YouSaid · the spoken record

Gordon Segal

lines on the record: 40
first: 2017-02-20
most recent: 2017-02-20
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, that's our problem You replace cars every two, three years, you have dinner where for 20 years people tell me they have product they bought in the 60s and 70s and I win.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still have, from when I graduated college and moved my first apartment, my mom bought me a set of flat white craton barrel dinner plates they were made in Japan at the time. I still have them. Still serve dinner on them.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, could you ever have imagined when you opened up this thing in Chicago in a disused elevator factory with boards that you hammered under the walls that this company would be doing sales of what are Creighton Barrel's numbers today?”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the lucky part was our timing. It was just at the appropriate time to be going to Europe to find new contemporary design and tabletop and furniture and things. I think it was a talent of attracting people and making them feel like we were all in it together that I didn't realize I had, nor did I realize I was good at for many, many years, but I was. And I think that had a lot to do with it. I was lucky to be married to Carol Siegel, who had this enormous talent. You know, we started out to create something that was going to be different and beautiful and wonderful. And this is still in the culture of the company in great depth, and they're still doing very well.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, of course it's hard. You know, I didn't realize I'd have that much energy left at 70, but I had enormous energy. But in the last two, three years, I've been doing things in our family office of finding new young entrepreneurs we could support. And when I advise young people today, I said, look at the job and say, are you going to love it? And is it going to be something you can devote your life to and work 10, 12 hours a day and work six, seven days a week? I mean, then you'll be a success, but don't go to do something because of a salary or a title. And I think that's the thing we picked up from the European friends of ours who have a different pace of life and a different focus. And, you know, that's how it should be. It shouldn't be, I want to make a lot of money. How do I do it? It's what do I love to do? And if I do it really good, then we will make money.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. They're basic philosophy was to acquire businesses like ours and let the management continue running it. And our success was we tripled the size of a company. We quintrupled the profits of a company. And we were able to grow. But more important, after we were with them a year or two, they said, you've got to really look into this internet. This was, what was it, 99, 2000? And we said, what's the internet? And then they started telling. And early on, then we started developing our internet business, which today represents about 38% of all the sales at Creighton Barrel. And customers buy it an enormous amount of furniture on the Internet. Is hard for me to believe”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we actually spent a year and a half looking around the world for a partner. And we finally found Otto, the auto group in Hamburg, Germany. And they were the second largest mailer at a company in Europe. And today they're after Amazon. They're the biggest internet company in the world. And in 98, we sold them about two-thirds of the company. And 10 years later, the contract was for 10 years. We sold them the rest of the third.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had thought by the time I was 65, I was then about 60. I'd probably want to retire. And some intelligent guy had said, you know, if you're going to sell your business, do it five years before you retire. So you can help the transition and whatever. And I own the responsibility to both my family and to my staff to make sure the company was well financed and could take risks and could go through trauma and survive. And I also realized that at that time the company was relatively very strong at retail, but relatively weak in direct marketing, which at those days was catalog cash.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it sounds like things were going pretty well for you without having any outside investors. So, what made you decide to eventually bring in outside money? What was your thinking when you made that decision?”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we reach a different era where it was important to have scale, to do the things we had to do with buying merchandise. So you had a guarantee to a factory you'd buy a certain amount of product to make sure we would only people in the United States that would be carrying it. And you got a sense that you needed scale to get there. And that's what we started doing. In 1990, we built a flagship store in Chicago, which really helped launch our expansion because then every landlord, every shopping mall, wanted a Creighton Barrel build. And we were a big attraction because we drew in a lot of customers. And what happened starting in that big expansion was landlords started paying for a lot of the build out of the store, building of the building and whatever. So we didn't have to take as much of our financial risk ourselves because the landlords built these stores, a lot of these stores for us.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because we felt they would have different motivation. We love being merchants. We love talking to customers. We loved inspiring staff. And we love searching for the product. Our goal wasn't to build a chain store. Our goal was to find the best merchandise at the best price that would excite our customers and excite our staff about what we were doing.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every time, and every time we knew if we failed, the company might go down. And then in 1975, we got the opportunity to open our first Michigan Avenue store. And if we failed here, that would certainly, we had to invest a lot of money, take a big risk. But that store opened in 1975. And after three months, we knew it was very successful. And from then on, the pressure was a lot less. Then it wasn't betting a company because by then we were doing enough volume and creating enough profits, but we didn't want partners. We didn't want investors.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every store we opened between our opening in 62, our first built store in 65, our plaza de la Lago store in 68, our Oakbrook store in 71. Every time we was betting the company.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you guys decided to open that second store, this was 1968, is that right? So then you got... A bank loan, and in a way, you were, I mean, I guess you were betting the company, right? Because with that leverage, if the second store failed, the whole thing would go under.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, basically in those days you'd go to a bank and you'd borrow money. I remember a first loan was $10,000, the second loan was $25,000. When we opened the store in $65 through $68, we still had only one store. We were doing $500,000, which today is like a little store doing $2 million. So it was profitable by then.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. There were many people who had doubts, but we have letters of credit. We had ability to buy. We found us an agent in Sweden who knew a lot of people who helped us introduce us to factories. And I don't, you know, they believed in us or we met Torbenoskov in Copenhagen who introduced us to Mare Mekko and introduced to us a lot of Danish factories and he sold us beautiful product also, wooden things and textiles and leather goods. And this guy influenced our lives. He and his wife remained friends for the next 50 years.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“efforts she was not only talented in helping select product but she was very talented at visual display and we were both very good at selling”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. The first year in 1963, our first full year in business, we didn't have time to go to Europe. But 1964, we went to Europe for three weeks. By then, we had two or three staff members, and we left the company to them. And we went and we traveled all over Europe. We started in Belgium and found a great glass factory. We went to the German trade fairs in Cologne and Frankfurt and found all sorts of interesting products. It was incredible. Nothing like that existed in the United States. We spent a lot of time walking the streets and seeing special stores and looking at stores and seeing what were they doing in Europe. Why were we so excited? What was it? It was the visual display. It was the way to use color. It was the way they did the storefront. It was the way they did their lighting. And we became students of retail. And Carol, by the way, the company never would have succeeded without her.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where do you go when you want a good meal? He says, I go to the airport and I get on the first flight to New York. So it's hard to believe that today because Boston and Chicago got great restaurants because people now, there's a major food.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was a big difference in the way they looked at dining and food was very important, chefs were important. America those days, cooking was a chore. It wasn't something people love to do in dining and serving in a dinner table. You know, I remember in Chicago in the early 60s, we had maybe three good restaurants. Boston, I remember Craig Clayborne was once asked when he was up in Boston, he was the food critic for the New York Times.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what happened was we were very fortunate. One, you know, America was then getting wealthier in the early 60s, 70s. Two, there was a lady named Julia Childs that came along and made cooking fashionable. Three, jet travel was beginning, especially to Europe and many more people were doing it. These events started all of a sudden making people aware of French cooking.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first year we did 100,000 that we did end up at the end of the year doing $100,000. The second year 200, 225, the third year $300,000.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So not only were we importing it directly, the fact that we didn't know what we were doing and we were mispricing the merchandise also made it even more exciting.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were very scared that we would lose my father's money in our savings. But you know what? When you're young, you know you could start over. Slowly, that spring came around, Old Town became more popular, they put gas lights up on the street, and people said, boy, did you see that counter culture stored on a Well Street? They're selling nice things out of crate some barrels. And it was nice merchandise. And we had ended up because we didn't know how to price merchandise. About half the product we sold, we sold it cost.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, because eight times 12 is 96. But then January of' sixty three came along and we did $4,000. We got a little scared. And then February of 63, I remember was probably one of the snowiest months in Chicago's history. And we had one day where we did $8 and the whole month was only $2,000.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had calculated that we needed to do about 100,000 dollars to take out $100 a week to live on. In that first Christmas, we did $8,000.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the opening weekend, and this area called Old Town had developed this over a decade, this sort of week, the first week in December. They called it the Christmas walk. And we opened that Friday of the Christmas Walk, and we'd forgot to buy a cash register. And so we actually used a cigar box. And it wasn't until the following Monday or Tuesday that actually my father found an old NCR cash register, the ones used after crank up to open the mount.