With their new clothing concept up and running, Doug and Susie flew to Manhattan to further investigate the garment industry. During their meetings they heard about a hotshot salesman. Several contacts described Allen Schwartz as the best clothing salesman in town. Intrigued, Doug arranged a meeting. “I met them at this beautiful brownstone on East End Avenue owned by Leica Camera,” said Allen. “He said to me, ‘You should come and work for us.’ I said, ‘You don’t do any business.’ And he said, ‘If you’re as good as you think you are, I’ll give you ten percent commission and twenty percent ownership.’ I said, ‘Twenty percent of nothing is nothing.’ And he said to me, ‘Well, make it good.’ I said, ‘I’ll do $300,000 next week; that will be $30,000 in commission, so advance me $15,000. And when you ship the other half, you’ll owe it to me.’”
Doug agreed on the spot, and Schwartz sold $400,000 of Plain Jane clothing during his first month working for the nascent company. “We sold to them all: Casual Corner, The Limited, Saks, Bloomingdale’s, everybody,” he said. “The business I built was all about New York—all these chains with thousands of stores. I sold every piece of goods.”
With Allen pumping sales, Susie and Doug added Sweet Baby Jane blouses (in honor of the chart-topping crooner James Taylor’s hit of the same name), then Jasmine Teas (imported T-shirts), and then Cecily Knits (knit sweaters) and skirts. Their specialty was knockoffs; they would spot a trend, tweak the design, add fresh colors, and copycat their way to millions in sales.
In 1972, just three years into their new venture, sales hit $8 million, and “Susie and Doug” were a hot couple. Overnight they became San Francisco style icons. Their brightly colored, uber-comfortable clothes were snapped up. Cash cascaded into their life. Doug and Susie paid off all their debts, rented a proper workspace, paid salaries on time, and still had piles of cash to invest. Tompkins used a wad of cash to buy a red Ferrari. “He got a ticket in Bear Valley driving 110 miles an hour,” said Lito. “He tried to convince the judge that this was a really exceptional car and it wasn’t a problem driving a Ferrari at that speed. The judge said, ‘I’ve always wanted to ride in a Ferrari. Why don’t you show me?’ So, he took the judge out for a ride in the Ferrari. They came back and the judge still gave him a big fine. That was typical of Doug. He thought he could defy the rules and sway the world to his way of doing things.”
In Southern California, Yvon was also striking it rich. Together with his wife and business partner, Malinda, they gambled that sturdy rugby shirts could double as climbing attire. Yvon spotted the shirts while climbing in Scotland, and the bright colors opened up a new flank in the outdoor clothing industry in which the dominant tones were light tan, dark tan, light gray, and regular gray. Yvon knew he was onto a trend after receiving a letter from a customer asking if Patagonia could please continue to produce sturdy outfits in a “non-ugly color.”
Yvon had also launched a veritable revolution in the world of rock climbing with his proclamation of “clean climbing.” Instead of disfiguring the mountainside by hammering in metal spikes, Yvon promoted aluminum forms that could be wedged in by hand. Calling the new chocks “stoppers” and “hexentrics,” Yvon struck a chord with both his products and the environmentally sound philosophy it represented. Like his friend Doug, Yvon was not bound by traditional forms of building a business. He imported an eclectic line of products, including wool mittens from Austria and bivouac sacks from Scotland. For the logo of his Patagonia company he asked a friend to draw the jagged peaks of Fitz Roy and suggested they add color and a storm cloud over the summit for effect. The trip with Doug had cemented more than just their friendship. When Yvon needed to manufacture overseas, he used Doug’s contacts in Hong Kong, and was soon manufacturing 3,000 shirts a month. Yvon was now in what they called “the rag business.”
Hong Kong became a key part of Doug’s booming clothing company. Doug and Susie manufactured T-shirts and knockoffs by the thousand in the British colony, where its bilingual workforce sported a work ethic that amazed Americans. Based on a tip from one of their employees in San Francisco (who had a brother in Hong Kong), Doug and Susie reached out to a young man named Michael Ying. Doug described him as “an unemployed guy in between jobs who happens to be the brother of a girl working for us in the United States. . . . He didn’t have anything to do.” Doug gave Ying initial orders, and, “working twenty hours a day,” Ying became the force behind Doug and Susie’s massive production capacity in Hong Kong. Doug was stunned. He considered himself a workaholic and overzealous, but Michael Ying was something else. Doug called him “the real reason that we’re having success in producing and delivering product.”
