by Mel Ziegler
Patricia, on the West Coast, was a little closer to the fault lines of the 1960s turmoil. She spent the Summer of Love as a high school student in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, dancing to the local bands: the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead. She didn’t wear flowers in her hair, but for all practical purposes, Patricia became a hippie. The Vietnam War, boyfriends with draft notices, the Berkeley riots, the hypnotic solicitations of Harvard professor Timothy Leary to “turn on, tune in, and drop out”—everything was falling apart all around her. With UC Berkeley too close to home and in chaos, she elected to attend the Santa Barbara campus, which changed within two years from a Greek and surf party school to a hotbed of upheaval. The first year she tried to work within the system, gathering enough fellow war resisters to fill all of the ROTC classes, leaving no room for the pro-war students. But as the resistance movement grew, students rioted and burned a Bank of America building, the police grew more brutal, and she had enough. Off she went with a draft-resister boyfriend, hitchhiking and camping around the West, with a rekindled distaste for anything having to do with “the establishment.” To sustain herself, she painted portraits for rent and food, and finally landed in the Santa Cruz mountain community of La Honda, living among poets, musicians, and counterculture Stanford professors. Her entrepreneurial prowess extended into making custom leather pants for rock musicians. After a year, she’d had enough of this, too, and decided to reengage, returning to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, earning her tuition working part-time at a market, where a customer, wife of the art director of the Chronicle, told her of a job opening that would soon lead her to me.
Through all these peregrinations, paramount to each of us was creating the free-spirited life we wanted to live. It was a future in which Patricia saw herself painting and I saw myself writing. We never saw ourselves in business—and that oddly enough includes even when we were in business. An artist and a writer on an adventure in the wilds of business, and that was it.
So here we were nearly five years later in business, but not of business, and the guy from The Gap wants to buy us.
It would have been a better idea to hire a strictly in-business attorney, not one who was even less of business than we were. I’m making no excuses for engaging Bernard Petrie as our lawyer. We became great friends and enjoyed many deep and fascinating discussions about his passions, which were constitutional law and history. He was an avid reader with universal interests, although business was not measurably among them. How could we have known? His father, whom we met and whom Bernard respected deeply, was as in business as you can get. Milton Petrie had been a Cleveland tailor who opened a dress shop that grew into a chain of 1,700 Petrie Stores. Well into his nineties when we met him, Milton Petrie could tell you, down to the dollar, what each of those stores tallied in sales yesterday. Bernard, his only son, lived like a monk and had no use for money. He quietly but resolutely asked his father to leave his fortune exclusively to charity so it would not become his problem to deal with. He owned no car, ate like a grasshopper, and lived in an apartment with only a single reading chair, a reading lamp, a table and chair, a bed, and boxes of books he was too busy reading to find time to buy bookcases for. As an upstanding father figure and friend, the best. As the lawyer representing us in a transaction with one of the savviest businessmen of the age . . .
At the time, we never gave a second thought to whether Bernard was the appropriate attorney to represent us. Why would we? Everything about him was to love. He looked like Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving’s 1820 short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: “tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.” His idiosyncrasies were winning: how he picked at and rearranged the food on his plate in restaurants without really eating it; how he avoided crossing bridges; how he could ruminate for years on buying a certain rug for his perennially unfurnished apartment, probably knowing all along he would never buy it. His one-man office on Battery Street was musty with yellowing papers spilling out of boxes, file cabinets everywhere, and a secretary who looked and sounded like a sixty-year-old Betty Boop.
“Mis-ter-Pee-Trees office,” she chirped when she answered his phone. After taking a message, she hung up abruptly without a good-bye, not because of incivility but because everything necessary had been said.
Bernard did warn us. He said he’d never handled a case like ours. So what? we said.
Perhaps our dream of handing Don Fisher the keys and running off to Ibiza fogged our judgment. If we had somehow landed on the doorstep of financial independence, wasn’t it mission accomplished, and time to go off to write and paint?