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We worked from early in the morning to late every night. And we were just enthusiastic. I mean, the value of being very young is you have a lot of energy and passion and no wisdom. And so being that young was a great advantage and we had no children. We were 23. We had all the energy in the world. And because we had no money for fixtures, we basically turned over to packing crates. The merchandise was coming in. We came up with a way of stacking. We found some importer who had some more uniform crates. We had some big barrels full of china. And about two weeks before we were to open, we still didn't have a name. And a friend of ours walked in and looked around and I remember I was in the basement doing some paperwork and my wife came down and said, our friends suggest we call this place Beryl and Crate, but Gordon, maybe we should call it Crayton Barrel.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still not open. It opened the 7th of December of 1962. But we didn't get into the space till like November 15th. We only had about three weeks.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, each factory, a glass factory would have maybe an inch and a half, two inch catalog, or a ceramics factory or whatever. And we were just ordering from these catalogs and having them ship the stuff. Maybe we had four dinnerware patterns. We had a very narrow selection of merchandise. We only had $10,000.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In your store, right? So we needed $10,000 for inventory, and we only had $7,000 to build the store. And consequently, we had to come up with a clever way in taking this dirty old elevator factory and turning it into a Scandinavian feeling place. And the walls were all torn up and damaged, and we couldn't afford someone to sheetrocket. So we went out and found a lumberyard where we found crating lumber, which we knocked up vertically on the walls and covered the walls. We literally did it ourselves.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right at the end of the day, the only person who gave us the money was my father, who lent a $7,000. Probably all the money he had in cash”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had saved, made a little money, we had some wedding gifts. So we had about $10,000. And we figured, well, we really need $20,000. And I spent six months running around to everyone I knew had any wealth and offering them half the business for $10,000. There was no such thing as venture capital in those days. There was no such things as startups in those days. And I literally couldn't find anyone who'd invest $10,000.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly what we said. Wow. And they had books about factories in Europe that made specific items like glassware. And they refer to us to some people we might want to visit and gave us names of factories. And then we started, you know, where we're going to find a retail space. And we were driving around looking for anything. And finally, it so happened my father mentioned to us there was an area. Well Street, North Well Street, where there was an old dumb waiter factory that was actually moving. And I rented a space for three years for $350 a month.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because, you know, we had grown up, her family had actually been in the retail business, apparel business, and we were both very good at selling. My family had been in the restaurant business. And in all of those businesses, it's all about service. It's all about selling. And in a sense, I grew up with an immigrant, father, and mother. And the whole family on busy days had to work in a restaurant. So there was this background that we both had. And we loved beautiful things, obviously the motivation of going into business was to find beautiful things for other young people. But if we could buy things from Europe directly and just mark them up normally as if you bought them domestically, not take a big margin, but take a short margin, we could offer dramatically better pricing at more unique product, you know, that people had never seen before.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So we got married and like I say in June of 61 and we went on our honeymoon to the Caribbean. And in the Caribbean, we noticed there were some really nice stores. There was one Scandinavian store in the Virgin Islands. My wife picked up some of the items and said, how can you have Danish 18-inch stainless at 295 a place setting? It's so much more expensive in American. The Danish merchant there said we have salesmen from Europe come here and we buy direct from factories. And the very essence of that common stuck in our minds as we bought a whole bunch of things. We got back to Chicago and I was in a real estate business, she was teaching school. We were both sort of bored. And then about in February of 62 on that I was washing dishes. And these dishes we had bought. I said, you know, Carol, there had to be other young people like ourselves with good.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got married in the summer of'61. Now for our wedding gifts, we really didn't get any of the kinds of things we loved. We'd shopped at department stores and see beautiful downsk designs and a new Danish look and whatever. And none of our relatives had the money or the taste to buy us those kind of wedding gifts.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's probably a good chance that you have a piece of IKEA furniture somewhere in your house or apartment, and it probably looks pretty good, right? You know, nothing fancy, but functional, well-designed, kind of European looking. And the main thing is it's affordable. But back in 1961, if you wanted vaguely European looking furniture or plates or whatever in America, you had to be rich. And in nineteen sixty one, Gordon Siegel and his wife Carol were definitely not.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every store we opened between our opening in 62, our first built store in 65, our Plaza de la Ago store in 68, our Oakbrook store in 71. Every time I was betting the company.”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2017-02-20 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT