YouSaid · the spoken record

Mel and Patricia Ziegler

lines on the record: 133
first: 2024-08-19
most recent: 2024-08-19
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

“I think you can encourage luck by if you're willing to see that there's really assets and liabilities there really is a silver lining of some kind in every crowd. I guess I'm just an optimist, but there's always a possibility to work with, at least in our more lucky, sheltered world. Know, and I think one of the biggest lessons, and we talk about it, meditation retreats and what comes. Is that to me the biggest epiphany was that not knowing is the greatest strength because then you're open to everything.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I would say Mostly luck. Say go with the flow, but don't forget to row. I mean, in a sense, being in the right place, being born at the right time.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Days together. Being through 50 years of this, you go through so many. Phases, but I would say I'm more in love with my wife now than I've ever been.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's always very, you know, he's told me many times I said, well, in a couple years, this thing is going to be, and I named a number, and he said, well, we've exceeded that many, many times over. So he's a very happy new owner.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, unlike Banana Republic, he stayed reverent to the The Republica Tay stayed reverent to the original concept. We really loved that. I mean, the tea business. We're very proud of what Ron and his son have done with that business. And they still own it. They still own it?”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To that So I guess you only kept the business for like. Three years, and then you sold it to a businessman and a beverage guy, like a guy who was in wine and sparkling water. And this was Ron, this was Ron Rubin.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The fun of it was, as it was with Banana Republic, was inventing it, starting it. This is where the excitement came from for us. As it began to grow a little bit, it was back to the same old problem, which is basically you have to buy the tea before you sell the tea. So you're always short money. You always need more money. And at this point, our son was just a couple of years old. Our daughter was on the way. Our daughter had just been born. And we did not want to plunge back into that business. So we said”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's this thing called? In other words, should I sue you or should I not? And I explained to you. We had a nice relationship. He understood that we were not going to sell clothes at the Republica T. No. He was okay with that.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If coffee did this to me, I'm not drinking it anymore. And I happen to mention it to, I went to a group at that point, I was on the board of a group called the Social Venture Network, which is about socially responsible businesses. In those days, that was a new concept. And I went to a conference and I somehow found myself on the plane with a fellow who was there. And he's sort of talking to him, and I said, What would you do if you did another thing? I said, Well, I'd do a T business. And I started talking, I found myself talking about it and getting excited about it. And I sort of dove in trying to learn about it and understand it. And so I decided let's start. Let's do this. Let's start the Republic of T and you were going to run the rule.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No coffee. No coffee, and only herbal tea at this place. And so I thought, my God, I never want to have a headache like this. So I spent the rest of the meditation dreaming about a tea company that I would start. Tea.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went away to this retreat. The rules were no reading, no writing. You sit and meditate for all day And it was shocking to me. My mind goes so fast to ever have to go through something like that. And by the second or third day, I was sitting there and I had the worst headache of my life.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“78 to 88. And I felt at the end that I had somehow been on a track to succeed, achieve, succeed, achieve, succeed, achieve. And I thought. Whoa, I want to just back up from this. And so I went away to a I never done anything like this in my life, a possana meditation. Silent meditation.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what a gift You could now. I mean, you had enough money to, you know, as you say, not be fabulously wealthy, but enough money to actually have a comfortable life and to not have to worry about a paycheck, at least for some time. You could be with your kid.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today they're sort of resurrecting it and they're going back to the tradition originally, which is interesting. They're bringing back.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Authenticity of the brand. And for years, they just kept bringing one crew after another after another. And the company just kept failing for years and years and years.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I should say that it went for years. They realized they made a terrible mistake. They had no idea. Devotion that the customers had to the”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were free. We had made enough money to be not terribly wealthy, but independently wealthy. And that was enough. Enough is enough.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at that point, yes, because this isn't what we bought into We started this business to travel. We started this business to not to become rich, but to be free.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came later, but he's considered to be a pretty important. Guy in the apparel industry, and I just want to say that to In his defense. But I understand you did not want award. This was your brand that you started. You did not want to work for some.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said no. And our COO at the time, his name was Ed Stroban, was a real classic merchant. And the moment he saw Mickey Drexler, he said, beware. He's a grabber. And I think what was going on is that Mickey was eyeing the The success of banana and wanted to get his hands on it. And somehow or another. That happened”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just to explain, Mickey Drexler had been brought in earlier by the Fisher family to do some major rebranding at the gap, and he had just become the president of the company and then eventually become CEO, and it's kind of a legendary guy in that industry. But I guess you didn't want to work under him. You said no.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we were now grown to a point where we were not a tiny company any longer. Data did matter. But we We weren't entirely reverent of data. We thought that there were other things that we had to be considered. And our intuition, this company was part of our DNA. It was part of our fiber. We knew when something was right and when something was not right. And so we were getting suggestions, first of all, we had an agreement that would... They would stay out of our business. We were now getting sort of more and more. Urgent suggestions that we should make changes that didn't feel correct to us. I mean, Don came into the office one day and said, you know, I think it's time that you're not going to be reporting to me anymore. You're going to be reporting to Mickey Drexler.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I explained to him that this was a best selling item, but it wasn't going to continue to be a bestselling item. And I knew that. And that's something that's driven by intuition, which he did not get. And so there was a tension between us, an attention that was kind of breaking up the spirit of the company.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I could see that other companies were copying the shirt and selling it for lower prices. In fact, there was a whole The limited started a line called Outback Red that was really a copy of Banana at a lower price, and so They were copying a lot of styles, but especially this shirt. But I was saying, okay, now this is the time to stop this shirt because our customers aren't going to want to wear something that's being sold cheaper by another company. In cheaper fabric. So Bob Fisher was running our merchandising department”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a shirt we sold an Indian cotton shirt that was beautiful. We called it the Bombay shirt. And we sold tens of thousands of these shirts all the time in various different colors. And they were doing spectacularly well. But at a certain point, Patricia said enough. We should stop selling this. It's time to move on to something else.