Bernard’s counterpart at The Gap was the appropriately named Ted Tight, the general counsel. He played the polite, lawyerly, collegial part with Bernard while quietly smouldering with contempt for us. Why we irked Ted Tight as much as we did, if I had to guess, was our flagrant disregard for corporate decorum, and perhaps also the fact that two people, as corporately ill mannered as we, could be people who, by the numbers, Don Fisher valued more than him. For these or other reasons mysterious to us, the estimable Mr. Tight made certain that Don Fisher would be well advantaged and protected against the capriciousness of the upstarts with whom he presently seemed enamored.
The negotiations dragged on for four months, leaving us exhausted, and the company ignored and nearly paralyzed. And then . . .
Don called to say he decided he could not buy the company unless the two of us stayed on to run it.
“I wouldn’t know how to run your company. It depends on your ideas and your creativity,” he said. “I’ll buy it, but only if you two stay with it.”
“We aren’t looking for jobs,” I said.
“That’s not the way to think about it,” Don said. “It’ll be just like you own it. Nothing will change. I’ll give you as much money as you need to grow the business, as long as it’s profitable. You’ll get a percentage of the profits. You can do whatever you want.”
“But you will own the company,” I interjected, thinking and since we are the company, doesn’t that also mean he owns us?
“You’ll be operating autonomously. You’ll have total creative control.”
“Autonomous.”
“Total creative control.”
“As much money as you need.”
“Whatever you want.”
Before Merritt introduced us to Don, we were finally doing okay financially. However, after four months with Gap people crawling all over the place doing “due diligence” while I was fielding Don’s almost daily additions of new clauses to the contract (no doubt with Ted’s resourceful suggestions), each more clever than the last, the company was depleted of cash and energy. We were left with two stark choices:
1. Start the whole process over again with another investor—assuming we could find one and get him interested in a company that was by now almost broke and near broken, or
2. Sell the damn thing, sign the five-year contract he wanted, and take the money in dribbles as an “earn-out.”
Oddly, I found myself thinking of how I could remove my name from the burglar alarm company so somebody at The Gap could be the one to meet the twenty-four-hour plate glass service at the store at three in the morning.
The fifty-page document detailing the terms of the sale and including a five-year employment contract was drawn up and presented by Ted Tight. Bernard found little wrong with it other than the occasional typo or legal phrasing.
“Don’t worry,” Patricia tried to soothe me. “We’ll have fun. We’ll have the money to make the company what we dreamed it could be; and we can see the world.”
She wanted to do it. I didn’t know. By a vote of one yes and one maybe, The Gap acquired Banana Republic Inc. on February 1, 1983.
18
A Line of Our Own
Now that we had all the money we needed from Gap’s3 open checkbook, we had a lot of new merchandise to find and design. Patricia began sketching a line. I did some digging to see if any of the factories that made the original British surplus during the Second World War still existed.
Don remembered an expatriate San Franciscan who ran a small buying agency in London. Off we went with a suitcase full of surplus samples to meet Richard Walker. Richard put his staff to work researching where we could find other factories that had manufactured surplus items, and he drove us to one he knew about two and a half hours north that made leather and canvas covers for rifles. There we found Mr. Brady, the sexagenarian grandson of the founder, dressed in a tweed jacket and tie. He oversaw a few dozen gray-haired craftsmen on creaking benches, attending to their ancient sewing machines. They were finishing or repairing bags the factory was presently making for fishermen. Fishermen, such as there were, Mr. Brady informed us. The demand for fishermen’s bags in England in the early 1980s had abated. Much of the business now was in repair, and there wasn’t even much of that. True to their promise, the Brady bags that had been sold in prior decades had proven nearly indestructible. As a courtesy to owners of bags sold by his grandfather, his father, or himself, Mr. Brady repaired the occasional one where the leather or hardware failed. He showed us one such bag where the buffalo hide leather trim, cracking with age, was being detached and replaced. It belonged to Prince Philip.
