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Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammaton.
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So one day I was in a lot I was in the bookstore at library something else and I see this book it says Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
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It was just a one of these very simple books but I thought there's some magic in me passing this thing and I should look at this and and they give formulas.
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It says think of how much money you want to make think of how long it's going to take you to make that money and get started.
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That's basically what it was saying.
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So in other words come up with something do something. Yeah.
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And at that time I was on an assignment actually in Australia.
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I was sent to Australia was paying the rent by freelancing.
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We wanted to travel so badly that Patricia and I both quit the Chronicle on the same day without an idea of what we were going to do. Yeah.
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Somehow we were going to do this.
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And then all this happened later.
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Just those these are how the times were so different.
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You can be this impetuous things weren't this expensive. It wasn't this hard. It wasn't so stratified. It was just easier. Uh-huh.
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And so I was in Australia.
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I went into a a disposal store which is their version of a surplus store and that's all I ever dressed in was army surplus.
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Only navy pea coats or these jackets or whatever.
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I just went to the army surplus.
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I never wore anything but army surplus.
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I love the idea of this here I'm going to go into a new place with new new surplus and I walked into the a disposal store and I found this like old khaki jacket. I picked it up.
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It was an old British Burma jacket made surplus by the the UK somewhere in the late 1940s and somehow found itself into this thing.
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And when I got off the plane and Patricia picked me up at SFO she saw the jacket said where did you get that jacket?
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That's where did you get that?
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And then I wore it to work. I wore it to play.
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Where did you get that jacket?
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Where did you get that jacket?
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Patricia started changing the buttons putting patches on the sleeves leather behind the counter. Wait a minute.
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This is how much you want to make?
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This is how long it's going to take you to make it.
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This is what we're going to do.
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We're going to sell surplus clothes as fashion.
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It started as essentially army surplus. Yeah. That's all it was.
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That's all it was and all I had was $1,500.
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We had $1,500 between the two of us not any more that we had saved.
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You could do that in those days. Yeah.
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And I had this fail-safe system that if I ever go below whatever it was at that point like $1,000 I wasn't going to spend any money. Yeah.
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This is my part of me that says yep sorry you starve now while you have $1,000 in the bank and figure it out.
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So we were down that low. I was down to $1,500.
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How did you start how did you start the business? a reporter.
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I started I started researching it.
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I started looking at this and this well this is how army surplus is sold.
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Well in the United States it was sold by the government in huge lots.
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They would just sell a huge lot and then take it off to places like Travis Air Force Base and lot number one lot number two lot number three used airplane propellers excess toothpaste shorts.
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You'd have to buy the whole lot Uh-huh. and then sell it off.
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These were the jobbers who were the wholesale version to who fed you the whole thing.
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I I I went we went there and tried to buy something.
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Uh we just needed to get the jackets and we didn't need the toothpaste or the propellers or whatever it else it was.
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We didn't know what to do with them.
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We didn't have the money for them.
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So we had to go to the jobber and he was in Oakland and we realized that there were only about six or seven of these guys who were really bidding these things up all across the country.
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They were all they all knew each other. It was a little club.
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They were these Jewish guys you know really who understood how to make the schmatta business work and everything else.
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They had it they had it in their blood to make it work.
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So we found one of these guys in in Oakland.
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And we came to we went over to his warehouse and started to look around it.
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Describe the whole warehouse for me.
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I'm interested in that dung stuff. Yeah.
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It was full of mold and sweaty clothes that had never been washed and and greasy stuff and but it was but but they or no? They sorted it out. They did sort it out.
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And so over here was some shirts old poly shirts.
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Was it all military stuff or not necessarily?
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No excess military they were buying from the military.
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That's where they were buying it from.
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All these auctions that they they would go around the country and and bid against each other and then they would trade afterwards. Uh-huh.
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From my lot I'll trade you this I'll trade you that.
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That was too we didn't have the money to do that.
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We didn't have the wherewithal to do that.
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We that wasn't what we wanted.
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We wanted to find clothes.
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scale than what you were doing.
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We wanted to just sell fun fun clothes.
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Other people well if you can buy a surplus jacket and these were the polyester clothing years. Yeah.
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So these were the natural fibers.
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The only way you could find natural fibers.
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And so in these were the days when designers were just weren't really designing anything particularly great but throwing their names all over them. Uh-huh.
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My sense of fashion is you know the next available thing to pull off the rack in the closet.
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I didn't have it I didn't think about fashion.
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It was but Patricia is she did.
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Were most of the things that you saw either khaki or olive Yes. green? Yes.
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Almost everything was khaki or olive green.
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Some version of of both if it was a textile if it was a a garment. Yeah.
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But what we found in this warehouse was a whole pile of shirts with epaulets on them that looked fantastic.
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They were these epaulets so these were the 70s so we wore epaulets beautiful safari kind of shirts.
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We asked them where did these come from?
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They Spanish The Spanish yeah the Spanish army shirts.
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They were paratrooper shirts.
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Spanish paratrooper shirts. Oh interesting. How much? $5 a piece.
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So Patricia nudges me and we just walk away. She's good at this. He said well what?
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How many How many shirts did they have?
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There were about 500 of them because that's what we we bought them all and that's what there were 500 Spanish paratrooper shirts.
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I don't know how or why I was driving a Pinto in those days but we had a Pinto and we drove up to the warehouse and loaded the whole back of the Pinto with these 500 By the way it was five $5 no how about a dollar how about ending up at $2 whatever it was per shirt. Yeah.
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That's why that's right cuz it was $1,000 and we had $500 left. There it was.
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So we drove them back to our our house in Mill Valley at that time. We were renting a house.
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And started washing them one at a time one at a time one at a time one at a time.
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And um we had a dinner party.
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Some friends were over and one of one of our friends was one of my best friends over the years Herbert Gold who was a novelist who if you haven't read his book Fathers is one of the greatest books of all time in the 1950s. He wrote that book.
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He was sort of mentored by Saul Bellow and he's of that same he's written many books.
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He just died at 99 recently. Dear friend. He was at the dinner.
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And he's kind of a buy it at goodwill.
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He doesn't he no spend no money. He's just a bohemian.
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He was a beatnik of the beatnik era in San Francisco.
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He walked upstairs he brought the then he brought one of the shirts up.
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And he's like he said what is this?
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And Patricia said well it's a Spanish paratrooper shirt. He said I want one.
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I said take one Herbert and she said $6. 50.
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I can't you charge my friend money for your shirt anyway.
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So he he takes out his checkbook he writes $6. 50.
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Was that your first sale? That was our first sale. Oh great. That was first sale. Then he puts it on. This is hilarious. Then he puts it on.
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And the sleeves came to here. They were short. sleeve.
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Three-quarter it it was I don't think it was meant to be that.
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It was it was it was surplus because short.
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too short cuz he went down and found five more and they were all the same.
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Now we knew why it was surplus. Yeah. Cuz they didn't fit. Didn't fit.
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We thought this is crazy. What are we going to do?
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I said well we're going to sell a short-armed Spanish paratrooper shirt. Yeah. That's what we own. Yeah.
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And we told this is probably because Franco had this crazy idea that he didn't want any long-armed people around here.
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We just we made up some fun stuff and wrote some copy about it. Uh-huh.
9:18
At that point there was a flea market in Marin City.
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They had a big dirty open lot there that every Saturday they had a flea market in it. It was huge flea market.
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So I said let's go to the flea market and sell our short-armed Spanish paratrooper shirts.
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So we go there the first day and we have a sign short-armed Spanish paratrooper shirt $6.
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95 or whatever it was $6. 50.
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And people are fascinated with it.
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They're just fascinated with it and they're coming by looking at it.
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By the end of the day we sold like three of them.
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I said what are we doing wrong?
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Patricia said they're too cheap."
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So, the next week we went back and doubled the price and sold out.
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And then we began to realize, well, we're in like the strangest of strange businesses. We're buying surplus.
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There can be incredible margins Yeah. in this business.
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Most people in business school would tell you if you raise the prices, you'll sell less. Yes, of course.
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This was the first reason that we knew that you you the best asset we had is having no experience whatsoever. Absolutely.
10:28
It was absolutely It was just we were professional amateurs.
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And I've been one ever since because of that.
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How did she get the idea to double the price?
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She she was interested in fashion.
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She worked at Macy's and when it was a real store in the in the 1960s and down in the on Union Square in San Francisco, she worked as a in under some people in the fashion department helping to buy and so she was very she was very aware of the fashion world.
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I had zero visibility to it. But she could see it.
11:00
I would never known that, but she it's fascinating. Well, look at today.
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Look at the price of some of these of some of the clothing that's out there with certain label names on it. Yeah.
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Do you really think that's not a 90% margin?
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It's absolutely a 90% I mean, this is public thievery, but look at how many happy people who have been stolen for I mean, it's just crazy.
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It's crazy this this big because this whole world we live in now is that is about, you know, manufactured scarcity.
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Anyway, so that became it.
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We got enough money to open a little store on a side street in Mill Valley. $250 a month.
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The only thing is we couldn't lock the door because there was an Aikido studio upstairs and we had to let people come in for evening classes.
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So, we had a store with all our merchandise in it, but we couldn't lock the door and people had to walk in and out all night even though we weren't there. Yeah. 1970s Yeah.
12:00
What did you name the first store?
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The name was Banana Republic.
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So, Banana Republic the first $250 a month store was Banana Republic. That was the beginning.
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And the reason I named it Banana Republic is I knew it would get noticed.
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Because, you know, you just didn't name stores Banana Republic in those days.
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That was not what you did. Yeah.
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And it was making a political statement on top of everything else, which I wasn't going to leave the rest of me behind to go into the fashion business.
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I mean, and Patricia wasn't going to leave the rest of her body.
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So, we went into it as a writer and an artist.
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And when we look back now from where we are and look at it in the early years before it was destroyed by The Gap, there was nothing quite like it.
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It was It was all about creativity. Just do anything.
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Just make it fun and make it true. Make it honest. Just no limits. Mhm.
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If you can imagine it, you can do it. Yeah. Think and Grow Rich.
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And we were because we were who we were, we were we were drawn to other unemployable people. Yeah.
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Who were just amazing when you hired them. Yeah.
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And so the whole thing became wacky and creative and the catalogs were just I don't know if you ever remember them in the 1980s, they were each one of them was lovingly created.
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We never ran a photograph.
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Patricia in the beginning is an artist.
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We couldn't afford a photographer.
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So, the first catalog she would draw.
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So, illustrated clothing with a description.
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With a with with a literary description. Yeah. I was a writer. This is what I did.
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So, this is the only place we felt comfortable. Yeah.
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We didn't know anything else, but we did know how to write the copy and we did know how to draw do the drawing.
13:46
do you think the combination of the illustrations and the copy sold versus the item itself?
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Do you know what I'm saying?
13:55
Well, it it was a unique experience because if some of the items were a Swedish army gas mask bag without the gas mask.
14:07
Now, would you buy that because it was written about or would you would you say, "I have to own one of these things?"
14:13
But everything had its story. Mhm.
14:16
There was a story for everything.
14:18
And everything it sounds like was limited because people It was genuinely limited because it was surplus. It was when it was gone.
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So, you would buy 500 and 1,000 and when those were gone, gone.
14:27
You didn't have that anymore. Gone.
14:29
So, it was always turning over what you So, that would be another reason for people to either check out the catalog or come to the shop is because everything was going to be different next time. Absolutely. Everything was new.
14:43
And they were unique things we were finding.
14:45
The way we were doing it we were sort of Well, okay, there was a British army sleeping bags.
14:51
But they had sheepskin liners. Mhm.
14:51
So, we we stripped the sheepskin out of them and made sheepskin vests. Yeah.
14:58
Would you ever dye them or do anything to them?
15:00
Later on we dyed everything.
15:00
We had all kinds of colors. We dyed everything. Yeah.
15:05
Not in the early years cuz we didn't have the money to do it.
15:06
But when we had the resources to do it, we would have done all that earlier.
15:10
We were working with what we had. Yeah.
15:12
And there were basically the two of us doing everything in the beginning.
15:15
Stapling the catalogs at the kitchen table. Yeah.
15:20
Hand printing them out of the catalogs first catalog how many print? Well, I 500. Yeah.
15:24
And where would you distribute them?
15:26
Well, I come from media, so I knew the only way I was going to make this thing work is to get attention.
15:32
So, I sent it to every to every city desk, to every newspaper, to every magazine, to to everywhere I possibly could hoping somebody would open it and realize Banana Republic.
15:42
Look at this crazy thing. Look at this copy.
15:46
And it so happened it landed one day on the desk of John Gambling WOR radio New York tristate area broadcasting Huge listeners. broadcasting.
16:03
Patricia one day were desperately we just it's raining.
16:05
Nobody's coming in the store in Mill Valley.
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She goes in to open the store. She picks up the phone.
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She we were so desperate that she would try to take wrong numbers and turn them into sales.
16:20
And this happened to be hello, who who am I talking to? Patricia. And who is this?
16:24
John Gambling and you're on the air. WOR New York. Amazing. That's how it happened. Amazing. It was amazing.
16:33
So, she's funny and she's great and she told some wonderful stories and she described some of the crazy merchandise.
16:42
And he said at the end he says, "Well, how does somebody get one of these things?"
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And because we manufactured 500 of them and they were expensive, we just said we're going to sell them for a dollar.
16:51
We sold the catalog for a dollar.
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It was a literary beautiful catalog.
16:56
So, Patricia said, "Send a dollar to post office box 745 Mill Valley, California blah blah blah blah blah."
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And we were right across from the post office.
17:04
Four days later, the postman walks over with two sacks of mail.
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Every one of them had a dollar in it. Amazing. And that was it.
17:16
And from that, we never raised any other money.
17:19
It was our $1,500 we were working on cash flow.
17:23
Although I wouldn't even know what it was then.
17:24
It was just let's open 25 envelopes and go to dinner.
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19:09
Tell me more about the name about how much thought went into the name.
19:13
Well, I knew it was naughty. Yeah.
19:16
I just knew it was naughty.
19:16
I didn't know what I just knew I was not going to it was going to get attention. Yeah.
19:20
And I had to get attention because I had no other money and it was just I had to get attention. Yeah.
19:26
I mean, I realized later on that I'm a marketing guy. Mhm. This is what I do.
19:30
I mean, I knew how to do it. It was innate to me. Yes.
19:34
Walk me through the growth of the company. The next step.
19:36
People are ordering catalogs.
19:38
They're ordering catalogs. What happens next? Well, we need help.
19:44
We're doing this all ourselves.
19:44
So, a beautiful woman walked in and said, "Shopping and just said, "Oh, are you hiring?"
19:52
And Patricia said, "Yeah, but I can only pay you $5 an hour." I said, "Oh, it's okay."
19:56
And she came in and then we had an employee.
19:59
We had a store with an employee manager.
20:01
It It was It was happening. lot of repeat customers?
20:04
Yeah, they were really people who were devoted to it.
20:06
A lot of creative people. Yeah.
20:08
Mostly creative I mean a lot put a Banana Republic label in the clothing? Oh, yes.
20:12
Banana From the beginning? From the beginning.
20:14
It said Banana Republic and not only that, but the original logo were two bananas and a star, a red star.
20:22
Because I remember that particularly because after a while I realized we could probably get a bank loan.
20:28
So, we went to the local place that had our checking account and we met Fred, the loan loan officer, and he looked at this he said, "Well, do you have a business card?"
20:35
He looked at the business card with this red star in the middle of it.
20:39
I said, "Oh, no, no, no, we're just this is we're just making up this name."
20:43
We had to explain it to him.
20:46
And we talked to him we talked to him we talked to him he says, "Well, look, you know, here's how you get credit.
20:50
You got to have capacity which is basically collateral.
20:57
There were three C's I'm forgetting what the third C was.
20:59
You have to have character."
21:02
He said, "Well, you don't have those other C's, but you are sure two characters."
21:04
He said, "Well, I'll tell you, have you thought about net 30?
21:10
Asking your suppliers for net 30?" I said, "What's that?"
21:18
And that's what happened. Yeah.
21:20
We financed through net 30 which then became net 60 and net 90. We always paid early. Yeah.
21:24
And, you know, years later when we walked around before the company really evolved into more uh broadly, we would show up at the surplus conventions in place in Las Vegas and these were other people with with army navy stores how the hell you guys do this?
21:39
Cuz we were just selling you this fashion.
21:40
We're just selling you this fun. Yeah.
21:42
Because we this is what we wore this is what we did.
21:45
We didn't even We don't live in boxes. Yeah.
21:49
You framed it as a different thing than army surplus. Yes.
21:52
Cuz there are plenty army surplus stores, but Banana Republic wasn't an army surplus store even though It was you sold army surplus. Yeah.
22:02
So, it starts with just the clothing and then over time you would start dying it.
22:06
What other modifications would you do?
22:08
You said you would take something apart.
22:10
Well, we we we knew we were selling a lot of khaki.
22:11
So, we couldn't manufacture we didn't have any money enough money to really even manufacture at that point.
22:16
We were getting all the surplus we could and we were running low on some things.
22:22
So, we would go and find a company that was making natural fabrics Okay.
22:27
and and making things in khaki and we would say, "Would could you just take that shirt and change these buttons and make a few of these for us or could you just do this put and put our label on that pant or" Yeah.
22:36
And that's how we sort of expanded. Uh-huh.
22:39
And that's how we began to do more, but we still weren't didn't have the money to dye.
22:45
I'll never forget the moment when we got that idea.
22:51
I was in lower Broadway in New York.
22:51
I was there visiting Patricia was back in in Mill Valley at the store.
22:58
And there was a store I forget the name of it.
23:03
It was a wonderful store that was on lower Broadway to something clothing it.
23:08
But what they did is they took everything and they dyed it in these outrageous colors.
23:13
And I walked into that store I said, "This is what we should be doing."
23:18
I went out to a phone booth and noisy lower Broadway phone search I called Patricia she said, "Hey, how you what's up?" I said, "Dye it. Dye it. Dye it. Dye it."
23:28
She said, "Are you saying I'm fat?"
23:34
Are you telling me I'm fat?
23:36
She was joking, but she got it because we had more than khaki.
23:39
the first thing that you manufactured yourself or did you ever get to that stage?
23:43
Well, here's what happened.
23:46
The deficit began to show.
23:49
I had no interest in business.
23:52
I had no education in business. And Patricia neither.
23:54
We were just two creative people bumbling along Mhm.
23:59
through this whole thing.
24:01
And we had a some customers who just loved what we were doing and there was a fellow by the name of Myrick Shear who lived in Marin County who was a shopping center developer.
24:11
And he came in often and he said, "I want to put one of these in my shopping center. This is great."
24:18
And I couldn't even imagine how I was going to do that.
24:19
Nobody loaned money to I mean, people today could not possibly understand what it was like in the 1970s.
24:29
Venture capital if anything was for a few little companies of making chips in Silicon Valley.
24:35
The very idea of of financing a brand or a clothing nobody would do anything.
24:41
That was just ridiculous.
24:42
And then particularly one named Banana Republic.
24:45
I mean, it was just this was too dissonant Definitely. even if for those times. Definitely.
24:53
And Myrick would come in and I said, "Myrick, I can't.
24:54
We don't have the capacity to do it. We don't have the money.
24:58
We don't have I just can't do it.
25:00
We can't even we're not sleeping.
25:03
We're filling orders at night which is in the store.
25:05
We're trying to make this thing happen.
25:06
We're writing the catalog.
25:07
We were I mean, those days you had to set the catalog in linotype. It was crazy.
25:12
Patricia was so tired one night she was driving past after three nights of no sleep over the Golden Gate Bridge and swerved into the other lane. Wow.
25:21
I mean, we were just we were just we were years in were you now?
25:23
We were now four years in and we were doing it for us. We could travel.
25:29
We could do We had I mean, what but we weren't really making any money. We had two stores. I said, "Take a day off.
25:34
Just go walk in the mountain.
25:36
Just walk in the mountain."
25:39
And I went and I meditated.
25:39
I didn't know I was meditating, but I was actually letting my mind just go free and I thought, "You know, the only solution here is not to not to close the catalog or not to close the store, but to grow."
25:51
Pretty obvious, but you for intelligent person I was pretty stupid.
25:57
I didn't see that, but then when I saw that I said, "Okay, so" she said, "What do you" So, I came back and I said, "Here's the solution.
26:02
We're going to open a second store." She said, "What?"
26:06
We're going to get another store in San Francisco. So, we did.
26:08
We went we opened the store in San Francisco and it was gangbusters. It was people loved it.
26:12
It was on Polk Street between um Pacific Heights and Russian Hill.
26:18
And we did we did really well in there.
26:20
And um Is the store still there? No, it's long gone. It's long gone.
26:27
So, we still all we wanted to do was travel and we were bone tired bone tired.
26:34
And so our friend Myrick said, "Well, come to my shopping center. Put this in here."
26:38
Uh I said, "Not only can I do it, but I'd sell this company tomorrow if I could."
26:44
He said, "Well, oh you ought to meet Don Fisher."
26:46
Well, Don Fisher is the guy who started The Gap.
26:50
He started The Gap maybe 10 years earlier in San Francisco by selling Levi's Mhm. and records. Mhm.
26:54
And The Gap was the thing from the 1960s, the generation gap. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah, yeah.
27:03
And so know that's what The Gap was.
27:05
That's what Yeah, it was named after the gen don't trust anybody over 30.
27:09
By that point The Gap had 500 stores.
27:09
It was a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.
27:14
Were they still only selling Levi's?
27:16
They No, by that point they were they were they were they were gone they were in malls. Yeah.
27:20
They were manufacturing clothes with a lot of different self a lot of different labels in it none of which said Gap.
27:28
And they were putting them on these rounders and nothing was on on the wall and on shelves and there was just clothes in a white space called a store in a mall. Yeah.
27:38
He walks into this thing store and he's Don Fisher.
27:41
He He was an exceptional person I will say.
27:43
He really was an exceptional person. Very bright, very smart.
27:47
Real estate was his background.
27:51
But he got found his way into the clothing business through real estate. Mhm.
27:56
And he started walking around the store and picking up things and he says, "What's What's this?"
28:02
And the salesperson would say, "Well, that's that's a Falkland Islands bathing suit from the British surplus from the Falkland Islands." What?
28:08
He would look at this and he would look at He started looking at every item and reading the tab and reading the letters.
28:17
We used to post all the letters people sent us in the dressing rooms.
28:20
They were all posted over the walls cuz people were just they would love the company and they just sent us love letters all the time and we just posted them. That's a nice idea. He said, "Yeah, yeah." He was interested.
28:31
He actually wanted to buy the company.
28:34
And um he said, "Let's have lunch.
28:36
Let's go around the block."
28:38
There was a place to have lunch.
28:41
He brought his CFO with him.
28:44
He then he got into drilling down questions.
28:47
He said, "Well, where are you incorporated?"
28:49
I said, "Well, I don't know. I incorporated myself.
28:50
I figured out how to incorporate it."
28:51
He said, "You have an accountant?"
28:52
I said, "No, I'm the accountant. I did everything. I was the lawyer. I was the accountant. I did everything.
28:56
Couldn't get no money for this stuff." Yeah. Do it yourself.
28:59
It was It was mom and pop.
28:59
It was a mom and pop business.
29:03
He said, "Well, what do you do for markdowns?"
29:05
Patricia said, "We don't. We mark them up."
29:11
He said, "What are your margins?"
29:12
He said, "It's not 80% 90%." He said, "You're lying." This was the CFO.
29:18
He was the executive He was He was lying.
29:23
The truth is we didn't really know our margins cuz we didn't even have a we couldn't even keep inventory.
29:26
We didn't have the capacity to even keep inventory.
29:30
We were just buying surplus.
29:32
This is probably what we should charge selling it.
29:33
It was just all on the We were just going. We were in motion.
29:40
There was no way out of this thing but except through it and we were that we were It wasn't getting us anywhere yet yet because we everything was going wrong all the time and we had to be there to fix it.
29:51
And so anyway, out of that somehow or another, we ended up selling the company to the Gap.
29:58
Was it a good thing to do?
29:58
Was it a bad thing to do? Tell me more about that.
30:01
That's that question, if from where I am today, Yeah.
30:05
it was a great thing to do because my life took the best turn ever. Mhm.
30:10
The best turn it was a great thing to do from a business perspective, Mhm. it was insane. We did everything wrong. Yeah.
30:23
Everything wrong from protecting our asset, from getting the value that we really created, everything wrong.
30:34
I thought, well, I've got to get a lawyer to help us.
30:35
So, how do I go find a lawyer?
30:37
I asked my friend Herb Gold for a lawyer and who does he pick?
30:39
He has this friend Bernard Petrie who's just this wonderful human being, but he's the strangest human being.
30:48
I put him up against the Gap and he tries to do the best he can, but he knows about as much about business as we do. Yeah.
30:54
Even though he's 10 years older than we are and even though his father was a Cleveland tailor who started a chain called Petrie Stores which was a massive chain.
31:07
He's the son of this man who I sat next to dinner at who knew the sales in every one of his 1213 stores the day before when he was 85 years old. Wow.
31:17
So, you can imagine what his son who didn't want to be that man Yeah. what he was our lawyer. Yeah. Lovely. We loved him. Yeah.
31:25
So, we just whenever we negotiated, we negotiated and it was okay we were going to take it was enough money I forget.
31:30
We're going to go we had enough to travel. We're going to do it.
31:35
The last minute Don Fisher shrewd said, I can't do this. Why can't you do this?
31:40
He says, he says, I can't do this because I wouldn't know what to do with this company.
31:45
I said, well, we're not looking for a job.
31:49
I I I'm not talking about a job.
31:49
He said, you know, you you just show me how this company can be profitable.
31:54
I'll give you whatever you need to make it be profitable and I'll give you a percentage of the sales or gross margin or whatever it was down the line.
32:02
So, we looked at each other at that point, you know, we although Bernard wasn't very expensive, we hired a CPA from Arthur Andersen who was going and we had owed about $50,000 in fees which we didn't have and I didn't know whether to sell or whether or not, but he said, I promise you I won't interfere. This is your company.
32:27
You do whatever you want. I don't care. It's yours.
32:30
Just plug this profitable.
32:33
So, Patricia and I talked about it and ultimately I was like, well, maybe and she was, let's do it. So, we did it.
32:43
And then we began to basically with funds, we began to really start to have fun.
32:52
Of course, Don would walk in and he says, well, why don't you make jeans and khaki?
32:56
We said, no, Don, we don't do that.
32:56
You know, it's In other words, we test if there was a tester of two.
33:00
And then he really did retreat.
33:01
He didn't do anything except support us in in every single way.
33:06
And we grew the company for years doing that and but we weren't fitting into a regimen. Something was wrong.
33:14
at the company after this?
33:16
there for another basically it was almost five years owning it and five years four years with the Gap.
33:20
And he was true to his word until he wasn't. Mhm.
33:25
And it was a good experience.
33:25
It was a good experience.
33:29
It was a wonderful grow over that four years?
33:32
In those four years we opened 50 stores, I think and we and we had a circulation of 30 million catalogs.
33:37
It was just a lot in those days.
33:39
Something something a lot, I think.
33:41
I forget exactly what the number I can't recall. 50 50 or 60 stores.
33:46
still writing the copy for the catalogs?
33:48
By that point we had a creative department and they were amazing.
33:49
They were just amazing We hired people who as I said could never get a job anywhere else, but they were in that playpen, they had so much fun.
34:01
And so they took the way Patricia drew and they took the way I wrote and they just amplified it.
34:08
Much better than we ever could. Yeah.
34:09
I mean, they just beautiful.
34:09
They did a beautiful job.
34:13
And that went on for for a while and and it was it was fun.
34:16
We traveled and found things and we did unusual things at that point.
34:21
We became Well, we would go to Italy.
34:23
We would find our We would pass by something that was a restaurant trade show. Oh, what's in there?
34:29
And we go into the restaurant trade show and we say, look at those jackets. Italian waiter jackets.
34:37
Wow, those are really cool. Italian waiter jackets.
34:39
So, we would buy 10,000 Italian waiter jackets and dye them all different colors. Mhm.
34:47
The vendor would say, how many restaurants do you But we would do things like that.
34:52
We would fly to Israel and find Israeli army paratrooper bags or something like that and just send and we would get a prototype of it and send it back and make more of those things.
35:07
We would go to England and manufacture to match the surplus as well. As much as we could. Yeah.
35:13
Or we went for instance in England, we went to uh we found a man by the name of Mr. Brady. Mr.
35:19
Brady would make these beautiful bags, these khaki leather bags that the fisherman used Mhm. and uh they never broke.
35:28
No matter how many years later if you send it back to Mr. Brady, he would fix it. And we would ask Mr.
35:34
Brady if he would make some bags for us and change this and change that and Mr.
35:38
Brady would make some bags for us and we would sell those bags as part of the catalog and things like that.
35:42
We did that a lot of that everywhere we could.
35:46
Would you say it still felt like your company for those four years? our company.
35:50
He was not in any It was entirely It wasn't even It wasn't kicking out enough money for them to worry about the analysts.
35:58
It wasn't really kicking out earnings yet Yeah.
36:00
because their their volume was so big and we were It's only when it began to get that way Yeah.
36:08
uh that Were they helpful in terms of opening stores or other things like They real estate They had a real estate department.
36:14
Yes, that we relied then they built they helped us build the stores.
36:18
They were That was machine.
36:18
They knew how to do that.
36:20
And yeah, but we again, there was a little bit of conflict. Yeah.
36:26
Because what Don liked was mall stores.
36:27
I said, I don't really shop in malls.
36:30
I like street stores, you know, and so we got as many street stores as we could.
36:34
If there weren't that many, but we would find street locations that we really loved and thought, this is the right place to put a store and build a store there, but no two stores were alike. Mhm. That was the rule.
36:48
No two stores were alike.
36:48
This one's going to be a safari camp.
36:50
This one's going to be an embassy.
36:52
We were always playing with the metaphor. Yeah.
36:56
We were always inside this apocryphal country Mhm.
37:03
called Banana Republic and everything was about that.
37:05
The gift boxes were rhinoceroses.
37:09
The The The gift paper was the Banana Republican newspaper and it was it was every single thing if you could We had a climate desk and you could call the climate desk and hear what the climate was going to be where you were going to go.
37:23
I don't people today listening to this and thinking, how could there have been a life without internet?
37:26
Well, there was no internet. Yeah.
37:28
In the initial days, those catalogs we had to get an order form in there, put an 800 number and if you wanted to order from us, you had to either call the 800 number and give us your credit card or you went out and got a stamp, found a post box, it dropped it in the mail. That's how you ordered. Yeah. Yeah. For dinosaurs today. It's a great story. It was it was fun.
37:57
And then what happened at the end of the four years?
38:01
At the end of the four years, a stock market event called Black Monday. Mhm.
38:07
The Gap had reported earnings maybe a month earlier and they missed earnings and the stock fell a lot.
38:15
And then on Black Monday, it fell 50%.
38:21
And did that happen just to the Gap or to the It happened while we were at a conference somewhere at the Claremont Hotel with all our store managers and I went out and saw this Black Monday headline. I had no idea.
38:29
It just Well, I'm saying did Black Monday only impact the Gap or did was it across the board? The market.
38:38
It was it was one of the biggest crashes of all times.
38:40
Black Monday 19 80 seven. All right. So, the market changed.
38:46
It wasn't that the Gap failed No.
38:49
The market wasn't the Gap.
38:51
It was the market, but the Gap but everything went down with a sinking ship.
38:54
And they had already gone down. Mhm.
38:56
So, they were down once and now down again Mhm. and they panicked.
39:02
And the analysts at that point, they were trying to say, look, we have Banana Republic. It's coming up.
39:06
It's looking really great. Blah, blah.
39:08
And the analysts were saying, this safari thing can be nothing more than a trend.
39:11
And it was we I said, it was This is the most ridiculous thing ever that that we weren't safari any longer. We were travel Mhm.
39:20
clothing and we were really functional travel clothing.
39:23
Buttons that buttoned to something, zippers that worked.
39:27
Everything was functional and beautiful and exquisite fabrics, natural fabrics.
39:34
We really were, but at that point they decided, well, things like this.
39:39
Things This this the kind of things that would happen.
39:43
We'd have a shirt that beautiful Indian cotton shirt and we'd sell it season after season and we would change the colors. It would be great.
39:55
And um Patricia at one point said, you know, this is getting old. We got to change it.
40:04
Well, the data monsters at the Gap said, how do you throw out an item that is selling this kind of tonnage?
40:12
You can't really And she would have to argue.
40:13
There was there was suddenly now an argument.
40:17
We would still throw the thing out of the catalog. It didn't matter.
40:18
But now there was an argument.
40:22
And that didn't work for us.
40:25
This isn't what we bought into.
40:25
The good fortune was that for many years we were trying to have a baby and we did. And my son was born.
40:33
And I was already 43 years old.
40:33
We had just signed a huge contract for lots of money.
40:40
And uh I said, I'm not doing this. I don't care. We have enough. And we left. Wow.
40:51
And that's what happened. Mhm. And it was strange.
40:55
To all of a sudden your progeny was was gone. They killed everything.
40:58
They they killed the catalog.
41:00
They killed the magazine that was going up.
41:01
They changed the clothes.
41:04
For years customers were furious.
