YouSaid · the spoken record

George Zimmer

lines on the record: 66
first: 2019-04-15
most recent: 2019-04-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think they go hand in hand. In other words, I think you need luck. But you also need the talent and the intelligence to know how to take advantage of luck. I think that what happens in life, unfortunately, is a lot of people have the opportunity to be lucky but don't know how to take advantage of it.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so Well, I'd like to think that I'm right about many things and wrong about a few things. But yeah, I think that, you know, that there is a real problem in America. I think that capitalism, which clearly won the battle over communism and even socialism, is need of modification. And I'm a capitalist. What the hell? I've spent my life making money. But there are a few adjustments to capitalism that would make it sustainable, which unfortunately I don't think it is sustainable.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, and we do things like if you want a free home try on, we'll do not only one two free home tryons. We do free swatches. You know, we do a lot of things that make our business strong, and right now it's starting to really fire on also cylinders.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know how it happened. But the next thing I know, Terry called me and said, I'm very sorry, George, but we're not doing it. And I said, Who are you doing it with? And he said, he didn't want to tell me at first. And then he said, men's warehouse. And I went, you gotta be kidding me. And it doesn't make me vengeful or revengeful. It just makes me more determined to do what I know how to do.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rental, and we had the deal. It went to legal review. And while it was in legal review, Men's Warehouse stole it. I could not get Macy's to agree to a no shop clause.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at first, they wouldn't sell it to me at all. Then they said, all right, if you give us a four year non-solicitation. And I said, what do you mean by that? And they said, you can't hire our employees. Yeah. Four years. And I said, Are you kidding? I'll give you two years. But four years is an eternity. Deal never happened. To this day, they still can't find anybody that would offer them half of what I was going to pay them. Then I had a relationship with Macy's and we were going to provide Macy's with the tailoring for their online business, not their stores, their online business. And as a lark, I asked my local guy if they would have any interest in doing a tuxedo rental thing with us. And within a few months, My team and I were in New York in Terry Lundgren's office, the CEO of Macy's, making a deal. To be the”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I tell you, you know, what men's has done, men's is afraid of me is what it must be. Because after I was fired, the first thing I tried to do was buy KNG from men.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I tried for four months. I sat in my backyard in Piedmont beautiful flowers. It was the summer, and I thought gee, this is dull and boring. My kids are in school, my wife's got her own life, and I'm sitting in my backyard looking at the flowers. Didn't make sense.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And the reason is because men's warehouse thought that the Joe Bank customer in the men's warehouse customer were different because of shirt stacking. We were more aggressive in the selling process. When you walk into a Joseph Bank, they leave you alone to browse. And what I found was that you do a lot less business with that strategy than if you have a knowledgeable consultant. Who is genuinely interested in helping the customer in whatever the customer's lifestyle is?”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now it could be that under some sort of therapy it would be discovered that I am really quite hurt, but I don't feel hurt. I got divorced after this happened for the second time. I have a great relationship with my children. I'm, you know, watching politics in the evenings, but I don't feel... I don't know. I think being hurt is very close to feeling like a victim. And I just reject that.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, well, I feel that I'm a great friend. And so when you hurt me, the only way I have to get even is to withhold my friendship. Say, that's it. We're no longer friends, and I no longer want to speak to you.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am completely comfortable in my skin almost all the time. People are interested in what I have to say and I feel I have a lot of respect from people I care about. I see what happened at men's as really an example of capitalism run amok.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and this may not be a satisfactory answer, but I don't get hurt the way you mean it. I did not get depressed. I did not go into this poor me and I'm a victim.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I did not. It was not a complete surprise. There had been a phone call about two weeks earlier where the compensation committee chairman had said to me We're going to leave you in your position for the time being. And I remember thinking to myself Who the hell are you to tell me that? But I knew that there was something wasn't right in the”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“50 cartons were put in storage, and in the moment it felt like, well, damn if all these people who are my friends don't want me as their leader anymore, then why do I want to be their leader? Obviously there's something not right here.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And led me on a guided meditation because he was concerned that I wasn't taking into account my legacy. He was right. I wasn't valuing my legacy and what I was valuing was two things. Number one, I said, look, I know I told you that Doug would be a good replacement. But after a couple of years, I was wrong. He's not qualified to run the company. And that wasn't what Deepak wanted to hear. And so the next day, they said that, you know, by unanimous consent, they've decided to replace me. And they said to me, and George, we've put your furniture in storage. And I remember thinking, you've put my furniture in storage. I mean my furniture and my knick knacks forty years of stuff that I had accumulated.