While it was only the rare Brady customer who needed a new fishing bag, we saw that the bags could also be useful for multiple other purposes: to carry cameras, wallets, passports, papers—anything where a shoulder bag was helpful.
The order we placed was appreciated, and the deal was sealed with afternoon tea.
Over the week we traveled from one archaic, forgotten, out-of-the-way factory to another. It was gratifying to see that these outmoded yet authentic factories still existed and were oblivious to the frivolous whims of fashion. They used only pure fibers: cottons, linens, and wools, and created classic styles that functioned perfectly even in England’s consistently wet weather.
At a trench coat factory in the Midlands, we watched craftsmen waterproofing the rubberized cotton coats with a process developed centuries ago by Jewish tailors called schmierers. Bent over sagging tables for hours, they hand taped and glued every seam, the schmiering process accomplished with their own fingers.
At another outerwear factory, we watched an antiquated process in which different blends of oils and waxes were added to cottons and linens to create jackets and coats designed to keep hunters and fishermen dry in the wettest conditions. Unlike the slick and shiny sweat-inducing plastic-coated nylon raincoats I had always known, these coats breathed. They looked like hand-me-downs from a British country lord.
A fur felt hat factory harked back to the Industrial Revolution. We ducked under a five-foot doorway, stepping down onto a packed-earth floor into a scene reminiscent of a Dickens novel. Steam hissed from hoods along the walls as grizzled elderly men shaved fur off rabbit pelts. Other men in leather aprons shaped mudlike mixtures of fur over hat forms. Upstairs, quieter, matronly women in thick spectacles sat pleating puggaree bands onto hats. Other women packed the finished hats into boxes.
We asked where the young people were. There was no work for them we were told. No one wore hats anymore. Mel and I smiled.
We visited an old mill that once made cotton ventilated fabric shirts for British soldiers serving in India, North Africa, and other tropical outposts. As the British Empire shrank, so did the mill’s receipts. Here too our order was accepted gratefully. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom, a maker of leather military belts dating to the nineteenth century accepted our order and brought back retired craftsmen to make them for us. In Ireland, in low-slung thatched-roof whitewashed buildings on hills speckled with sheep and wildflowers, we visited factories making traditional Donegal tweed sweaters. We selected yarns from the bins of just-spun wool to be knitted into sweaters, vests, hats, and scarves that looked as cozy as bowls of oatmeal.
From one obsolete factory to another, we found respect for tradition unshakable. Sadly, however, the demand for their goods had fallen off dramatically because of the loss of business from the military. Oddly, no one in England seemed to even entertain the idea that the goods coming out of these factories might have appeal in the High Street shops. But we knew our customers’ thirst for authenticity, and here, finally, were sources of unique items as carefully crafted as the surplus.
There was, however, a problem. These factories were rarely open to suggestions. When we wanted to tweak the fits, change buttons, make a small adjustment to the shape of a collar, our requests were often met with polite amusement, as if we were a couple of Yanks suggesting afternoon tea be served in Styrofoam cups.
Seeing our frustration, Richard suggested a small buying agency in Florence. He thought we might find more flexibility in Italy. One of us needed to get back to the office. I went on to Italy alone. Mel flew back to San Francisco to start on the next catalogue.
Florence was every bit as enchanting as I had imagined: an ancient, accessible city, with a nonchalant, well-worn beauty layered in history. Its language immersed me in a bath of warm childhood memories of spending time with my Italian-speaking grandmother.
I felt a natural rapport with Gerry Zaccagni. From the first moment he ushered me into his office, I could sense that he understood our aesthetic. We set out in his small Fiat to see a military bag manufacturer an hour or so out of Florence. For years, Mel and I had felt that luggage was missing in the line. In the early 1980s, travelers were still lugging around stiff, heavy suitcases or, at best, strapping them to little carts with wheels. We envisioned a line of authentic-looking carry-on luggage that was lightweight, flexible, made of natural fabrics, and every bit as sturdy as the Samsonite models of the day.
My notebooks held sketches of vintage military, mechanic, and doctor bags, and fin de siècle travel luggage. I had recently hired a bag designer to help bring the sketches to life. Niki Skelton turned the sketches into full-scale paper prototypes so that we could get a feeling for the volumes, closures, and distribution of weight on the handles. I now pulled the folded paper samples out of my bag along with my notebook of sketches to show Gianni, the foreman. He studied the paper shapes, then my sketches.
“Va bene, ma . . .” Gianni pulled out a pad of paper and drew his own sketch of the largest bag. “The corners, I think, need to be a bit stronger, no? Maybe . . . ”
As if on cue, a man from the warehouse entered with a few pieces of buffalo hide. Gianni shaped one into the leather-reinforced corner he had just drawn. The small detail added a vintage sense of character as well as strength. This was going to be fun! I got an idea for the handle, which I drew onto his sketch. Gianni considered it, nodded his approval, then added a few stitch lines to my drawing. Sì, it was my turn to nod. He took another piece of the buffalo hide and shaped it into the tube for the handle, the end of which he gave a special leaf shape that increased its stitching surface, adding strength and beauty. So it went, back and forth, as we sketched together for nearly an hour.
In a matter of days, Gianni and his team transformed the sketches and paper prototypes into finished samples of a six-piece soft luggage line in pigment-dyed Belgian linen with a certified tear strength of 465 pounds per square inch, military brass zippers and supple oak-tanned buffalo hide handles, corners, and trim. Romantic, functional, roomy, and elegant—each one an object of beauty, an instant heirloom. I could not have been happier. England had its craftsmen, but Italy had artisans.
In the same collaborative way at other factories, sketches materialized into a knit traveling dress, linen sweaters, canvas and leather shoes, colorful scarves, and unique belts. Between design sessions were delicious meals with Gerry’s family and side trips to the Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Vecchio Museum, nearby on the Piazza della Signoria.
I would have loved to design the whole line
in Italy, but due to customs duties and quotas, I was learning that it was more economical to manufacture certain classifications of clothing in different countries. We wanted to keep the prices reasonable. Fortunately, we already had a duty-free source for the leather jackets, Golden Bear, in San Francisco, where I developed styles with the owner’s daughter, Shirley Winter, from patterns they had used to make jackets for the U.S. Air Force. Golden Bear was an Old World–style business. Each jacket was entirely cut by one expert craftsman and then stitched together by one expert seamstress.
For woven cotton shirts, pants, shorts, jackets, dresses, and skirts, Hong Kong proved the best place to manufacture. Unlike Italy, however, where product development could happen spontaneously in the office of the factory, Hong Kong needed a complete spec package and a sample garment. We set up a sample room in our offices with pattern makers, assistant designers, and seamstresses. It would take three or four production samples, sometimes more, to get an item right.
Henry James claimed that his novels each came from a tiny seed. That is how our line developed. All of Banana Republic’s style was seeded in Mel’s Burma jacket and the Spanish Paratrooper shirt. Consequently, the line was based on menswear. Even the dresses were shaped and lengthened versions of men’s shirts. Men’s shirts at the time consisted of either tailored dress shirts or T-shirts, with little else other than cowboy shirts in between. The detailing of the Spanish Paratrooper shirt and Mel’s Burma jacket carried the authority of fine tailoring, while their weathered fabrics provided the nonchalance for everyday casual wear. This was the key to the line. Traditional tailoring, single-needle stitching, horn buttons, gussets, split waistbands—all the qualities you found in fine menswear (or for that matter, fine British surplus)—plus a few pockets, with the counterpoint of aged fabrics, for both men and women.