Wild Company

by Mel Ziegler

  We turned down a tempting business opportunity from Leonard Lauder, of the eponymous cosmetics firm, to partner with him in a new venture. He introduced himself as a Banana Republic fan and customer. When he heard that we had left the company, he approached us with the idea of launching a new natural skincare brand together in which he would be the financier and we would be “its parents.” We knew well what he meant when he said, “Every brand needs parents.”

  Meeting several times over the next several months, we liked Leonard and his wife, Evelyn. We found them both smart and gracious, and saw they had deep values by which they lived. Ultimately, however, we decided that rolling out of one business into another was not for us. In reaching our decision, we got a chance to recognize that our initial motivation for starting Banana Republic had endured and was now ready to be realized. Having started Banana to win the freedom to do whatever we wanted to do, it was odd in a loopy way to discover that the first thing we wanted to do with our freedom was not do another business. It drove home to us that there was not much about business that we particularly loved, even though virtually the entire world we encountered saw it differently. It was Banana Republic we had loved, not business. In the weeks and months, even years, after leaving Banana, the question posed to us most often was, “What’s next?” The presumption was that we had to have another blockbuster business simmering. Actually, not. Never even occurred to us until Leonard came along. The Gap’s Ted Tight thought he had done Don another great service in strangling us with a five-year noncompete clause in the clothing business, which we signed without a second thought. We were more than ready for a break from business.

  It wasn’t as much about saying no to the opportunity presented by the Lauders as it was about saying yes to a life without a title on a business card; a chance to discover la dolce far niente. We were fortunate to have enough money in the bank to allow us, for at least a few years, to forget about “making a living” and, instead, live. For perhaps the first time since we met, we were asking ourselves why, rather than why not.

  When the decision was made to pass on the new venture, life was new again. I renewed my passion for yoga, started a vegetable garden, learned to cook, and took up my paintbrush. Back on the streets—well, at least on the trails in our small mountain town—I reentered a hands-on life with an infant teaching me the big joy in small things. This was humbling, enlightening, and challenging. No longer as a boss of three thousand, but as an equal, I began friendships with other new mothers who became treasured companions.

  Overnight, my personal narrative shifted radically from mouthing off on “Building an Iconic Brand” to lessons in “Bringing Up Dad.”

  Having ascended from crawling through the wild and giddy feat of teaching himself to balance on two feet, our son was now perambulating in all directions and ready for any adventure. We were on the porch together, and I was showing him how to catch a beach ball. I helped him to stand just so, stretch out his little arms just so, and be ready with his hands to clamp on the ball at just the right moment. My instructions tantalized him.

  “Come on come on come on,” he said, wiggling his arms.

  “Okay,” I said. “Ready?”

  He wiggled his ready arms and bounced impatiently up and down.

  I took a breath, looked him in the eye, and from a few feet away very gently tossed him the ball. In slow motion I saw his eyes follow the ball as it came toward him until at just the right moment his little arms reached up, and his hands clamped and held it, startling us both. Looking with awe at the ball and then at me, his eyes exploded with glee.

  “I caught it, Daddy, I caught it!” He giggled with pure delight, jumping up and down.

  “You did indeed, son,” said I.

  “More! More! More!”

  I took the ball out of his hands, stepped back, and tossed it again. But his success made him even more eager to catch it a second time. He reached for the ball prematurely. It flew right past him, hit the deck, and bounced away. I made an encouraging face. He looked at me happy as ever, jumping again with pure delight, giggling:

  “I missed it, Daddy, I missed it!”

  The little guy had a big message. For me, it helped put to rest any residual ill feeling I harbored against the Gap pack. Yes, they could have been more gracious, but so could have we. My son was right. It was not about winning. It was about playing. And did we ever play—for nearly ten years. To us it was as much about art as business. Of course, as a toddler hasn’t found out yet, winning is what it’s all about if you are playing for points, but we were never playing for points. We were playing for fun.

  Yes, we “lost” the company if you look at it through a filter of win-lose, but in reality, Banana Republic gave us exactly what we asked from it.

  A lucky dad who could, I jumped at the chance to spend as much time as possible with my son. The kid, after all, had already shown me he could teach me a thing or two, as would his sister, who came along four years later. There was nothing I wanted to do more than to be Daddy. For good measure, I also took up mountain biking and body boarding, got to read books I’d always wanted to—mostly philosophy and literature. I started to paint, even tried a hand at writing a musical, delved into meditation and yoga, made it my daily goal to be present, not tense.

  In 1990, two years after leaving Banana, Mel decided to try a Buddhist meditation retreat. He packed books, hiking boots, and writing pads, and drove off for ten days of silence and meditation, only to learn that reading, writing, hiking—anything but sitting in silence—were discouraged at the retreat. The purpose of the retreat was to empty one’s mind, to stop thinking. With a mind that was always percolating, this was no easy task for Mel. While sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed, every time he tried to empty his mind, it filled up with a business idea he’d been thinking about since the second day he was there. He awoke that morning to discover there was no coffee. Mel experienced a caffeine withdrawal so severe that he vowed to never drink coffee again. “The black swill,” his marketing mind demonized it, and . . . voilà! Tea was the answer. Tea was the new business idea. And once again, of course, he could be the “first customer.”

  The meditation was not without some effect on Mel. When he came home, he was more calm and clear, but nonetheless ready to brew a new business. As much as I loved our quiet life with time to paint and build mud castles with our son in the vegetable garden, I too got excited about building a new brand. Again it was a business wrapped in an apocryphal world, this time to market tea.

  Soon afterward, Mel flew back east for a conference of the Social Venture Network, an organization for socially responsible business, where he served as a board member. On the flight back, he met an energetic and aspiring young entrepreneur named Bill Rosenzweig, who had also attended the conference. Bill managed to get Mel talking about tea for the entirety of the six-hour flight. By the time the plane landed in San Francisco, Bill landed himself a job in the new Republic of Tea as its Minister of Progress. I had already signed on as self-appointed Minister of Enchantment to help in the branding and design, as well as mixing in our kitchen the teas and herbs that would constitute the line. As Minister of Leaves, Mel conjured up the overall plan to launch the new republic.4 I was pregnant with our daughter, and again consigned to bed rest by the doctor. This time I spent my days in bed thinking through my sketches and designing the packaging for the new line of teas while our son built his Legos at my side.

  We focused on specialty premium tea, which was hard to find in the pre-Google days. In the early 1990s, if you wanted black tea, you settled for a tea bag filled with Lipton’s orange pekoe dust, even in the finest restaurants. Green tea also was hard to find, and only one company, Celestial Seasonings, offered a decent range of herbal teas. With advice from our friend Bruce Katz, founder of Rockport shoes, who joined as Minister of Finance, we created a complete line of full-leaf teas.

  We had great fun thinking up names and descriptions for each tea. There was Mango
Ceylon, “a metabolic frolic”; Assam Breakfast, “back in the body tea”; Big Green Hojicha, “chop wood carry water tea”; Ginger Peach, “longevity tea”; Chamomile Lemon, “surrender to sleep tea”; and Earl Greyer, “more of a good thing tea.”

  No matter how strong the concept or product was, unless the packaging stood out on the shelves and communicated the philosophy in look, shape, and feel, people would pass it by. The other brands were all packaged in square or rectangular tins or boxes; even their tea bags were square. Our packaging had to be different, but it also needed to be true. Coffee had edges, tea was rounder. So I explored round. Tins had been used traditionally to store tea, so I sketched tall, elegant round tins and even round tea bags. The art needed to be quiet, evocative. After exploring watercolors, I settled on softly colorful collages with a teapot in the foreground, celebrating the steeping process and what Mel termed as taking life “sip by sip.” This phrase became the company’s motto. The paper for both the labels and bags was unbleached, and the tins were refillable and recyclable. Mel’s Minister of Leaves’ musings to evoke “tea mind,” such as “The pot gives up its emptiness for the tea,” filled whatever space on the label not claimed by FDA requirements.

  We launched with a line of twenty-one teas into a world of markets that allotted about twelve linear inches of shelf space to tea, and, luckily, discovered there were a lot of people like us who had been looking for a reliable purveyor of premium tea. Today the company, now in its third decade and lovingly owned and operated by Ron Rubin and his family, offers more than three hundred teas and is the prominent brand in the now twelve-shelf specialty tea section.

  So that was the one that worked. We messed up on another one called ZoZa.

  It was Ed who prompted the whole adventure. He had gone on to become CEO of Discovery Channel Stores and then retired.

  He called us and said, “We had so much fun, let’s do something on the Internet.”

  It was 1999. Venture capital firms were throwing dot-com start-up money all over the Bay Area, and some of it landed on us. These were the years when building a website that today could be built for $5,000 ran a tab that could reach $5 million—if you could find the engineers to build it. In this manic era of dot-com start-ups, much cash and adrenaline was spent on achieving “first mover advantage,” which meant getting out of the gate first to build a hugely successful website in a specific category of e-commerce, such as pets, drugs, grocery delivery—or clothes. ZoZa was to be the first completely virtual clothing brand: no stores, no wholesale, our own cool clothing available only from our website. Our venture investors were entranced, as was everyone else in Silicon Valley, by the frothy possibilities of strictly e-commerce valuations unburdened by the weight of “bricks and mortar” overhead.

  Our kids, then ages eleven and seven, were excited that we were going back into the clothing business, but they didn’t like the idea that our new company would be only a website.

  “Make it a store,” they said.

  Now that I was a mountain biker and body boarder, I had found that some of the natural fabrics that we swore by in Banana Republic could be wanting, even dangerous, when it came to performance. Synthetic fibers had come of age in the world of athletics for their ease of use, their functionality such as wicking moisture, their tendency not to wrinkle, and so on. Patagonia was the quintessential company for the customer who appreciated performance clothing. It had great spirit, technical savvy in materials, and estimable social values as a company, but its focus at that time was strictly outdoor adventure clothing.

  Patricia was spending more time in yoga pants but didn’t want to look like she was in her workout clothing all day. We started thinking that these performance fabrics could be just the thing for the rigors of everyday living. For instance, business suits that stretched, breathed, refused to wrinkle, and could be thrown into the washer and dryer. Or evening gowns that could roll up in a purse and be taken to work for an evening on the town without your having to go home to change. And they could be made from swimsuit fabric, in case you landed in the pool at the party. ZoZa was a full line of “performance” clothing for what we called “the sport of living.” We had free yoga classes in the office midmornings, and a company Zen Master: my high school friend Norman Fischer, formerly the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. The talented Gale Parker, master of exacting fits and former creative director of Ralph Lauren’s collection, joined Patricia to design a line described by the media as “Patagonia meets Prada.” Actually, it was neither—just comfortable, stretchy, no-problem clothes that had a warm, futuristic look.

  But as I should have remembered, the product is one thing and the business another.

  In 1999, here’s how the funding worked: series A got you up and running, and series B and maybe C got you to the brink of going public. Stock market valuations for dot-coms were stratospheric. If you were playing the “first mover advantage” game, the point was to spend as quickly as you could to achieve measurable results that could be used to entice round B investors at a much higher valuation. The whole thing was predicated on series B coming in.

  We built the website, designed the clothes, and launched to great fanfare and a rush of business. Irrepressible retailers as we were, we quietly opened a showroom far from the center of town with samples and computer kiosks, so that customers could see and try on the clothing. A few months later, in March 2000, when the stock market was effervescing into the ether of Nasdaq 5000—boom! The market crashed. Series B disappeared for virtually every company that had dot-com in its name. It hardly mattered that ZoZa was up and running and that customer reaction could not have been more encouraging. We were out of cash, and nobody was interested in our series B. Too late, we listened to our kids and filled the showroom with our clothing, opening to booming retail sales and grossing $1 million in under six months. But we were running an overhead built to feed a monster. Even more devastating, Ed was diagnosed with an aggressive pancreatic cancer and died in a few months.

  ZoZa went to dot-com heaven in 2001. We had failed to accomplish with $16 million what we had done twenty years earlier with $1,500: to start a new clothing brand.

  “See,” said the kids, “you should have opened stores.”

  A note on failure and success. The seed of success is in failure, and the seed of failure is in success. Starting ZoZa, we were probably too sure of ourselves and too hypnotized by the dot-com bubble. We trusted that if we got the product right, everything else would follow, and the company would work. We often hear from people who still wear their ZoZa clothes. They tell us with great enthusiasm and a note of sorrow that we did get the product right. But that’s not enough. For every business, there’s an appropriate scale. That one we got wrong twice.

  But I’m not complaining. We got exactly what we wanted.

  Today we are happy and grateful. Our kids are in their early twenties, and although they’ve heard from a lot of other people that their parents started Banana Republic, they haven’t heard much about it from us. Kids love to look forward, so we did very little looking back. We tell this story now for them, hoping they will one day find the time to read it. We also hope our story will suggest to restless creative people everywhere that creation begins with creating the life you would like to live, without fear or inhibition. It’s never a straight or smooth road, but in our experience it was the bumps and the breakdowns, the mishaps and the wrong turns, that stimulated the breakthroughs we needed to get where we wanted to go.

  A special bonus for us in the process of writing: we got to do it together, and it brought back all over again how much fun it was.

  Choices are hidden in the pace of the day. Intentions are hidden in choices. The desire for autonomy, creativity, being close to nature, family, and having an expansive, not hectic, life were what we found reflected back as our memories bubbled.

  Since we walked out that April day in 1988, we have continued to live north of San Francisco with a mountain in our backyard wh
ere deer, fox, coyote, and puma roam.

  Banana Republic feels like another lifetime. Nonetheless, people often ask if we mind seeing the changes in the company we started. Our sincere answer is that when you give up your baby for adoption, you can’t quibble with how it is raised. I say this even when I read with a slight gulp in my throat that Banana Republic is opening a new flagship store on Paris’s Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Since it was scale that mattered most to them, maybe Don, Bob, Mickey, and Wall Street were correct in auguring that the safari and travel theme was too limited to get the company to the $2.5 billion size it is today. It is, though, I admit, perversely satisfying to see cargo fatigues, khakis, and safari and military jackets still popular year after year.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Craig Roberts and Christine Benefice, thank you for teasing the germ of this book out of us as we sailed the enchanted Bay of Islands; Robert Hardin, best pal anyone could ever wish for, thank you for the feat of remotely, from your own banana republic, helping us to fine-tune our words and thoughts; Herbert Gold for being Herbert Gold, always a beacon, dear friend, and huge fun; Bruce Katz, for your encouragement, unshakable friendship, and uncompromising truth telling; Ben Loehnen, you are an amazing editor and we hope this is not the last time we play together; Sammy Perlmutter, you are going places because you get it done; Jackie Seow, Ruth Lee-Mui, Kate Gales, Jessica Abell, Sybil Pincus, Philip Bashe, and Jim Thiel, a world-class team to birth a book; Danny Grossman for checking the work in its primitive first draft and probing it for veracity and diplomacy; Seth Godin for the generosity of your boundless imagination; Michelle Lester for your effervescent enthusiasm and keen comments; Mimi Buckley for never letting Mel forget that whatever else he was off doing, he had to keep writing; Linda Grossman, Jordana Fribourg, Chris Lopes, K.C. Hardin—we learned something from every one of you that brought this book to its resting voice; Morton Janklow, sincere appreciation for your talents and grace; and, most important, we will never forget our coconspirators, the spirited Banana Republic employees from the grand old days, the most passionate and creative lot to ever assemble inside a “corporation”; finally, of course, to the memories of Don Fisher, Bernard Petrie, and Ed Strobin, giants all.