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at first they said to me, We'd like you to become chairman emeritus. And I said, What is that? And they explained it, and it was a figurehead position. And I said, When do you need to know? And they said, by ten o'clock. And the reason why was that we were meeting as a board in advance of an annual shareholder meeting. And so they wanted to get me off the prospectus as chairman of the board, and they said they could do it if I notified them by ten o'clock that night. So we were in a hotel. So I was just by myself in a hotel. In And I remember being in my room and thinking, you know, my lawyer was the company's lawyer. I had very few good friends outside of the business. I had nobody to really talk to. Depot came up to my room that night.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm going unanimous. I mean, I have Deepak Chopra, as well as people that you don't know. And I can't believe that it is unanimous because I have done so many favors for all of these people. He says,”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it wasn't that long ago, so I remember everything. I remember that the lead director, who I had put in the position, six foot seven, stood up which made him quite intimidating, and said to me, You know, George the board by unanimous consent and went on to talk about getting rid of me, but when he said unanimous consent, I'm in a room of friends.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the same time, because K and G was a significant national presence, it prevented other stores from realizing that investing in low priced clothing the way I had done in seventy three. Yeah. Would make sense So the board and Dug wanted to sell KNG and I told him that I would support them In selling it, but I didn't agree with it. So it was that type of decision, and the board represented it in their public relations releases as though I was unwilling to cede authority. And I never understood what they were talking about because I was totally explicit in explaining to Doug that he was the guy.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't really know exactly what happened because as it got closer to my termination, I was cut out of more and more of the discussions that the board was having. But I'll give you a simple example. We owned a division called KNG, and KNG did four hundred million. We had a hundred stores. And it was a superstore in the sense that it was twenty five thousand feet, and it was men's and women's, and the price points were below men's warehouse And I said to the board KG provides a unique opportunity for an offensive and defensive strategy, and they didn't quite understand what that meant. And so what it means is men's warehouse stores were able to raise the gross profit percentage by a full ten percent, which is a thousand basis points over a decade because KNG was protecting our opening price point position.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did you really back away? I never told Doug what to do. After he was made CEO. I said to him, Dog, you're the CEO, and It's your decision, you make it the way you see it.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did I want to retire and Doug had been my COO and had been doing a great job? So I said to him, you know, Doug, our offices were next door. I said, I'm not retiring. I'm going to come to work every day. Yeah. But you're running things day to day, and I'd like you to get credit for that.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every time you screw up a wedding, you lose a customer. You know, this is not a way to build a clothing business? So we rolled it out into our stores, a third, a third, a third over three years. It took five years before the employees in the company stopped complaining to me about being in this business, and I used to say to everybody, and it got to be redundant where I would say. Look, this is going to take a while to develop, but when it does, it's going to be amazing.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we were at a training class, one of my regional managers had dinner with me and said You know, George, I went into a few tuxedo stores he was in Seattle, and he said, You know, this is exactly what we do. Fit people in clothing. Yeah. Why don't we do this?”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean first of all, would the money that we got from the IPO in secondaries, we started opening fifty stores a year? A store every week. So if you can imagine each store costs about a million dollars in inventory.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was never trying to amass the greatest fortune that I could, and uh, It turns out to have been, I think, a very good decision because although we had an IPO that only raised thirteen million, we then had four or five secondaries. Each secondary was at a higher value, so”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would present it to the customer, and we were not, in my mind, pushy, but we were not passive. Salespeople, either, and the result was that our customers thought we had great service because they perceived this as service, and it drove a lot of revenue.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that the answer is that many did. There were people that tried to mimic what we did, but, you know, part of it is, and I'm very proud of this, I did all the training originally at men's, and I used to say to our employees, look, men look at going into a clothing store, like going to the dentist office. So their wife says to them, I made you a dental appointment, and it's like the worst thing that the man can imagine. So they put off coming in to a clothing store. Until they can no longer defer it any longer. And from that intuitive understanding, we develop what we call shirt stacking so that when a man purchased a suit while he was in the dressing room, we would put together shirts, ties, belts, shoes. Everything that would make the outfit really”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the benefit is that when you are a spokesperson for your own business, of course you're doing it to affect the external world. You want more business. But what happens is that, and we were in a retail business with hundreds or thousands of employees, the workforce loves the fact that the boss is on TV. Oh, I know, Joel.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It happened as an ad lib. And as I was ad living the commercial, I'm having an inner dialogue with myself while I'm speaking. I didn't have much time since I was in a live recording, and all I could think of was I guarantee it. And the beauty of I guarantee it was not so much the words'cause the words are as hackneyed as you're going to find. But when I started walking around in my regular life, people were saying to me Hey, George, I guarantee it, and I knew A that was catching on, but I also have known something else, which is as long as people are calling me George. I think the companies that I'm involved with will prosper. If they start to call me mister Zimmer, I'll be worried.