Doug needed an overall corporate name to house his brands, and his friend Lito came up with “Esprit de Corp”—The Spirit of the People. The word “Corps” made it sound like “corporation,” and Doug also enjoyed tweaking the US Marine Corps by using its slogan to sell women’s clothing.
Esprit sales rose to a million dollars a month in 1973, even as Tompkins held back. “Sell what we have,” he told the salesforce. “That’s all we’re making.” Rather than chase soaring demand, Doug chose to control growth to a level that would not sacrifice quality. He pruned the suitors, carefully selecting which department stores were worthy of the opportunity to sell his growing collection of brands. “There are 45,000 stores in the United States and we sell to 2,000 of them,” he said. “We want the 2,000 that we sell to, to be better than the other 43,000—that’s the competition.” Doug saw the clothing business as a cutthroat field with thousands of companies fighting for market share. Fashion changed every three months, so guesswork was part of the game. If he could predict the future trends, print up the patterns, and stock the inventory, then when the trend hit money would flood in. “These companies are fast and aggressive, quick to respond. And that’s the nature of the industry,” said Doug. “We have to stay on footing with those guys. We have to be broken down into little battalions—like guerrilla factions—so that we can compete.”
Esprit de Corp clothing now ranged from a miniskirt to flowing bell bottoms in a style that epitomized West Coast liberation. These were the kinds of clothes that sporty fifteen-year-old girls and more-particular twenty-five-year-old women would buy for themselves. Mainstream dictates were snubbed. Esprit de Corp was the offspring of San Francisco’s counterculture values mixed with European fashion tastes. Female liberation was here to stay, and Esprit de Corp expressed not the angst for freedom but the small celebrations of individual choice. Requests to stock Esprit clothing were often rejected. “To sell my clothes,” Doug declared, “you must present them on the right stage.” He was fanatical in his dictates. The tag, the button, the hanger. No detail was too small.
As he’d done at The North Face, Doug leaned heavily on Duncan Dwelle to run his company when he decided to explore the great outdoors. Just days before a trip to Scotland with Chouinard, Tompkins called Dwelle and asked for his help. “Come over and talk to me.” Duncan went over, and Doug said, “Errh, uhh, I got this clothing business, going to need someone to run it. You gotta come over and run it for me. I’m leaving next week,” recalled Dwelle, who had moved on to another job. “So, I quit my job and I met Doug on a Saturday morning. He had stacks of envelopes, yellow notepads where he had scribbled notes about what had been sold, notes about what fabric had been ordered, and he left to go climb the Eiger, but ended up in Scotland. At that point he had lined up factoring by selling the receivables to a bank. We had crazy market acceptance.”
Although he rarely complimented employees to their face, in a private interview Doug raved about Dwelle—“I’ve moved him around incredibly. He’s a guy who can take a situation and grasp it. He makes himself an expert in a short period of time and then applies the same good principles of thinking.” According to salesman Schwartz, Doug was the company visionary, but it was Dwelle who managed the entire infrastructure. “Duncan is kind of a genius type,” said Schwartz. “He’s not a fashion guy, he’s
a country guy you’d find living in a log cabin. He was the Wozniak.”
Tompkins broke many rules of corporate business and challenged truisms. He hired women for three-quarters of the workforce, and made sure the company cafeteria was stocked with organic veggies, whole wheat breads, and healthy juices. He abhorred meetings, ruthlessly enforcing a companywide rule that no meeting could have more than three participants. “I try to leave a meeting with everybody feeling that they, too, would have made the decision unilaterally themselves.”
Tompkins was obsessive with aesthetic details. Workers were permitted long hair and use of music speakers with hidden jacks. The office had 300 house plants and a full-time employee for their care. Workers quietly slid about barefoot or in socks to protect the wood floors.