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Okay, so what were some of the, you know, as they started to look into your business and started to presumably say, hey, you know, we think maybe you should expand out beyond adventure and safari and travel gear. Is that what they were saying?”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It went down further, and suddenly The gap became interested In Banana Republic. Everything was going fine. We were doing quite well, but the gap suddenly became edgy. Don became a little nervous. They didn't quite know. Where things were going And so we were beginning to contribute to earnings and they began to have some ideas about how we could squeeze more earnings. Out of the company. And it created some friction.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. It so happens that two or three weeks before that, the gap had reported earnings, and they missed earnings and the stock had taken its own dive. It was already down substantially, and then came Black Monday.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. We had this huge conference at the Claremont Hotel in Oakland where we brought all the store managers and regions. Company in the middle of a break, I walked out and I looked at a paper, a newspaper that was in the shop there in the hotel, and it said, Dow falls 22%.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dozens of stores. You were doing by one estimate like $60 million in sales, which is pretty great. But also at a certain point, I guess, some tension started to emerge between you and the higher ups at the gap. And I think may have come to a head around 1987 when the stock market crashed.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would not know two stories could be alike. Every store had to be different. We had different designs. Some were embassies. Some were safari camps, some were. We were just designing whatever we could in the genre. But no two stores would be the same”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That changed everything because then the next thing several months later the store opened, there were lines there. It was the highest grossing store in the mall. Wow. Everybody came into this. It was everything. These malls, we started getting calls from malls all over the country. They just, can you build one here? Can you build one there? Because malls, as you know, are percentage rent. So, the more money we made, the more money they made.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sat down. We sat down. I'll never forget this day. We sat down around the table. It was almost, this was exactly opposite of anything that they could possibly want in this mall. We should show her the drawing, the woman across the table. I remember her name, Rosemary McCandrew. She's the design director. We slipped the drawing across the table to her. We're sitting there looking. There's a minute of absolute silence. And she looks up at me and she says, I love it. I love it. I absolutely love it. We look at each other. What? And that changed everything”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got it. Okay, but you guys are still running the company, and with Gaps muscle, you're able to start working with factories to make clothes for you so you don't have to make them yourself. And then, of course, you start opening more stores. I think the first one, I think, was in Palo Alto at the Stanford Mall, which is pretty fancy, pretty upscale. And Patricia, you still got to design the store, right?”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And So we agreed. As I said, I mean, by a vote of Yes, one yes, and one maybe Banana Republic board decided to sell to the gap.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You won't see me. It's your business. I will give you Every dollar you need to grow this business as long as you keep it profitable.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to buy this business. But there's one thing. He said, you need to run it. I so I don't want to sell my business. I'm not looking for a job. No, no. Basically, that was my reaction. It's like, oh my God, after all this, this is where we are. Back to going.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A trend or something. It's a trend. And so he basically backed, almost backed out of the deal at that last minute. And that point we had a huge, I mean the accountant who was figuring this out with us. We had bills that we had to pay, accountant bills and legal bills and other kinds of bills for all this negotiation. It was just. But Dodge still wanted to buy the business.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he took us right down the path. And then at the last minute, he took it to his board And the board said You can't buy this company. You can't buy this company. It's not going to really.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't think that far. Yeah. We wanted out. We want it out. We wanted to go back to painting and writing and we want it out.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stores, a couple million bucks 1983. It's not bad. So that's what we just wore. We were thrown back. What kind of a salary would you like Looked at each other. I know. We never had a salary. We just basically took the money out of the cash register and went to dinner.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think we went to lunch and in the midst of the conversation we realized he says, well, how much do you want for the business?”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Don picks one up and looks at it and he says, Wow, do your customers really buy these? And I remember our store manager said, well, I haven't seen anyone come out of the dressing room wearing one lately, but they are buying. They're like a piece of history. And I could tell he was impressed with her, he was kind of blown away by the craziness of this item and fascinated. Yeah.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which fascinated him. You actually named the clothing and you wrote about this clothing and this and what's this and how's that?”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was fascinated. He went through that store reading very carefully every hang tag, looking very carefully at every single garment.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, and he had started with a single store in 1968, I think, on Ocean Avenue”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you kind of offhandedly say I sell the business before I do this, and this guy Merritt Sher says, let me introduce you to Don Fisher, the CEO of GAP. Which by that point in early, early 80s wasn't what it is today, but it was already a pretty significant.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't even know where to go to find the kind of people who could run this sort of thing. We were so busy paying the bills, getting the salaries, getting the job, getting the orders in the mail. We didn't have time to withdraw. And figure this out. And both of us were working around the clock.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, overwhelmed. Totally overwhelmed, we're four, we're almost four years into it at this point, I think. We never put the initial systems in place. The business just kept happening so fast that we could never stop for long enough to just sort it all out so that it all could work. And we didn't have...”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Merritt was a customer who came in frequently, and he was a very lovely man. And we liked him. And he said, Merritt, I can't. We're doing everything. We're too busy. We don't even have time to figure out how to. This business staffed correctly. And he said he'd come back again and again and again. And I think one day he came back and he said, it was just a bad day. I said, no, no, not only will I never open a store in your shopping center, I'd sell this company tomorrow if I could. He looked at me Want to talk to Don Fisher, who at that point was the owner of the gap, the Fisher family, was basically, he's the guy who started the gap. I said, sure, let's talk to him.”
2024-08-19 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Banana Republic: Mel and Patricia Ziegler · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT