all new and in a full range of sizes. As Mel predicted, our sales were double and soon triple Mill Valley’s. As Mel had also planned, the new money went back into the catalogue. The response from the next catalogue was better than we hoped for. He had a knack for picking and testing the mailing lists, and I had discovered a certain thrill in analyzing the pages by the square inch, selecting what to put where, predicting within a few units how many of any item would sell in each space. Sales were now booming, and we finally began to hire more experienced employees.
Solving one problem, however, now created yet another: we had picked the domestic surplus stockpiles clean of anything worthwhile. Although we filled some gaps wi
th the new merchandise from wholesalers, the company’s appeal was built on exotic surplus finds, and our survival depended on the generous margins the surplus allowed. We couldn’t keep diluting our brand with items otherwise easily available, or cutting our margins with expensive wholesale products such as quality khaki pants and sweaters newly manufactured by other companies but with our labels sewn in. Sooner rather than later, we would need to figure out how to produce our own original line. In the meantime, we needed an urgent solution. We had a roaring business . . . with a dwindling supply. Fortunately, Mel was already on it.
14
Her Majesty’s Leftovers
The answer was Europe, with its feast of distinctly different countries, each with an army of its own and its own cache of surplus. The reporter in me did a little snooping, made some phone calls. I learned that the man to see was Cobles in London.
I scribbled down the address and handed it to the taxi driver. He winced, then looked up at us shaking his head.
“You sure this is where you want me to take you?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why?” He offered no explanation beyond repeating my question. Just shrugged, turned around, and started driving.
Patricia and I exchanged a quizzical look. You could not expect a surplus dealer to set up shop in a posh London district like Mayfair. Conceit of youthful abandon kept us from probing further.
We crossed the Thames. As we drove deeper into the East End, we watched the streets lose their polish and turn more raw. Twenty minutes later, the taxi stopped in front of a decaying four-story building spanning half the block. After we paid him, the driver sped away.
No sign, only a small door with the number on it. I knocked. An eye filled the peephole. We could hear locks slide. The door opened, and a short, grizzled man with crumbling posture and vacant eyes took a step back from the doorway, pointing his thumb over his shoulder to the long hallway behind him, at the end of which was a glass-walled office. Only our footsteps broke the silence.
I had called the week before from California. We were expected. Nonetheless, the suddenness of the heavy door clanking shut behind us played to the taxi driver’s disturbing demeanor. I walked behind Patricia with my hand on the back of her waist. Two large figures in the glass office at the end of the hall stood as they saw us approach. Obviously father and son, both of generous girth. To our great relief, their eyes twinkled, and they smiled warmly. Cobles Senior, with a distinguished mane of white hair, dressed in a three-piece black suit and ascot, tottered from behind his imposing wooden desk, followed by Junior, same apple cheeks but with curly dark brown hair, dressed in a crisp white polo shirt and khakis.
“The Zieglers from sunny California, I presume,” said Senior, setting off a flurry of handshaking among the four of us. “Leslie here, and my son, Lawrence.”
We exchanged pleasantries, and the courtly old man, his heavy frame making colossal demands on a silver-headed cane, led us into a cramped and disheveled adjoining room—“our showroom”—where mounds of jackets, sweaters, blankets, bags, pants, and shirts covered tables and a dozen or so chairs. Along the wall, dowels sagged with the weight of weary wire hangers that held other khaki and olive drab garments detailed with an abundance of epaulets, bellowed pockets, snaps, and emblems.
We had come to the right place.
Patricia began sorting through the “sample” piles. I joined the hunt, feeling as if I were Edmond Dantès discovering the secret buried treasure on the isle of Monte Cristo. I could hear Patricia’s thoughts: If they have quantities, our problems are over! We casually set aside a number of items.
“What kind of quantities do you have?” I asked flatly, pointing at our sample pile.
“Quantities?” repeated Senior, beaming. His answer was to push open huge double doors and usher us through the threshold with his cane. The familiar dense, musty odor invaded our nostrils. Mountains of khaki stacked to the ceiling and spanning half a city block.
I stole a glance at Patricia. She was doing a monumental job of suppressing her amazement.
If there was a Nirvana of Surplus, we had found it. Sack upon sack, bale upon bale, box upon box, some covered with tarps and others bearing cryptic stenciled descriptions of their contents to which we had grown accustomed: TROUSER LINERS MANF 1951 SIZE 7 QTY 48 VAR R/PKD 10-MAY-43, IT 508K COLOR: ORANGE QTY 24 EA KEEP DRY HANDLE WITH CARE, CP 8405-99 CREWS No. 6 OLD PATTERN SIZE 12 QTY 4, DRAWERS WOOLEN SHORT, SIZE 3, FALKLANDS, SWIM TRUNK 50 EA COLOR: STRP B/W.
We stopped at an eight-foot-high pile of navy melton wool short-waisted civil defense jackets from World War II, knowing we could sell every single one of them. Customers would have snatched copies of these jackets for hundreds of dollars in high-end boutiques. And there was just about everything else imaginable: olive drab long johns, more Ghurka shorts (even in sizes other than 32!), pleated khaki trousers, thermal shirts, leather-bound berets, linen horse feed bags, gloves, socks, boots, belts.
“Nice selection,” slipped from my lips. Patricia pinched me.
“We are purveyors of the finest tailored garments from Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, Army, and Air Force, and the British Empire, such as it was,” Mr. Cobles Senior stated in his broad British accent.
There was pride in the man. And an ever-growing, wily twinkle in his eye.
“I can’t believe all this still exists!” I whispered excitedly to Mel when we were out of earshot behind a pile of British Navy greatcoats. “Do you know what you would have to pay for fabric like this today? Feel this melton wool greatcoat. Some of these jackets look like they were made on Savile Row. And in the original bales, still unused! I’m afraid to hear his prices.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Mel whispered back.
I nodded.
“Right, then!” Cobles Junior said as we came back into view. “Shall we trot on up to the next floor?”
We looked at each other. Lawrence caught it and smiled.
“Think you were done for the day, did you? There’s three more floors and another building as well.”
The Cobles were gentlemen and treated us like visiting dignitaries. They were upbeat and genuinely pleasant. In dealing with Zimm, we had learned it was important to haggle but also important to give him something close to his price. We approached the Cobles the same way. That made things easy. To our amazement, the prices were as good or better than what we’d been paying in the States for U.S. surplus.
Terms?
Sixty days to pay after the goods cleared U.S. customs, Senior offered, no questions asked. They would arrange for a container, and “the goods will be on the water by the end of the week.”
The Cobles had a car waiting to take us back to our hotel.
“Can we get you some tickets?” young Cobles offered, poking his head into the window of the car. “Any shows you’d like to see?”
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats had just opened in the West End. We had tried to get tickets, but the show had been sold out for months in advance.
That night we found ourselves sitting in row D, center.
A few years later on another trip to London, now by far his best customers, we reminisced with Cobles Senior about this first visit.
Mel asked him, “How much of the stuff we bought from you that day did you think we would never sell?”
“You want me to be perfectly factual with you?” he asked.
“Always.”
“Ninety percent of it!”
15
Now, There’s an Idea
With the largesse from Cobles, we were back in business with plenty of new merchandise. The quality of the British surplus was better and more novel, leading to more sales. Enough money came through the mail and the stores to hire Dennis Colbert, who had worked in operations at the Sharper Image, another catalogue company in San Francisco, to supervise getting the orders processed and out the door efficiently.
We also bought a computer, an IBM PC, which made our lives a lot easier once we figure
d out what to do next after the mystifying little yellow C > flashed on the black screen. I was thrilled that we could manage our mailing list on it and found a typist to enter the tens of thousands of names of buyers and catalogue requesters that we had been storing on individual IBM computer cards. Ever since we mailed the first catalogue, I had been tormented by nightmares in which the trays storing these cards somehow got stolen or destroyed and having to start Banana Republic all over again.
By 1981, we had outgrown the full-moon-flooding warehouse in Sausalito and moved to 410 Townsend Street in the South of Market area of San Francisco, a building that has since won fame as breeding offices for web start-ups that go on to the big time. We hired a few phone order takers, a truck driver, some people to pack the orders, a bookkeeper, and a few other employees. Best of all, Patricia hired Kevin Sarky, a recent graduate of the San Francisco Academy of Art University, and trained him to render drawings that she herself had been doing of every item in the catalogue, freeing up a good chunk of her time.