Leaving an unnecessary lightbulb on or a cigarette butt on the ground was a sin. “Somebody had an olive oil can with all their pencils and scissors,” recounted Susie Tompkins. “It was a great old Italian olive oil can and Doug came in and said, ‘Get that off her desk.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s her personal expression.’ He said, ‘It doesn’t belong here.’”
Tompkins required “Friday Reports” from the seventeen people who reported to him. He asked his staff to produce “Quick reports that can’t take longer than fifteen minutes to write and five minutes to read. That’s about all I can handle.” Every week he read for about an hour and a half, reviewing these reports. “This gives me a big overview. But the reports are as much for me as they are for themselves.”
Ignoring his de facto role as CEO, he branded himself as the company’s “image director” and was often seen pulling double back flips, high above his workers. At Esprit de Corp, the company trampoline was larger than the boss’s office. “The trampoline was up on the roof, which was pretty spectacular,” said Peter Buckley, the champion high diver who taught Tompkins how to spin on the trampoline. “You felt like you were up in the clouds. Occasionally you fell off the tramp, and someone tried to break your fall. On tricky stuff, we had a safety belt. He was a great athlete. He learned so fast. And he was fearless.”
ESPRIT’S 10 BUSINESS PRINCIPLES
Know who we are and stick to it.
Create demand rather than supply demand.
Build a brand first; a business will follow.
Quality before quantity.
Co-prosperity among customers, suppliers, employees, and company.
The organization receives the by-product of each employee’s energy.
Treat all colleagues as equals. Maintain a two-way communication system to resolve grievances.
Give each individual a chance to realize his or her potential.
Take pride in excellence and achievement.
Enrich the societies in which each company operates.
Near the trampoline was the Esprit de Corp carpentry workshop where Jim Sweeney turned out custom oak desks, sculpted picture frames, and made workstations for the sewing shop in Chinatown. Sweeney held a PhD in advanced math and had chosen woodworking and craftmanship as expressions of his philosophy that “What you do is who you are.” Sweeney had impeccable taste. Anytime Tompkins wanted furniture custom built from wood, Sweeney could make it. As a team, the two men spent hundreds of hours brainstorming furniture design, rock climbing, and sharing LSD.
Sweeney said his boss reminded him of an aquarium fish named the “Jack Dempsey,” in honor of the champion boxer. “If you take a tank of water, and you put two Dempsey fish in it, the way they challenge each other is by turning sideways and making themselves look big,” said Sweeney. “The two Dempsey fish will struggle to dominate the space. Basically, what happens is a fish will have his zone of that tank. They will struggle back and forth in this psychological way. They don’t bite each other. But they establish dominance over a particular zone of the tank.” Sweeney continued: “And the stronger, more dominant fish will eventually take over almost all of the tank. The other fish will be in a tiny corner of the tank all by himself. Doug was a bit of a Dempsey fish, in that initially in a domain he’d enter and he’d go, ‘Okay, I see who the players are here. That’s fine.’ But then he’d start to say, ‘Well, I can be in this playground also.’ And then he’d become more and more dominant and he’d claim more and more of the space.”
Eager for more adrenaline, Tompkins took flying lessons in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco, in a versatile plane known as the “Citabria”— “a-i-r-b-a-t-i-c” spelled backward. “Instead of learning in some Cessna training vehicle with tricycle gear, he learned to fly, right from the get-go, on a tail dragger,” explained Edgar Boyles, his friend and fellow pilot. “Soon after, he bought a plane. And he dove into flying like it was the next sport, as an aesthetic challenge.”
With the ink still wet on his pilot’s license, Doug took his family on the same route he’d traveled a few years before in a van: from California to the southernmost tip of South America.
Susie and Doug replaced the back seats of the airplane with a custom-cut pad, a playpen for Quincey, age four, and Summer, two. “It was the equivalent of a flying VW Bug,” remembered Quincey. “There was a foam mattress in the back, and he would fly up and then he would quickly drop, and we would float up.”
From Oakland they flew to Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile. Their final touchdown was Tierra del Fuego near the tip of South America. With his children holding tight, Tompkins touched the tiny Cessna down at the end of every day, improvising a campsite or family excursion. Following the saying “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” he frequently landed on remote beaches. In Mexico, he misjudged the high tide and just in time mobilized Susie to help push the plane down the beach to a dry spot as he gunned the engine and took off. For twelve hours his family was stranded, and Doug could do little more than land in the nearest village, pick up food, package the morsels securely, then run low-level flights just above the beach as he air-dropped lunch and dinner to them on the beach below. “We used to land on beaches and get into trouble, and we’d land on fields too,” said Susie. “We had some pretty scary things, but I think when you’re a certain type of person at that age, you don’t think about any of it being scary. It’s just like wow!”
As a family they camped, sleeping on the ground or in the back of the plane. Telling stories and reading books as they flew, Tompkins sometimes let the children take the controls. This was a more playful version of their strict dad. For the daughters, flying was a magic moment, an escape from the “terrestrial Doug” who was more tyrant than parent. “He was never really very interested in other people, what they were doing, their lives, their family, their anything,” said his daughter Quincey.
Back in San Francisco, Susie and Doug bought a large home on a huge lot, nearly a full city block, at the head of the famously serpentine Lombard Street. The oversized yard included a hot tub, a guest cottage, and a pool big enough that friends brought kayaks to practice “Eskimo rolls.” The main residence was surrounded by towering redwoods. “It was like Muir Woods in San Francisco,” said Rick Ridgeway, a longtime friend. “As you left the house, the redwoods framed the TransAmerica pyramid, which had become an international visual icon of San Francisco.”
The hot tub was not visible from the house, and at night Randy Hayes, a local teenager, sneaked into the hot tub for risqué adventures with his girlfriend. Years later when Hayes confessed to Tompkins, he laughed. It sounded like something he himself would have done.
The Lombard Street home was an oasis in the heart of San Francisco. The upper floor of the house featured a crow’s nest room with a 360-degree panorama of San Francisco Bay and a postcard-perfect view of the Golden Gate. It was the most expensive lot in San Francisco, yet from the street only a tangle of branches was visible. There was little to tempt outsiders, and the Tompkins family rarely locked the gate. Doug lobbied to never use keys. If he got locked out, he scaled the walls, and at times tripped the house alarms. Despite multiple robberies of his car radio
, he never locked his auto. “I’m going to get a car without a radio,” he declared. “Screw it, so I don’t have to lock my car.”
At home, Doug was a mad perfectionist. In the kitchen he decorated a shelf with can after identical can of tomato sauce, each label showcased and in perfect alignment. He loved the elaborate flower arrangements placed throughout the house and regularly added to his valued art collection, including paintings and sculpture, with precise lighting like exhibits in a museum. His daughters were forced to accept his strict definition of “art.” “They couldn’t put things up on the walls. He decorated their rooms the way he wanted their rooms to be—all gray and white,” said Susie Tompkins. “He wanted to control you.”
An exhibit of Amish quilts at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan left Doug and Susie bedazzled. She marveled over the fine stitching and studied the hues of natural dye. Doug grew enamored with the geometric perfection and began collecting the quilts, many of which he framed as wall decorations. First at home and then throughout the Esprit office, the quilts of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, became a hallmark of the couple’s collective aesthetic. When he mounted the quilts, Doug fussed over the width of the frame and the angle of the lighting. It had to be just so, all the flaws removed. The quilts provided a stage on which he could showcase a piece of perfect art, failing to see that it is often the flaws that show humanity.
On weekends, airplane trips continued as a family pastime. For lunch they would fly to The Nut Tree in Vacaville, landing at an airstrip that was part of that popular restaurant’s experience; a kiddie train ran from tarmac to dining room. Three-day escapes to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico became a regular weekend outing. They explored Northern California extensively. “San Francisco is so foggy, a lot of the time you’d take off in the fog then go up and be above it all. I remember being over the Bay Area and I could see the top of the towers of the [Golden Gate] bridge. Those red towers, the top little bit,” said Quincey. “We’d go up on the Fourth of July and look down and see the fireworks and we would fly under the bridge.”
A Wild Idea Page 7