41:06
Then they hired creative people.
41:09
People who posed to know what they were doing and they made it even worse. Professionals. Professionals, right. That's what happened.
41:19
And it took them many many years.
41:19
In fact, I would say because of the the way it all happened it wasn't really it wasn't classy. And I didn't like that.
41:33
The way that the exit happened.
41:36
I just never really looked back Yeah. at it.
41:40
But finally now I can see I've I've been noticing that that they're coming back to the roots Mhm.
41:48
of the company, but more from a 21st century standpoint.
41:51
They're trying to regenerate the products that were there. Mhm.
41:54
And I think there's pretty some some pretty nice things that they have.
41:57
I haven't really looked at it, but people have brought my attention to it.
42:03
Interesting to relive all that. Yeah.
42:07
Then you started your your life of meditation and being a father.
42:10
I loved still do love being a father.
42:15
You know, I'm a writer and I have been working on a book forever that someday I'll publish.
42:19
It's called Bringing Up Dad. They raised me. Yeah. They really did.
42:26
They're still raising me. Yeah.
42:29
Even in the 30s they're raising me. Yeah. But it's this is it.
42:31
And I when I started to study Taoism and I I was fascinated.
42:37
I would I would fly to England just to get into the British Museum to read these texts I couldn't find. I was really into it.
42:46
And I was trying to crack my mind.
42:49
I I wanted to think in a completely different way or not think at all. And it took a long time.
42:56
I've been I've been a I'm a writer at the core that has wandered into other paths in in life, but I found my way into Eastern philosophy after I sold my company.
43:10
I decided to go to a retreat.
43:13
I'd never done it and it was one of the the Bapst in the retreats.
43:14
Somewhere up in Santa Rosa.
43:16
And when I went there I didn't know anything about it.
43:20
So I took a whole pile of books and I took sketchpads and I was just going to pour out and everything on those pages.
43:30
And the teacher said, well, here's the rules. No talking. Uh no reading. No anything.
43:39
Just sit for 45 minutes and walk for 45 minutes. I said, what? I'm like, okay. I was game. I stayed for it. It was odd.
43:50
I was unsettled for the first day or two.
43:55
And then I got this excruciating headache. And it wouldn't go away.
44:03
And I said, I'm never going to let this happen to me before it's because there's no coffee here.
44:11
I'm going to start a tea company.
44:13
Which is exactly what I shouldn't have been doing in a meditation retreat.
44:18
So for the first next several days I I was dreaming up the Republic of Tea.
44:24
And then I finally fell into the meditative state.
44:30
And I could hear further than I could I didn't realize I could hear so far. Yeah.
44:36
I was stunned at what I was hearing.
44:41
And hearing I would say is my strongest sense. It always has been.
44:47
And so after that I came back and told my wife and she just And of course we had just sold a successful company.
44:53
We were very visible and we were getting all kinds of offers. Do let's do this. Let's do that. Let's do this.
45:00
I said, I'm going to do nothing.
45:02
I'm going to just do nothing because I just realized that I was like a wound up toy. Succeed. Achieve. Succeed. Achieve. Succeed. Achieve. It was in my DNA.
45:13
Had it been like that your whole life?
45:15
From childhood in an intense way.
45:18
Melvin, maybe you'll be a doctor.
45:18
Maybe you'll be a I mean I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
45:24
There was a lovely part of town that was called the Hill Section which was a Jewish community. Suburban? No, it was in the town.
45:32
Scranton is about 100,000 people.
45:32
It's an old coal mining town.
45:37
About 2 and 1/2 hours from New York as you go through New Jersey.
45:38
And somehow Jews had found their way there and set up a little community there and it was a middle class 1950s.
45:48
You know, everybody had come home from the the war.
45:50
Everything was so comforting.
45:53
What a difference I can't even talk about the 1950s.
45:55
What a difference it was to today, but it was it was a very sweet place.
46:02
It was a very sweet way to grow up.
46:04
Later many years later when I brought my wife back, she said to me, nobody's mean here.
46:11
It was a high school reunion.
46:11
The 50th high school reunion.
46:13
The sweetest people ever. Yeah. So I grew up in that. Yeah.
46:18
But my grandparents were first generation and my parents were second generation.
46:22
They didn't go to college. And a lot was expected.
46:25
I was going to go to college and I was going to do that.
46:29
And my dad said, you should be a pharmacist. What's a pharmacist?
46:34
He said he was in the war in Germany.
46:35
He was a very simple sweet man. I loved him so much.
46:40
He was he was a bodhisattva.
46:43
I realized long after he was gone. He died at 59.
46:48
Anyway, I found my way out of there.
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48:22
You think of yourself as a writer. You started as a writer.
48:23
Do you think of yourself as a writer or a journalist?
48:25
I think of them as different. They are.
48:30
And I should say actually even though I said that, neither. I'm an observer.
48:35
I've tried for many years to shed the amazing amount of judgment and screens I had in order to see the world.
48:47
And what I have tried to do is reach that objective space.
48:51
I'm hardly ever there, but it's my goal to be in that objective space.
48:57
I am a student of ancient Chinese philosophies, particularly Taoism.
49:02
And I read a Taoism book where where the statement was, Forget yourself.
49:07
Follow objective circumstances.
49:11
And that's pretty much what I try to do.
49:13
I don't I don't think of myself as anything fixed.
49:16
When did you first come in contact with the Tao? After the retreat.
49:22
I swallowed every Krishnamurti book first because I'm a thinker. I think obsessively. I'm full of concepts. I'm full of ideas.
49:34
And I found him he gave me a path to just make me realize that I'm just living in a swarm of thought and seeing nothing.
49:47
And I read every single book.
49:51
And I listened to the lectures.
49:51
And then somehow or another I picked up Laozi.
49:57
But the one that really did it to me was Zhuangzi.
49:59
I don't know how you pronounce his name. He's the one Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi. He's the the rogue. Mhm.
50:05
I really related to this guy.
50:05
He was like just making fun of everything and having fun and having a good time.
50:12
And at the same time through him I began to realize that the Tao that can't be told can't is not the Tao.
50:22
You can't so how am I ever going to describe it to you?
50:24
But it was it was this total vision of observing in tune with nature.
50:30
Everything was part of nature. Including human beings.
50:34
In fact, I have I remember having this conversation years ago with Jack Kornfield.
50:37
I said you know, he was are you Taoist frustrating me?
50:43
I just Well, I'm just the same thing as that, you know, I'm the the storm, the weather but it's the same thing.
50:50
So, it really spoke to me. Yeah.
50:52
It spoke to me and it got me to a place where I really tasted emptiness. Tasted it. Yeah.
51:00
Is there anything more delicious when you think about it than emptiness? Let's see. Peace. I love the Tao. I love um Oh, I bet.
51:10
I could see from your book that you that you live it and I and I and I admire you.
51:17
I just it's it's something you don't really want to talk about because it's It's hard to talk about.
51:25
Yeah, it's it defies that. Yeah.
51:25
Tell me about your writing days.
51:28
Well, I was a journalist.
51:31
The way I was going to get out of Scranton was to write my way out of Scranton.
51:36
Scranton was wonderful in many ways.
51:37
What it didn't introduce me to I regret to say was music and art. Mhm.
51:41
Which became my passions is particularly art as the time went on years later and and is and is currently really.
51:48
Now I I paint but I was a journalist.
51:54
And I wrote for my high school magazine. And I enjoyed it.
51:58
It was I was just writing little stories actually short stories at that point.
52:03
But then I got a job at the Scranton Tribune writing a front page column about the weather. That's all it was.
52:12
Cloudy with a chance of rain. But I was so excited. How would you know?
52:24
There was a weather bureau I guess you called and they told you. Okay.
52:25
And the temperature range and everything else.
52:30
And then I became a copy boy and then then it was time to to to to go to college.
52:35
And uh I went to Penn State.
52:38
It's all we really could afford at that time and it was a state school and uh it was a wonderful school.
52:43
It was in State College, Pennsylvania.
52:45
I don't know if you've ever been there but beautiful wonderful school.
52:49
And did you study journalism? I studied journalism.
52:53
And then I heard that the place to study journalism was really Columbia.
52:58
And so I applied to and went to Columbia.
52:59
And I happened to be there in the vintage year 1968 when everything exploded.
53:05
It's very similar to what happened this last year.
53:11
This was the year of Berkeley and Columbia and there was a there were protests on campus about the university's expansion into Morningside Heights taking away the neighbor I mean it's very prescient to all of that happening. know about that.
53:24
Yeah, it was it was in the '60s and they occupied the buildings.
53:27
It was a they were total occupations of the buildings. Wow.
53:29
So, here I was a journalist in the journalism school and two buildings over was Low Library which was usually the which is where the president was.
53:39
I'm walking out one day and the the whole campus is full of protesters.
53:40
I'd never seen anything like this in my entire life.
53:47
And when I went to Penn State there were there were hootenannies. That dates me.
53:54
But I was leaving it was protest songs. It was beginning. Yeah.
53:56
And so I got I caught up in this in my and yet I was a journalist.
54:00
And so I I saw this the students had occupied the president's office Grayson Kirk.
54:08
They were all over the campus but the big thing is they were occupying his office.
54:13
And it it was a remarkable as I remember that because the women had set up a kitchen in the office. I mean think about that.
54:19
The women were setting up the kitchen in the office.
54:23
And the guys were whatever they were doing.
54:29
There's a ledge that goes around Low Library.
54:31
It's a it's about maybe eight 10 ft tall.
54:37
And that you could if you get to that ledge you can go into the to the office.
54:41
And I wanted to go into the office as a reporter.
54:43
I wanted to find a story here.
54:45
And I wasn't sure whether I was a reporter or I didn't know I wasn't sure who I was. Mhm.
54:49
But what was what this was all about.
54:51
I was just learning about it myself. Was it exciting? It was extraordinary. It was exhilarating.
54:56
I mean they we they shut down the school.
54:58
We never had a graduation.
55:00
It was it was like last year.
55:04
It was the first it was the precursor and probably the only time to the unfortunate protests last year. Yeah.
55:10
And and much more justified I would say.
55:14
Anyway, so I I didn't know if I was a reporter.
55:16
I didn't know if I was it.
55:18
And I came out and it was time to go and graduate and I wrote a story and the story was published in the Miami Herald.
55:28
It it just interviewed me for a job. I sent them the story.
55:30
They published the story and offered me a job.
55:32
And I also was I think I also wrote a story for New York magazine at the time which was just starting up again.
55:38
It used to be a earlier it was the Sunday supplement of a paper called the it was a fusion paper Herald Tribune of the one that became the international.
55:48
And it was sort of a a really elegant newspaper but Clay Felker who was the editor of New York when it was in that paper bought the rights to it when the paper folded and then regenerated New York magazine and that's how it came to be.
56:03
And one of my teachers at the time was Dick Schaap the sportscaster and we became very good friends and he introduced me to Clay and then I started writing for New York magazine.
56:16
But I got very tired of New York after a couple of years.
56:19
And And uh on my way west.
56:25
But I was still a journalist.
56:28
And at that time I came to San Francisco and I was going to write a novel.
56:32
How did you choose San Francisco? I chose it in Colorado.
56:37
We were driving across the country.
56:41
I was either I was either going to go to Mexico point south and I had a girlfriend.
56:48
We were driving an old French Simca that we had bought the year before and shipped over.
56:51
We didn't know what it was but what it certainly was going to be was not New York. Yeah.
56:57
Because the 1970s in New York was hell.
57:01
I mean you had garbage strikes dog [ __ ] all over on the sidewalks.
57:05
Nobody picking up after themselves. No regard.
57:07
It was just it was what am I doing here?
57:11
And I had a friend who is in Hastings Law School in San Francisco earlier and I'd flown out to see him.
57:17
And it was a beautiful February day and San Francisco was really enchanting.
57:24
After that and I said I sort of feel like I belong here. Mhm. What year was this?
57:29
This was 1970 two I think. 1972.
57:36
So, Summer Love had already happened. It had already happened.
57:38
What I didn't know is that four years earlier my wife was happening with it.
57:44
She grew up in San Francisco.
57:45
So, so there's an interesting story there but I did what I do.
57:47
There were two papers at that time San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner.
57:51
I got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. And I had a great time. It was fun. I was on the city desk.
57:59
It was a room that was a huge room with reporters sitting here, the art department there, the photography studio there, the Sunday section there. It was huge.
58:11
It was like a little city city room.
58:15
And there was a it was almost out of the movie The Front Page.
58:17
There was an editor by the name of Abe Mellinkoff who wore a monocle.
58:23
And he would stand up and he would say, you know, Ziegler 474 Hyde baby in a trash bin. Get a photographer.
58:35
And you get a photographer and you would just basically go find the abandoned baby in the trap I mean this is the this was it and it was a wild.
58:45
These were the years of the zebra killings. Wow.
58:49
And the zebra killings were happening and I was there on the night beat writing the story about what just happened in the streets.
59:01
And at 2:00 in the morning going down to catch a bus at 5th and Mission to take me to Mill Valley where I lived completely by myself.
59:09
But anyway I enjoyed that. I enjoyed working.
59:11
I enjoyed being part of a city.
59:13
I enjoyed learning everything.
59:17
Do you think the fact that you came from a different place added to it like part of your job was you're like a fish out of water in this new environment and your job is to observe it and report on it. Yeah. Yeah. Drink it in. Take it all.
59:33
Yes, it was all it was absolutely I didn't The West Coast was totally new to me.
59:37
It was a completely different s- It was a completely different mentality. Mhm.
59:42
One that I summarize this way, Clay Felker who was the editor of New York magazine at that time later went out to be become teacher at Berkeley.
59:51
And I ran into him at a party maybe 15 years later and he said, "Didn't you used to be Mel Ziegler?" It's funny. That's New York. Yeah.
1:00:05
And so I was very happy not to be there. Yeah.
1:00:07
I was very happy not to be there.
1:00:08
I was learning a whole new way of life. You could do anything. Yeah. It was free. Freedom is wealth. It's not money. It's not It's freedom. And I felt that freedom. Yeah.
1:00:21
It was just exhilarating being there.
1:00:23
And these were good years.
1:00:25
They were crazy years because it was also I was also there when the Patty Hearst kidnapping took place, which was really crazy.
1:00:34
I mean, it was just crazy.
1:00:34
I mean, I Did you cover that story? Yeah.
1:00:36
I was part I was part of cover I was part of everybody covered that story.
1:00:41
If you were on the shift and you were down there, you were in front of the Hearst mansion in where Atherton and somebody would say, "Hey, Ziegler, your tree is ringing."
1:00:49
They'd have a phone hooked up to the tree.
1:00:54
It was wild being in the newspaper business. It was wonderful. I loved it. I loved it.
1:00:59
It was journalism was different in those days as well.
1:01:04
I mean, these were the days of Walter Cronkite, you know?
1:01:06
I mean, these were these were the days when at least there was an effort to be objective.
1:01:15
I mean, the world hadn't seen Rupert Murdoch yet.
1:01:17
It was going to brand news and brand point of view and create this situation where everything became contrary to everything I mean, it was just Then it was just Here's the story.
1:01:31
You couldn't even use the word I.
1:01:31
A reporter said, "A reporter saw."
1:01:33
You know, you wrote about yourself in the third person. Yeah. And I so I loved it.
1:01:41
But the only point of view was what you saw.
1:01:43
You weren't given an agenda to try to make the story mean something.
1:01:49
Yes, or to come put it through the filter. Yeah. There was no filter. There was no filter. Yeah, no filter. It was just objectivity.
1:01:54
Your job is to be objective. What really happened?
1:01:56
Give us both sides of the story.
1:01:59
Quote them both, you know, just lay it out. Yeah.
1:02:04
And um It's nice hearing both sides of the story. Yes, isn't it? I love it.
1:02:07
I mean, this is what's wrong.
1:02:12
This is really this would fix everything.
1:02:15
If people would just Hey, you know, why do you feel that way?
1:02:22
It's funny you talk about going back to Scranton and the people being nice.
1:02:28
You'd think that the people in San Francisco would be really nice.
1:02:29
There was a time when they were. They were.
1:02:34
Do you remember those days? Yes. They were.
1:02:36
Well, everybody was nice.
1:02:38
my wife will tell me stories about she hitchhiked here and they somebody said, "Come to dinner."
1:02:42
She'd stay 3 weeks with somebody who beautiful people who were working at Stanford and this I mean, it was that kind of a city. Mhm. Yeah.
1:02:51
I don't even know when it happened. But it happened.
1:02:55
I don't know how it happened.
1:02:57
I guess the answer is always day by day.
1:03:03
How many years did you continue being a journalist?
1:03:05
I was a journalist until I met my wife there. She is an illustrator.
1:03:12
I told you about this big city room?