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dull commercial come back to my mother's. Words. It never occurred to me, and I could say this about two dozen things in my life that most people would say Didn't it occur to you that that might not work? And I go quite frankly, not really”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I said, set up a fake training class and bring in three cameras and film me from different angles and we will just bring in random office employees to ask me questions. I will answer them and we will edit it into a good message.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I did because we had had training classes, which I would give a presentation to, I found I was very comfortable in those environments.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't. So to that degree you could call it a Hail Mary, but I had been in the retail business for a while by then, and I had instincts that this made sense. It made no sense to me, this constant garage of sales. It was though everybody in retail thought that the American consumer was stupid. And actually, they're not as stupid as those people thought.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the toughest part of this was trying to persuade people that I knew what I was doing because they were questioning whether I knew what I was doing.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's in the early eighties there was a general meltdown of all the banks in Texas. In every bank, including our bank, which was the largest bank down there, First City National, all of them were acquired by out of state banks. So we had to rethink our business model. So I looked at our inventory, and by then it was on computer printouts, and I noticed that on about half of the inventory there was a significant discrepancy between the ticketed price and the selling price.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A clothing store, and there was not a regular priced one hundred percent wool suit for under three hundred dollars. And we were sowing hundred percent wool suits for one hundred ninety nine. So I went back to Houston and told my team that we could pick up Dallas later and we were going to go right to the Bay Area before things changed.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In nineteen eighty I came out to the Bay Area on a vacation, and we were planning on opening up in Dallas as our next market. And I walk into either Ruse Atkins or some other Bay Area store.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I beat him and we got Nino Serudi suits white labeled, but at a twenty percent purchased discount, which enabled us to sell them moderately profitably at one ninety nine when everybody else in America was selling them at $299. That was the essence of the business.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct and he said He said Why would I do that? And I said You know, Kenny, why don't we play a game of basketball and if I can beat you, you'll give me that deal. And if you beat me, I won't bother you again. The rest is history”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were America's largest clothing manufacturer, and he came to see us, and I said to him They had the line Nino Serudi. And I said, We'd like to buy that line from you. And he said, Forget about it. I sell Foleies, I sell. And I said, Well, let me tell you the whole story. We want to buy the line without the label. But we want a twenty percent discount.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started to get into a broader product assortment in the mid to late seventies. We first went right to suits, and we had a salesperson he was the EVP for hard shafter and marks based in Chicago.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The marketing expenses in a major urban area are so high you can't really run a single location. You need multiple locations.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I remember the first Saturday we were open for business. We ran an ad in the Houston Chronicle and in the Houston Post. We were selling sport codes for $25, slacks for $10, and did not carry suits or shirts or ties or have tailoring, in fact, our first cash register was a mechanical old style NCR that you would push the buttons and it would come up in the window, no sale.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And the way that worked was that I had only $7,000 when this all began. And that basically went to first and last month's rent. So there was really no money as the company got ready to open. My father sent us several thousand suits and sport coats and slacks, as well as 80 raw steel rolling racks, which is what we used for store fixtures in the first store.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, no, the way I started it was Harry Levy had been my fraternity brother. Was from Dallas, and I had called him up and said, Would you like to move to Euston and do this with me? And he said, What's in it for me? And I said, Well, I give you a third of the company for three grand.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, while I was living in Dallas and going to Houston every month. In the way I explain this is that Dallas was old money, Houston was new money. So that for a young upstart like myself trying to create a business, the chances were much greater in Houston, and in fact, since I didn't really know anything about the retail business when I opened men's warehouse, the only reason that I was able to make it was because the city's growth was so extraordinary that it covered up for what I didn't understand.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had expanded so that his product assortments were outerware like snorkel jackets, these raincoats that had zip out linings that were fairly upscale, and then he started a line of inexpensive suits and sport coats”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come to you. I'll tell you having been a student activist in college and having been somebody that did not believe that capitalism was the end-all be-all to what we needed. I did not like the idea of having to execute not just my father, but the sales managers vision. I always wanted to be able to have my own dreams and to follow my own dreams. And so the reason I, the primary reason I opened men's warehouse was that it was a way for me to become my own boss and create my own destiny, follow my dreams.”
2019-04-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Men's Wearhouse: George Zimmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT