Wild Company

by Mel Ziegler

  Because we were asking for a look they hadn’t seen before, it was often a challenge to communicate what we expected from the factories. Our first production samples of a poplin “naturalist shirt” came back looking stiff and unnatural. Even with its tiny metal snaps substituting for buttons, the shirt lacked character. Well, Hong Kong can copy anything, right? So I took a shirt home, washed it in bleach, and left it crumpled overnight in a tub of strong tea. “Oh,” said the staff in Hong Kong when they saw the distressed sample, “you like pigment dye and garment wash?” Voilà, the shirt could have been one that Papa himself wore racing with the bulls.

  Inspiration struck in a cotton fleece factory the day before I was leaving Italy. Exhausted, I wanted to wrap myself in the luscious sweatshirt-weight fleece and take a nap. Instead, I sketched a jumpsuit with a drawstring waist and soft rugby buttons down the front, and asked the factory to rush a sample to my hotel before I left the next afternoon. I tested it curled up in my coach seat on the nine-hour flight back to San Francisco. As cozy and comfy as I’d hoped.

  Well rested, I pulled on my boots and buckled on a wide leather belt as we descended into SFO. Mel was waiting in his car at the curb. His smile confirmed that we had a hit. He had a name for it: the All-Night Flightsuit.

  19

  Ask Not Why but Why Not?

  Don Fisher kept his word. Except for monthly meetings—and the few times he dropped by the office, always calling first—we rarely heard from him. We started to assemble a staff. A bear to handle operations, Ed Strobin.

  “Whatever you two think up, I’ll make it happen,” Ed pronounced, trading in his suit and tie for khakis on day one. And he did.

  Suddenly finance and administration, poof! Ed made them disappear.

  Our deal with Gap, which Don had spent countless hours structuring and restructuring with the wily Mr. Tight, was complicated. Simplified, we took a percentage of the gross margin, which meant that the more money we made for Banana Republic, the more money we would make for ourselves. The point was to grow Banana Republic fast and profitably, so Gap might get a little bit more value baked into its stock price, making Don Fisher and the rest of us richer.

  Wall Street likes nothing better than exponential growth, and we were up to giving it a try. Our view was “Why not?” We figured that as long as we did not compromise who we were or diminish what Banana Republic represented, we’d go for the ride and see where it went.

  With Gap picking up the tab—per the agreement to fund us as long as we were profitable—we decided to have some fun and open the next store at perhaps the snootiest mall in the country: the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. Because of the exclusivity it exercised in selecting tenants, Stanford was famous in the retail world for achieving the highest sales per square foot of any mall anywhere. Were we overreaching? Why not? I felt there were plenty of potential customers in the South Bay. If we could get into Stanford, we’d have no problem standing out—if only for counterpoint. It would be a kick to add a little grit to this self-consciously tasteful mall, where tiny gold-leaf signs on storefronts were preferred. Some high-end stores took understatement to a design level where it was difficult to discern their storefronts from mausoleums. We heard that the hopelessly bourgeois Gap had been turned down as a tenant. If we got in, we’d be in the company of Neiman Marcus, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Bloomingdale’s, and Nordstrom.

  When Mel called the Stanford Shopping Center, he was told that no spaces were available. There was a backlog of merchants in line for spaces as they opened up. But Mel never took no as an absolute, only an inconvenience. He hung on the phone and kept asking questions. He found out that a small, one-thousand-square-foot space was just becoming available, although there were several offers on it already. Before he hung up, he arranged a meeting so that we could make a design presentation to show the kind of store we’d build if we were awarded the space. A copy of the regulations arrived in the mail the next day. Twelve pages of “no’s” with the words tasteful, existing, standards, and consistent embedded throughout:

  Storefront character to be derived from existing shopping center’s vocabulary.

  Storefront colors must be in good taste and be consistent with neighboring merchants.

  Storefront materials must be consistent with mall’s standards.

  All awnings must be of standard Sunbrella canvas, uniform in shape, in approved palette.

  No neon or illuminated signs.

  “What? This is ridiculous!” I complained to Mel.

  “Forget you ever saw it,” he said, reminding me why I was so crazy in love with him. “Design whatever you want. If they don’t like it, we don’t want to be there.”

  So I held nothing back. I drew a color sketch of a storefront exterior with a World War II jeep protruding through the front window. Two living palm trees growing up through a rusted corrugated roof overhang framed the storefront. A life-size giraffe poked its head through the roof. On the face of the tin awning, the Banana Republic logo glowed in red neon lights. Weathered wood panel walls lined the interior. Hats hung along the rafters above racks and crates of khaki clothing. An arch of two curving ten-foot-high faux elephant tusks served as the threshold to the store.

  We brought an architect to the meeting, Ron Nunn. He cut apart my drawing with an X-Acto knife, separating the foreground, middle, and background with foam core board for a 3-D effect, and mounted it inside a deep Plexiglas box frame.

  Rosemary McAndrews, the design dictator of the Stanford Shopping Center, greeted us in a cordial but unceremonious manner.

  “Show me what you’ve got,” she said immediately.

  Ron pulled the framed drawing out of his bag and set it in front of her. Her back straightened. We could all hear ourselves breathing. Her elbow resting on the table, she cupped her chin. In slow motion, the elbow came off the table. She leaned back, turning to face Mel and me, looking us one at a time in the eye, then said,

  “I LOVE IT.”

  I wonder if she heard our unified out breath.

  “I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT!”

  Her ardor and the fact that she didn’t ask for any changes whatsoever startled Ron and me, but Mel was more philosophical.

  “What was she going to do? Ask us to move the jeep a few feet or make the giraffe a little shorter?” he said.

  Breaking form creates new context, Mel believes. When context is unfamiliar, the lack of orientation gives people a chance to see something fresh.

  Our plans specified stressed wood siding, aged corrugated metal, live desert palm trees, and an old Willys jeep. For the jeep, we sent an employee to the Southern California desert, where he located one: “still drivable, needs work, has original paint, 237,000 miles.” He managed to drive it, sputtering, back to Palo Alto, where we had the engine removed before mounting it on boulders. It looked as if it were climbing over the rocks through the window, its lit headlights still beaming and its backseat loaded with vintage suitcases, books, binoculars, and a pith helmet.

  “Looks like we’d better corner the market on World War Two jeeps,” Mel said.

  The store was a hit the moment it opened. On weekends, lines formed out the door. An employee heard folksinging legend Joan Baez say she would “come back when it was more peaceful.” Malls tally sales per square foot as the measure of a store’s success. Rents are not fixed but are based on a percentage of the sales, with a stated minimum rent that the tenant is expected to exceed. Therefore, the higher a store’s sales per square foot, the more desirable the tenant. In Stanford and other high-end malls, it was no surprise that stores such as Tiffany, selling tiny high-ticket items in a relatively small space, were king—at $500 or more per square foot in those days. Clothing stores were way down the list. But we opened at $1,000 per square foot and kept going up.

  Soon afterward, it seemed that virtually every mall owner was calling, offering prime space, sometimes even free build-outs. We were still partial to street locations. We had no interest in stam
ping out chain stores.

  Mel and I agreed that Los Angeles seemed the likely next location for a store. Serendipitously, Don called one afternoon, asking if we’d fly down with him to look at his Gap store in Beverly Hills. It wasn’t doing as well as it should, he said.

  The location was a retailer’s dream: a three-thousand-square-foot prime corner space on Little Santa Monica Boulevard, one block off posh Rodeo Drive. Gap’s store there was a nightmare, filled with a sea of chrome “rounders,” circular racks jammed with cheap, poly, shiny, froufrou blouses in candy colors, and garishly decorated jeans. In that neighborhood?!

  “How much do you think you could do here?” Don asked us.

  “How much are you doing now?” I asked.

  “About six hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Four or five times that,” Mel said without hesitation. I agreed.

  “Well, then it’s yours if you want it,” Don said.

  He sent orders to his CEO to close the Beverly Hills Gap store and hand the keys to us. Buoyed by our reception in Palo Alto, we pushed the decision even further, Hollywood style. Another jeep, of course, plus a full wall diorama with a life-size fiberglass elephant charging through the wall. To fabricate it, we hired an expert crew that had built installations in various natural history museums. The shoe department was a Quonset hut of corrugated metal. The dressing rooms were across a bridge over a creek with real water. A mix of living and silk jungle plants and vines added a touch of rain forest. For a final oomph, we brought in an authentic bush plane. When the aircraft was delivered, it required the closure of Little Santa Monica Boulevard and full police escort. The plane was hung from a blue-and-cloud-painted ceiling.

  Until this point in time, specialty stores had never been designed to be more than . . . stores. Having learned the value of entertainment to enhance retail, we were eager to incorporate elements of theater. Now that we had the funding, we escalated what had always been natural to us: pushing limits that were limits for reasons nobody could explain.

  Opening day, a line around the block. To keep the lines orderly, the City of Beverly Hills provided us with crowd control stanchions with maroon velvet cordons like those set up on Oscar night. The staff was more than ready to take on the crowds. Many employees were out-of-work actors. All salespeople were dressed in khaki outfits with “Banana Republic Guide” stenciled on the back of their shirts. We stationed two “guides” in pith helmets on either side of the door to admit people as space became available.

  As on the first day in our tiny Mill Valley store, the sound track featured Cole Porter. The first people who entered, a distinguished and attractive couple in their midforties, paused at the doorway, surveyed the interior, then waltzed together across the floor.

  It didn’t take long for the movie studios to discover us. They started buying sets of clothing for the multiple takes required in filming adventure movies. We opened a separate Studio Services Division, facilitating studio orders for everything they needed without having to strip the store’s shelves bare. Top Gun, Under Fire, Romancing the Stone, Out of Africa, and Commando were among the many movies made in Hollywood between 1983 and 1988 in which Banana Republic clothing was part of the costuming. Also, many actors and other celebrities occasionally shopped in the Beverly Hills store for their personal wardrobes, including Harrison Ford, Tom Selleck, Vincent Price, Sissy Spacek, Bob Dylan, Christie Brinkley, and Steven Spielberg, to name a few.

  We had no more worries about supply. Ed assembled a logistics team that dealt with the containers of surplus flowing in every other week. My mother was now the surplus buyer. At the same time, the new design development department translated my sketches into samples, and a complete line of clothing and accessories was being produced in Britain, Italy, and Hong Kong.

  Every garment went from sketch to flats, specs, and patterns, which were made in-house. From these, seamstresses produced the first samples, which were then closely studied on fit models. We modified and remodified the samples until we felt we had something good enough to send overseas for a first production sample. The process required a team of experienced production people who oversaw fabric selection and development, as well as choice of buttons, interfacing, and trims. When we got it all right, the production people located the factory best equipped to manufacture each particular garment. Then, when the factory samples came in, Mel and I and other employees wear tested them to make sure they felt right and held up to their promise.

  To help produce the catalogue we put together an in-house creative department of artists and writers. Now that we had the funds, we switched to a four-color printing process, although we still published the catalogue on uncoated paper that muted its color, preserving a vintage feel. We also began to advertise, but in print only: newspapers and magazines. TV was mass market and did not seem appropriate. Our visibility increased the media attention, which in turn fueled more sales.

  A few days after Beverly Hills opened to the numbers we predicted, Don called to congratulate us.

  He had only one question:

  “How fast can you open them?”

  20

  “Dr. and Mrs. Livingstone, I Presume?”

  A trip to Africa was long overdue, and with the safari line expanding by the day, it was time to test the clothes in the bush. On the way to Africa, we stopped for a day in London to prowl for inspiration in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. As always, I traveled in a bush jacket, which I now wore with khakis and boots from the line. Patricia wore a safari jacket with a white twill skirt and boots, all production samples for the spring line. Except for the surplus, we were by now designing and manufacturing all the clothing sold in the catalogue and stores.

  When we hopped into a taxi to go back to Heathrow Airport, the driver gave us an amused but approving look.

  “Dr. and Mrs. Livingstone, I presume?”

  It’s nearly midnight when we land. I’m hooked from my first inhale of the musky earth and warm, thin, dry mile-high air. Dark men in olive drab shorts, khaki shirts, and sandals scurry around in the dimly lit Nairobi airport carrying luggage. A porter brings our bags to the curb, and, appearing out of nowhere in the moonless night, a man drives up in a huge, roofless Land Rover with a sign on the passenger side of the window that says “Ziegler.” I wave him down. He hops out with the engine running and silently hands us some papers, which Mel signs and hands back. Then, still saying nothing, the man turns to walk away. One look inside the Land Rover, and we realize this is a far more complicated vehicle than anything we’d ever driven.

  “Hey, wait!” Mel calls to the man, who had almost disappeared into the dark. “Come back and show us how to drive this thing.”

  Since the man speaks only Swahili, the best he can do is instruct us by pointing to the gearshifts and instruments with a series of elaborate hand signals. He then vanishes. After a few stalls and jerks, Mel gets adjusted to the gearing system, and we manage to make it into Nairobi to find the storied colonial New Stanley Hotel and catch a few hours’ sleep before sunrise.

  We breakfast in the New Stanley’s outdoor Thorn Tree Café. It is to East Africa what Les Deux Magots is to Paris’s Left Bank. Over bracing Kenyan coffee, we scan the crowd of grizzled safari guides, starchy diplomatic attachés, mercenaries, political exiles from neighboring African nations in turmoil, Kenyan students home from British universities, photographers with lissome companions, gunrunners, and Coca-Cola salesmen. It’s a lively scene: animated conversations, head swiveling, and the occasional eye contact with a mysterious stranger.

  But wait a minute. Something is odd here. I’m looking from table to table, and what is everybody wearing? Cheaply made, misshapen, ill-conceived, impractical, shiny polyester safari clothes! These are supposed to be the real thing? Here we are on our first trip to Africa, the couple from California outfitting America in safari garb, excited to finally set our eyes on indigenous safari clothing made here in the safari capital of the world, and this is it?
Where are the safari jackets that enabled Hemingway’s stealth in the bush? The skirts and blouses that cooled Isak Dinesen, the Danish author of Out of Africa, as she watched over a scorching coffee plantation? There is not a single trace of any of them. From a sartorial standpoint, we have landed in Polyesterville!

  So it is that we first learn that quality authentic cotton safari clothes are not made or sold in this fabled outpost at the edge of the great African bush, the launching site for countless safaris into the Serengeti and the Masai Mara. Only ersatz safari garb can be found in Nairobi. We in California are the default source for the best selection of the real thing. If Kenyans were Eskimos, it would be as if we had introduced them to caribou fur.

  After breakfast, we are off in the Land Rover with maps and two five-gallon gas cans strapped to the rear fender, down Mombasa Road to the two-lane “highway” toward the Tanzanian border. Less than thirty kilometers out of Nairobi, still on the tarmac road, we spot on the distant horizon, small and faint, a giraffe roaming in the open, fenceless bush, nibbling on a treetop. Pulling off the road, we jump out with our cameras, closer and closer, giddily clicking away. Off the tarmac, now following maps on dirt roads, out of nowhere, a second giraffe—and all of a sudden, ten, twenty, thirty giraffes—lope across the open bush. Giraffes are everywhere, as they will be for the rest of the day. We had each exhausted a whole roll of film on the first one we saw.