1:03:17
Well, one day this very beautiful woman was walking in and turning into the art department, which was right behind the Xerox machine and all the way at the other side of the room.
1:03:30
Somehow or another when you I saw her, I saw my other half. Wow. But I'm pretty shy. Yeah.
1:03:39
I think that's one of the reasons I liked being a reporter is I didn't couldn't be shy.
1:03:44
I had to get out there and do what I did.
1:03:45
It brought me out of that. Yeah.
1:03:47
But I could I So I during the Christmas party, two of my other two other buddies of mine who were both reporters, we all decided to walk over and find out who this new girl was.
1:03:57
And so the three of us walked over.
1:03:59
Something happened in that moment where the two of them somehow disappeared and Patricia and I got into a conversation that we're still in. Amazing.
1:04:10
I love her now more than I've ever loved anyone.
1:04:11
She's my wife for almost 50 years. Yeah, beautiful. Congratulations.
1:04:17
Well, we've had our troubles.
1:04:19
I mean, this is we didn't get here We wasn't it wasn't a clear road. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:04:24
I mean, we really had trouble but but but we knew we were connected at the core.
1:04:32
And so she was there, I was there.
1:04:32
We were having a great time. I was my late 20s. I wanted to travel.
1:04:40
You know, I wanted to see the world.
1:04:43
And the Chronicle was just a very cheap paper.
1:04:46
It was known as being a cheap paper.
1:04:47
They wouldn't send you anywhere to do anything.
1:04:49
There was no other game in town.
1:04:51
It wasn't like today with media.
1:04:52
You go here, you go there.
1:04:52
There were three television stations if you're in journalism.
1:04:56
There was two newspapers.
1:04:58
Then it keep became one newspaper.
1:04:58
There was nowhere else to go.
1:05:02
I could freelance, which I began to do writing magazine articles for different magazines and had doing that kind of thing but I wanted to travel and we didn't have any money. We had nothing.
1:05:11
I mean, I basically lived off our salaries, which were what would $4 500 a week then.
1:05:17
I can't even remember what they were. They weren't much.
1:05:33
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LMNT Tell me about Republic of Tea.
1:07:02
I wanted to learn about tea.
1:07:04
I mean, I I'm that kind of person.
1:07:04
I If I want to learn about something, I just jump in. Mhm.
1:07:08
My path into tea was flavored black teas were magical for me for a while and then I just sort of got more into the key ones, the the more Chinese deep tasting Chinese teas but I saw a hole in the market that was sort of unbelievable. This was the early '90s.
1:07:31
Didn't matter what restaurant you went to.
1:07:33
If you ordered a tea, they would bring you out a Lipton's tea bag. Yeah. How could this be? Yeah. I saw that.
1:07:44
And on the other hand, there was a hippie brand book called Celestial Seasonings Mhm.
1:07:47
from a guy named Mo Siegel who lived in Colorado. It was beautiful.
1:07:51
It had all these different herbal things.
1:07:54
And other than that, there was a sprinkling in there, maybe a brand called Twinings and a few other things but nothing Nobody was really revering tea.
1:08:03
And so I thought this is this And historically tea has been revered.
1:08:08
Yes, it's the I call it the second oldest product in the world, you know?
1:08:13
And the nuances are fantastic, just like wine.
1:08:15
It did never really It still hasn't come fully realized but at that point, that's why did again, I didn't realize what we were doing. How did it start?
1:08:26
We were creating a category.
1:08:26
We weren't creating a company cuz now if you go into a store, it's all there.
1:08:33
So I went to a uh This is a year or so after 2 years after Banana Republic of my doing nothing years, which was dense with study and writing and traveling things but I went to a conference of a group called the Social Venture Network that was just starting up somewhere in New Jersey.
1:08:58
It was the first time I really left my son, who was maybe then 2 years old and I left the conference early and I started flying back and uh a young guy there saw me at the conference, sort of chased me down and found me on the plane and started talking to me.
1:09:17
He knew that I'd started Banana Republic and for some reason, I mentioned to him if I were to ever start another company, it would be a tea company. And he was all over it. He was all over it.
1:09:30
He He really thought this was a greatest idea ever.
1:09:34
And I said, "Yeah, okay."
1:09:36
But I wasn't sure about him.
1:09:36
I wasn't sure whether I didn't know.
1:09:41
Having gone through the It was I would say it wasn't a pleasant experience at the end of Banana Republic.
1:09:46
So, I didn't I didn't need this.
1:09:49
Look, I My goal is never to be rich or wealthy.
1:09:55
I mean, just not I just want to be independent.
1:09:58
And I had enough to be independent.
1:10:02
And so, I wasn't really looking at this point to do anything.
1:10:06
But he was very engaging and smart.
1:10:09
And I just happened to say I just getting these thing these names just come to me.
1:10:12
I said, "There's another company I'm going to call the Republic of Tea.
1:10:16
And I'm going to be the Minister of Leaves."
1:10:17
Was that the first time you said it? Yes.
1:10:21
I'm going to be the Minister of Leaves, which I kind of loved because, you know, I'm not only leaving, but I'm the Minister of Leaves.
1:10:25
You know, it's like it's okay. It So, I did.
1:10:28
I appointed myself Minister.
1:10:30
He said, "Well, I'll be the Minister of Progress."
1:10:33
And he really started banging together And this was These were the years when there were the fax machines.
1:10:37
So, I go home the next morning and my fax machine is chattering in my study.
1:10:44
And he's saying, "The Minister of Progress, we could do this we could do that."
1:10:46
And I would answer him and I could We would go back and forth with faxes back and forth with faxes.
1:10:52
And I had another friend who came over one day and saw all this pile of faxes.
1:10:56
I would I didn't know whether I was going to start it with this guy or wasn't going to start it with So, I didn't know what I was doing.
1:10:59
I was just I was playing on the idea of what should a tea company be. Yeah. I was imagining it. Yeah.
1:11:07
And a friend of mine came over, a friend by the name of Bruce Katz, who started Rockport.
1:11:12
He unfortunately recently died, fell from his roof.
1:11:17
Miss Came to my house one day and I had these things naturally came printed out.
1:11:22
So, he saw this pile of stuff.
1:11:25
He started reading through it. He said, This is great. You should publish this.
1:11:31
So, he through it knew somebody who knew somebody and there was the next thing I knew I had an editor from Doubleday was visiting.
1:11:36
And she read it and she wanted to publish it.
1:11:40
So, she published the complete exchange of of how to start a business, Republic of Tea, uh Letters to a Young Zen Entrepreneur or something.
1:11:49
I forget what the subtitle was.
1:11:51
It was changed along the way.
1:11:53
And I just didn't want to tear myself away from my son.
1:11:56
You sound like someone who when you dive in, you you're all consumed. Yeah. So, you're wary of Yeah.
1:12:06
becoming all consumed again. That's exactly right. I understand.
1:12:11
But I waited for the my Minister of Progress to sort of see what he was going to do and make it happen.
1:12:16
He was not quite making it happen until they gave us a book advance.
1:12:22
And so, since we were both writing these faxes back and forth together, they were It was really our book. It wasn't my book. It was our book.
1:12:32
So, I said, "The only way I'm going to do this company is if you start it with the book advance."
1:12:37
I thought that would be great.
1:12:39
Just take the book advance and start the company. And he did.
1:12:42
He basically started the company with the book advance and a little help from another friend of ours.
1:12:47
And we were able to build that up a couple of years.
1:12:51
And again, I was operating, but it wasn't the same.
1:12:53
And I didn't want to operate. Mhm.
1:12:55
So, we ended up selling that a couple of years later to a lovely family.
1:13:02
Tell me about the years of doing it. What was the process?
1:13:08
The process was creating different brands of of tea.
1:13:13
And working with the herbs or working with the dark teas and creating flavored teas.
1:13:19
And then somehow creating a a way of packaging that was going to be different.
1:13:23
We It had to be different because it couldn't be just another tea company.
1:13:30
So, we came up with the idea that and nobody had ever done this before that tea bags were square. Let's make them round. Okay.
1:13:40
And what about the the can?
1:13:43
The can has to be round for that to go into.
1:13:48
And what What would be on the can would be these exceptional names and stories and witticisms from the Minister of Leaves or anybody else that And so, we used the we used the the cans basically to advertise a life of sip by sip as opposed to gulp by gulp. Yeah.
1:14:08
I mean, it's always fun to create a villain.
1:14:10
And the villain here was the gulpers.
1:14:12
You know, you really can get your teeth into something if you have something to work off of. Yeah.
1:14:17
And it was this, you know, like people just We're not like them.
1:14:19
Yeah, we're we're we're not going to gulp in miss life.
1:14:23
We're just going to gulp our way through life.
1:14:25
We're going to sip our way sip by sip by sip by sip by sip. Yeah.
1:14:28
And so, we created just really lovely teas and learned a lot.
1:14:35
And try to make them more Earl Grey was Earl Greyer.
1:14:39
For instance, I mean, that was the name of that tea.
1:14:41
I forget a lot of the other names, but I think we probably should have opened stores, but we had another partner.
1:14:47
if you if you ever considered I We wanted to.
1:14:52
And if you would have opened shops, would it have been a store to buy the tea or would it have been more like the Starbucks of tea?
1:14:56
It would have been the Starbucks of tea. Yeah. Still no one's done it.
1:15:02
Howard Schultz found us early on.
1:15:02
And he had already thrown tea out of the uh Starbucks in those years and was trying to find a way back in. Mhm.
1:15:11
And there was a a time when I thought he might buy the company.
1:15:14
We flew up to see him and one of my partners is a good talker, but not a great listener.
1:15:21
And it just At that point, my my dear friend at that point was there were some sparks that were wrong between Howard and him and it never really worked.
1:15:27
And I said, "Uh let's sell this thing to somebody who can really make something out of it."
1:15:36
And uh there was this fellow in St.
1:15:39
Louis by the name of Ron Rubin.
1:15:44
And he was in the beverage business.
1:15:44
His family was in the beverage business, bottled beverage business. And he read the book.
1:15:52
And he flew out to meet us.
1:15:52
And he said, "I would I'd love to buy this company."
1:15:57
And I just really liked him.
1:15:57
And to this day, they run that company from the book.
1:16:01
He'll say, "On page 276."
1:16:01
And they were just wild ideas that we threw out. It's a beautiful story.
1:16:08
His son heard a story like that before. Really?
1:16:11
No, where the idea phase is documented and ending up becoming exposed in advance of the actual product.
1:16:21
There was no Republic of Tea. Right.
1:16:27
We always hear the story after.
1:16:27
We've never heard the wild ideas of what this thing could be in print and then have that thing actually come into existence.
1:16:41
It's a very unusual story. Yeah. It was fully imagined.
1:16:43
Of course, in 25, 30 years later, it's it's still evolving, but the core of it Yeah.
1:16:51
the culture The the philosophy of it was in the book. It was there. Yeah.
1:16:53
If If the Gap had done this with Banana Republic, they would have a wildly successful company.
1:16:58
If they had just done this. Yes.
1:17:00
They didn't have the courage to do this. Yes.
1:17:02
And but if they did this, it was so classic. Mhm. I mean, we owned khaki.
1:17:07
But we weren't all about khaki, but we owned khaki and we owned the practicality of functional clothing that stood apart from all the design.
1:17:17
The The opposite experience happened. Yeah.
1:17:20
With the Republic of Tea.
1:17:24
And there's good evidence.
1:17:24
No, it's not Republic of Tea is not amalgamated gigantic like Mhm. the Gap.
1:17:33
But you know, when is enough enough? Yeah.
1:17:37
In the In this world, I don't think people ask that question enough.
1:17:42
Tell me more about your spiritual life. I paint.
1:17:47
I can't start a painting until I accept and enter the emptiness.
1:17:54
The blank canvas, the silence.
1:17:58
And when I do that, then I'm always excited to start.
1:18:04
And I Something draws me to a color.
1:18:05
Something draws me to a brush.
1:18:08
Something draws me to a stroke.
1:18:10
Some Everything once it starts becomes resolution. It's all just resolving.
1:18:19
You're reacting to something that you see?
1:18:22
I'm responding to the materials.
1:18:26
I'm responding to the choices that I made earlier. I'm always in response.
1:18:31
I'm not really generating.
1:18:33
I'm responding and I'm listening.
1:18:33
To me, that's what empties me out.
1:18:38
And in the end, I sometimes when I when I finish a work, I look at it. It's abstract work.
1:18:48
Very colorful because I There's so much vividness in what happens.
1:18:54
I see something that's familiar.
1:18:56
It's some kind of a structure that it that existed that and it came out and it showed itself to me. Yeah. I didn't do that. It showed itself to me. Yeah. That's so energizing. Love to paint. Love to paint. And my son is a painter. My wife is a painter.
1:19:20
My daughter is a fashion designer.
1:19:23
When they were kids, we we bought the house across the driveway from us that was being sold by a a Marine County judge, a very sweet man, and it became our art house.
1:19:34
So, we would go over there just to create art. Fantastic. together. Family studio. Beautiful. It was so beautiful.
1:19:39
I mean, we'd have these art that we'd sitting there, and each one of us would be doing our own thing.
1:19:45
And I was playing like they was learning like they were learning.
1:19:50
And I've been doing it ever since.
1:19:52
And in the last several years, it's really kind of matured. Mhm.
1:19:56
But I don't even I didn't try to make a career out of it. Yeah.
1:20:00
How do you know when a painting is done?
1:20:02
And do you know for sure when it's done? It's never done.
1:20:07
I've gone back and repainted paintings I've done.
1:20:09
It's that they're framed, I tear them out of the frames and do them all over again.
1:20:12
It's like, yeah, it's never done. Mhm.
1:20:14
Because that painting was in that time, in that place, and that it's But sometimes I like the fact it's like a photograph. Yeah. It it is done. I can accept it. I could change it.
1:20:27
And the ones that I'm most proud of are the ones I just leave alone. Mhm.
1:20:29
I'm going to leave them alone, but I could change them.
1:20:34
And some of the best work I've done is basically repainting. Not just painting.
1:20:39
And I try to always find out if I'm following some kind of rule I didn't know existed. Mhm.
1:20:46
You wrote about that in your book.
1:20:49
It was fascinating about that. I'm always looking Yeah. for that. Mhm.
1:20:53
And I and because I am a self-taught painter, I watch my my wife, I watch my She's very respectful.
1:20:59
She knows I'm autodidact, and I want to I don't want noise. I want to discover.
1:21:06
And my and my son, who's prolific, and has never He's fast, and he's the turn of the faucet, and he's something comes out, and he never makes a mistake.
1:21:17
He because there are no mistakes.
1:21:19
It just keeps going, and somehow then he resolves, and it's over.
1:21:24
So, every once in a while I get a tip from one of the one of them or the other.
1:21:27
But my wife, years ago, gave me one tip to start with when I first tip when I painted.
1:21:32
She said, "Don't use black." "Don't use black."
1:21:39
So, for years, I would not use black.
1:21:39
I would do everything I could.
1:21:44
And one day I discovered, "Hey, I I don't have to follow this rule anymore." Yeah.
1:21:48
But I learned so much Yeah. by not using black. Yes.
1:21:54
Are you precious about the first stroke? It's a commitment.
1:22:02
And I can't think about it.
1:22:02
If I think about it, I won't do it right.
1:22:04
You look at my paintings No, you you were thinking there, Mel.
1:22:11
I don't want you to look at my paintings and think that I was thinking. Yeah.
1:22:14
This is my way of of not thinking.
1:22:14
And I I'm a great fan of not thinking. I think a lot.
1:22:20
You say you've lived most of your life in your head? I do. That Yeah.
1:22:26
And I realize it just basically it's just noise that tunes out everything.
1:22:32
So, I mean, the joy of growing older is really accepting how little I know. And enjoying it.
1:22:44
I mean, I I know how to do a thing or not but know in the big sense.
1:22:49
I'm constantly surprised. I could never explain.
1:22:51
And I was a great explainer.
1:22:55
But I I I basically trapped myself. Yeah.
1:22:57
And I'm an appreciator of things that are really finely done.
1:23:04
I love things that are beautiful and well done or well thought or authentic Yeah.
1:23:08
and come from come from the same place.
1:23:10
You can see when somebody It doesn't matter what they're creating.
1:23:12
It doesn't matter what matters is where it's coming from.
1:23:16
You can see the source in almost every work. Mhm.
1:23:19
And often it's a thought.
1:23:21
You know, you can go flick through the television show, and it's one thing after another.
1:23:24
It's one concept after another.
1:23:27
You can listen to music, it's one concept after another. Here we go. Here we go. Whatever.
1:23:32
But every once when you hit the one that's not, that's life.
1:23:37
That's That's what we're here for.
1:23:40
Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.
1:23:46
I don't believe in belief.
1:24:15
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