by Mel Ziegler
There are no other cars, structures, or even fences to be seen. The vastness expands my lungs, my head, my heart. The road grows rougher, muddier. We follow some tire tracks until they disappear, driving across cracked rust-red earth where the map shows roads built by the British years ago. At scorching midday, with not even a shadow for a compass, we keep pushing on overland, over clay, sometimes through tall grasses, navigating now by wonder, oblivious to possible peril. Near some trees in the distance, large shapes move. Slowing down, we stop under a tree and turn off the engine, alone in the immense quiet under a brilliant African sky. Elephants, a small herd. We climb out, walk tree to tree, closer and closer, until we can hear their breathing and snorting. We smell them.
Here we are, just the two of us, the elephants, the bush, and the open sky. Their tusks, imposing; wrinkled, sagging skin; alert eyes; large, flapping ears. Babies crouch under mothers’ bellies. Our eyes follow them until they disappear on the horizon. Walking back to the Land Rover, we spot a massive Cape buffalo. He sees us too. As we click away on our cameras, he ferociously paws the ground. We scurry back to the Land Rover, and drive away. Quickly.
We have no idea where we are until we see the unmistakable profile of snowcapped Mount Kilimanjaro looming in the mist. On the cracked vermilion earth, I spot a perfectly preserved, sun-bleached wildebeest skull. Mel stops to take a photo of me holding it. The earth starts to tremble, a growing kettledrum roll from a dust cloud coming in our direction. We have wandered far from the Land Rover. We run to the shelter of the nearest thorn tree as the rumbling becomes deafening. Out of the dust, horns and hooves—hundreds, thousands—a thundering river of wildebeest streams past us. They keep coming, for at least ten minutes, galloping at breakneck speed, threatening our small margin of safety, mesmerizing us with their pure force.
When we resume driving, a lodge appears on the horizon before we know we need sleep.
The next day, on our last can of gas, we drive north for hours, disoriented in the tall grass and covered in fine red-clay dust. Finally we spot a tall lone Masai tribesman who, to our relief, points when we ask, “Nairobi?” On the way back, we see a group of Masai women, elegantly wrapped in bright layers, with their colorfully beaded jewelry. I’d never worn much jewelry; I don’t even have a wedding ring. But the Masai jewelry enchants me. I want it for the catalogue.
As we walk through the hotel lobby, leaving dusty boot prints on the polished floor, Mel notices a headline in the Nairobi newspaper:
MAN KILLED BY CAPE BUFFALO
Okay, we weren’t going to find quintessential safari clothes here, but there was no way we were leaving empty-handed. Back in Nairobi, we looked for someone to help us to connect with the Masai and found our way to a shop called African Heritage. It was filled with African art, crafts, jewelry, and also clothing made from native materials but in more Western styles. The owner was in the back. A wistful and distinguished-looking American expat named Alan Donovan appeared.
After a stint in the Peace Corps in Biafra and a few years working in Uganda during the insane Idi Amin era, a time of random extrajudicial killings and extreme repression, Alan had seen a horrific side of life on the continent. But he was too smitten to be shaken. Kenya became his home, and he became what Kenyans call “a white African.” A trained jewelry designer, Alan became a collector of African art and now was cofounder with a partner (then the vice president of Kenya) of this stunning pan-African gallery. The gallery also served as a cafe and center of African culture in the capital. We became fast friends. He had connections to many local tribal leaders, owned a large jewelry manufacturing workshop, and was determined to raise the visibility of African culture worldwide. Alan showed us a wide range of large exotic jewelry that he had designed. Lovely as it was, Patricia could not take her eyes off a roughly carved set of a silver-leaf necklace, earrings, and cuff displayed in a case.
“They’re exquisite,” she said.
“Turkana tribe,” Alan declared. “Traditional pieces. They melt down old aluminum pots and pans into clay molds and hand-carve designs into each piece as it cools. I have this set, and another if you like.”
“Can you get us a thousand of them?” Patricia asked.
Alan grinned. His heart was in promoting indigenous crafts. He knew how much medicine, how many textbooks, an order of this size could bring the Turkana.
“I’ll get it done,” he promised. “I’ll get them made. Somehow.”
He bought up a truckload of new aluminum pots and pans and drove north to Turkana country to meet with a chief he knew. No way, the chief informed him. The Turkana would never use new pots and pans to make jewelry, only old ones found in the bush. Ever resourceful, Alan drove through village after village, offering his new pans in exchange for used ones. Word spread, and women came running out of their houses with all their old pots. Filling gunnysacks with the many pots he collected, he chartered a small plane to fly over the Turkana region and drop them into the bush where the Turkana could find them. Two months later, we had our order.
Alan insisted we visit Peter Beard, already a noted photographer and author, before we left. Peter, a blond New Yorker now deeply tanned, welcomed us at his Hog Ranch wearing a turquoise-striped kikoi cloth wrapped sarong style. His tented camp, on a grassy knoll where giraffes came to feed and hedgehogs played, would today be called an art installation. There were four spacious weathered green canvas tents mounted on saplings: a studio tent, another for sleeping, a dining tent with tables and chairs, and a parlor tent with carpets and furnishings that looked as if they could have come from Karen Blixen’s house. Photo vignettes of stately and beautiful tribal women in hand-drawn frames, animal vertebrae, dried plants, feathers, skulls, hand-carved tools, sketches, and notes decorated his walls. His illustrated diary lay open on a table in the parlor tent, to which guests could contribute.
We gave Peter a prototype of a photographer’s bag we had been testing and asked if he would review it for the catalogue. He agreed. His review arrived a month later, extolling the virtues of the bag as an ideal home and birthplace for hedgehogs.
21
Raising a Republic
With Gap’s funding came management that elegantly executed the mechanics of our expansion. Don asked us, and we agreed, to hire two of his three sons. They could not have been more different. The younger son, Bill, warm, open, and jovial, became vice president of stores. Bob, wry, intense, and sometimes gloomy, took on the post of vice president of merchandising. Dozens of spirited new employees implemented what only two years before we had done entirely by ourselves. This took the company to a whole new level. What we designed, decreed, and dreamed up, they made happen on a scale that grew by the day. By 1984, only a year after the acquisition, we’d outgrown our five-thousand-square-foot office and warehouse on Townsend Street. We moved a block away to Bluxome Street and renovated all four floors of a twenty-thousand-square-foot vintage 1908 brick warehouse.
The ground floor became the warehouse and the shipping department. The days of having to wear wader boots on high-tide full moons to pack orders became a distant memory. Now there was a receiving area with quality-control inspectors, neatly organized with floor-to-ceiling shelving, and long packing tables where a rising flood of orders got boxed and shipped expeditiously. The second floor filled with logistics managers, accountants, analysts, a human resource department, and others handling the increasingly complex administrative demands of the business. Here leases were negotiated, bills and salaries paid, trademarks defended, permits and taxes filed. Sharing the floor were employees in charge of renting mailing lists, coordinating catalogue mailings, processing orders, and populating a bank of phones that never stopped ringing with phone orders.
The third floor was devoted to stores and product development. Bill Fisher oversaw the growing number of stores we were opening. Each one required coordinating the hiring and training of a manager and crew of salespeople, setting up the displays and windows, stocking the shelves, and
knocking unfinished construction items off the punch list. Often Bill himself could be found working all night alongside his staff to meet a scheduled opening. At the other end of the floor was the design and product development department. Here were rolls of fabric and cutting tables. Colin Woodford, the new menswear designer, worked with a busy contingent of assistant designers, pattern makers, seamstresses, and fit models to get prototype samples ready to be sent to the factories.
The top floor, with skylights, housed the creative and merchandising departments. Here Bob Fisher managed the merchandising, production, and inventory control departments, which seemed to grow desks overnight. The merchandisers selected styles from samples generated in the design department, and then determined the quantity of sizes and colors to order based on the recommendations of Helga Baughn’s team of inventory analysts. Penny Hammond and Bob Haeger, who a few months prior had handled the whole department themselves, traveled the world to find factories and mills, negotiate prices, arrange deliveries, track quotas. They also fine-tuned the details, checking that the fabrics, dyes, zippers, and stitching met our standards. The department nearest to my office and Patricia’s was the creative department: a growing sea of artists and writers who illustrated the clothing, and wrote, edited, and art directed the catalogue and ads.
We were hiring daily. How had we handled all these tasks by ourselves only a few months ago? I wondered more than once. My job, of course, was to oversee it all, which, oddly, at times I found harder to do than doing it all. Managing didn’t come easily to me, probably because I had the youthful conceit of thinking myself unmanageable. Bluntness, little regard for consistency, and bursts of compulsiveness are not usually what define an exemplary manager. At least I saw my shortcomings and was conscious enough to exercise spotty restraint in better moments of self-awareness. Luckily, good employees are not dependent on good managers, and we had a lot of them, excited and proud to be part of what was regarded as an exceptional company.
Maybe everybody was happy because we didn’t fixate on profits. Instead we were focused on being a company as good as we wanted to believe we were and claimed to be. This had many employees finding hidden reservoirs of energy and talent in themselves. More enterprise and productivity were the results, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and—guess what else?—those profits we didn’t fixate on!
Having at the start of the company not known any better, we regarded profits as the natural by-product rather than the goal of our process. Of course Gap—as could be said about any other large, publicly traded corporation—was not natively inclined to accept such a casual approach to profitability, but our numbers spoke for themselves. By late 1984, our stores were breaking $1,000 per square foot, more than double the national average, and our catalogue was mailed to more than a million and a half customers, with still better than double the average industry response. It was generally accepted throughout the apparel business that we were the retailer of the day. Consequently, Don, as promised, kept his corporate honchos at a comfortable distance.
One employee said that working for the company was “like being in the crew on a rocket ship that’s being renovated in flight.” Truth is, we were making it up as we went along. Making it up with the considerable help of outspoken customers and imaginative employees. There were customers who so connected to the Banana Republic concept that they (correctly) felt welcome to contribute to it. They sent us streams of sketches, ideas, photos, thoughts—even their own favorite garments for inspiration and possibly to copy. Employees were often wildly inventive. One thing I repeated to anyone who would listen was my belief that creativity is not the unique province of so-called creative people. Creativity is always here, you just have to use it. Being creative is no harder and takes no more energy than blocking your creativity with the idea that you are not creative. Look, listen, take risks, and libérez l’imagination. The employees eagerly took me up on this challenge, and began reinventing everything from what a gift box should look like (jeeps, rhinos, and so on), to what was played on the phones when a customer was on hold (jungle sounds and language tapes), to wrapping paper (yellowed copies of a newspaper called the Banana Republican).
Ed Strobin sent out a memo that began, “If you ran this company . . . ” and received a slew of suggestions about everything from the way to properly fold shirts, to sewing spare buttons inside the garments. A former colleague from the Chronicle turned mystery novelist, Julie Smith, came on board as a writer-at-large and initiated an intercompany newsletter named Communiqué. Louisa Voisine in the Beverly Hills store turned the Studio Services Division into a thriving entity. Visual stylist Kim Nunn created manuals filled with photos of coordinated outfits and tips that tutored store staff members in the fine art of creating attractive displays. Media buyer Jayne Greenberg suggested an ad campaign that would run like a serial, telling the story of how we found surplus stockpiles.
I had not imagined it could ever be so good. A great organization makes the boss redundant. That’s what ours did to us where we were weakest. Now with Ed masterfully in charge of the operations, Patricia and I turned most of our attention to our strengths: design, merchandising, and marketing, where we were most happily engaged.
We were immersed in “the way” of every detail: the way the stores should look, the way the catalogue should read, the way the clothes should fit, the way a store employee should help a customer—down to the smallest detail of a window display or the word chosen to describe the color of an item in the catalogue.
The question behind all questions was how large could we grow and still remain unique. Because the funds to expand were easily available, we needed to be careful not to grow mindlessly. The risk was clear: our mystique was rooted in our start as a catalogue and store where customers expected to find a unique experience and authentic merchandise. How many stores could we open before we ran the danger of being seen as another chain store? How many catalogues could circulate, and how often, before we were no longer mailing to customers who valued the thrill of discovering us themselves? How many people could our first customers—the early adopters—see walking around in khaki clothes before they no longer felt so special in theirs? All this weighed on us, yet on the other hand, what artist doesn’t want his work to reach the widest audience? To our surprise and delight, though I never would have believed it possible, during this period of Mach-2 growth in the mid-1980s, the brand remained soulful and truer than ever.
We had a complicated relationship with fashion, dating to the start of the business. At heart, I was still the “first available” clothes guy, although now a rather well-dressed one. I often said we sold clothes “for people who have other things to think about than clothing,” restraining myself from saying “better things to think about.” I can’t say I knew what those better things were. It was my privilege in these heady days to be young and judgmental and leave it to an aging memoirist to explain the liberties I took.
My attitude gave me license to take harmless inverse swipes at some of fashion’s inanities; for example, reminding customers that our buttons did button to something, that our pockets could actually hold things, and that the flaps or zippers to nowhere that sometimes festooned fashionable clothing were absent from ours. Who was I kidding? All the while I was knocking fashion, fashion was knocking on our door. Over time I quieted down, allowing myself milder follies such as naming our knit shirt without a polo player emblem a “No Horse Shirt.”
Here and now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, overstatement has assumed dreary familiarity, and this may sound like more of the same, but we honestly gave it our best shot to make the highest-quality garments we could, classic in styling and indestructible in construction. I often kidded that we, like Mr. Brady and his bags, were unwittingly planning our own obsolescence, making ourselves “redundant” by outfitting our customers in clothing so well made it would be unnecessary to ever replace it.
It seemed that many people in America related to our
antifashion stance—even if antifashion itself was becoming quite fashionable. Mel’s playful swipes were better received than not. Wearing classically styled clothing in low-key colors with no visible logos, which included most of the line, gave people the pride of being unique individuals rather than billboards for designers. The media loved the concept and the clothing. Journalists adopted the styles as their own. The clothing was appearing in editorials in fashion bibles such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Glamour. We were caught up in the euphoria of the updraft, coasting along.
To Bob Fisher, a Princeton graduate with a Stanford MBA, the data from the growing history afforded him a chance to regulate the design direction that had been to this point navigated largely by intuition. Bob felt strongly that intuition was too ethereal and risky for a business of our size. I understood his concerns but felt equally strongly that while the analysis was essential to determine quantities, size breakdowns, and distribution to the right locations, it should never presume to dictate the styles. In matters of design, data give you the rear view—only intuition can tell you what’s up ahead. An item trending up in the data didn’t show that it had reached its peak until after it began to fall. In the clothing business, with months between order and delivery, this lapse could be much too late.
At one point, we were selling many thousands of an Indian cotton shirt we called the Bombay Shirt. The logical next move was to offer it in more colors. However, Patricia not only decided against adding new colors but also insisted “that it was time” to remove the shirt from the line altogether.