A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  With Summer, his second daughter, Tompkins was tough. He had skipped out on her first six months and never seemed to have fought to overcome that emotional deficit. “Quincey was his favorite child because she would go upstairs in her room and play quietly,” said Susie. “Summer would be downstairs in the kitchen in the midst of everything, either stirring the salad dressing or standing up to Doug.”

  On one infamous Christmas morning, Tompkins bought his children a stupendous pile of presents. Like a guilty absentee dad, he splurged his daughters with gifts. “We unwrapped them all, and he said, ‘Okay. You’re going to pick one, and we’re going to take the rest to an orphanage.’” Said Quincey, “I certainly tried to raise my kids with the maximum amount of sense of responsibility for what you have and for those who don’t have things and to teach them to be generous and charitable and selfless. But, what my dad did? That’s a really aggressive way to teach that lesson to a four-year-old.”

  Doug’s penchant for extramarital affairs struck deep into the family. Girlfriend after girlfriend passed through their lives—visible as tension between Mom and Dad. “He was a womanizer from the very beginning. He always had girlfriends,” said Susie in a frank interview. “It was very hard. And I am a resilient being. I can’t tell you what I went through. You have no idea.”

  Doug ignored the fireworks in the family and was often aloof and self-centered, acting as if being nice was beneath him. Was his stymied run for an Olympic ski medal the cauldron of his hyperdrive? Was sleeping just a few hours a night a sign of frustration or merely a by-product of his kinetic energy? Unable or unwilling to articulate the source of his anxious behavior, Tompkins was a trailblazer and a man who didn’t look in the rear-view mirror. He wasn’t competing against anyone else; he was racing against himself.

  Despite the marital turmoil, Esprit de Corp kept Doug and Susie so busy that it was often easy to let family issues slip by as year after year, sales boomed. Esprit needed more employees, more hands on deck. Tompkins went on a hiring spree, but in his own quirky way. Instead of selecting resumes, he selected those from a certain lifestyle. He wasn’t looking to continue anyone’s business plan; he was whistling hand grenades into the staid department store culture. Tompkins didn’t want MBAs, he wanted free-thinking adventurers. “I want to know what your taste is,” Tompkins said when asked to describe his hiring guidelines. “What you do and how you lead your life. I like to meet your parents. I like to go to your house and see what it looks like. It’s very easy, because you see their bookshelves, their record collection, you see their taste in how they fixed their house. You can tell about personal style from how they’re dressed, but when you go to their house it extends into a lot of other things. It’s like hiring hearts and not minds.”

  Having no experience in retail was considered a plus. “He once told me he wouldn’t hire an executive unless he can prove he’s gotten several speeding tickets,” said Fred Padula, a climbing buddy. “He felt that the person who had the personality to get speeding tickets was the kind of person he was looking for, who could work for him.”

  As Esprit de Corp boomed, Tompkins went on a climbing trip with Chouinard that nearly killed them both. Climbing without ropes and buffeted by heavy wind, they were trapped by an ice storm in a Scottish nature preserve. Tompkins was nearly blown off the mountain slope. Then an avalanche destroyed their bivouac campsite halfway up a mountainside. “We’d been sleeping there and several hours earlier had come down to a base camp when we heard a crash,” said Chouinard. “Looking up we saw the entire ledge where we had camped snap off and disappear. . . . Doug and I were both overly cavalier about jumping into dangerous things. It’s almost as if we’ve had a subconscious wish to invite catastrophe so we can try to get out of it.”

  Tompkins thrived in these expeditions where the goal was to travel to the edge of the map, then continue indefinitely, over the horizon. Women were not banned, yet the trips carried the stamp of a boy’s club. Suffering was to be expected. Complaining not allowed. No one depended on another to live. It was survival not of the fittest but of the fit.

  It was also the golden age of kayaking. With friends Rob Lesser, John Wasson, Royal Robbins, and Reg Lake, they pushed each other to the limit as they notched the first recorded kayak descents of three iconic California rivers in a challenge they dubbed “The Triple Crown.” The odyssey involved carrying kayaks on their backs over a 12,000-foot ridge, then paddling through rapids so steep that at times they used ropes to lower themselves down cliffs while sitting in the kayaks. On the Yuba River, Tompkins was out of his kayak and got caught in a whirlpool that sucked him deep down, spit him up, then sucked him down again. Lesser paddled upriver and snuck the nose of his kayak on the edge of the whirl, allowing Tompkins to grab the kayak. “It was this slow killing machine that basically kept rotating back and forth,” said Lesser. “He knew he could die in there and his reaction was, Don’t tell Susie.”

  Traveling into the wild was not a hobby, it was an essential part of Tompkins. He needed the wild to escape the confines of routine and the stress of running what was now a $15-million-a-year business. Whether working remotely from bad dialups in Tibet, the Swiss Alps, or Borneo, he called his key team members with ideas at all hours.

  “Doug wouldn’t just come back from a trip; he came back with 50,000 new ideas, and new directions, and new things that had to be implemented,” said Tom Moncho, his executive assistant. “Every Wednesday, we met at eight o’clock in this conference room, and then would come out bleary-eyed at, say, six o’clock. Some of [the ideas he offered] were not ready for consumption until they had been polished up a bit. He put things so bluntly, so if you went out and said to everyone what his ideas were, they might be pissed.”

  Doug curtly said “No” to executives who asked to fly first class—a total waste of money, he proclaimed. At his company, everyone flew coach. When the designer Tamotsu Yagi asked for a reserved parking spot near the door of the main offices, Tompkins spit out a quick “No” and explained that no one in the company received such perks. Tamotsu then asked why, in that case, did Doug always park next to the front door? Doug shot back, “Because I’m the first one to work every day.”

  When Yagi asked for a translator to help him understand English, Tompkins blanched. Translators, he declared, were a worthless use of time. Instead, he inaugurated a language training program, including Japanese language classes. The employee who advanced most in their understanding of Japanese every year was given a free trip to Tokyo. For two.

  “The whole company is on a first-name basis,” said Doug to an interviewer. “The telephone registry we have on our desks—they’re all alphabetical by first names, because people don’t know the last names. Someone sent to me a directory that had all the last names. It was completely useless and had to be sent back to be completely redone.”

  At Esprit headquarters, Doug allotted himself a small space—he wasn’t one to seek shelter behind a desk. His office was off the main passageway to the graphics department. “I want to be totally attached to the creative side,” he said. “He was always going into design meetings and looking at prototypes laid out on these big tables,” said Ridgeway, a climbing partner and documentary movie producer. “It was all open office; there were no walls higher than four feet. There was a sign that said, ‘Commit, and then figure it out.’ I told him I liked that saying and he said, ‘Oh, that’s not mine; I got that from Napoleon.’” His other favorite saying was “Life Is Entertainment, Survival Is a Game.”

  After commandeering choice shelf space in leading department stores in New York, Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles, Doug focused on overall branding and merchandising while Jane and Allen concentrated on clothing design and sales. “He was going to Tokyo early on; it was still quite a mysterious, a different place. And anybody from the West lived in this strange bubble and he loved that,” said Deyan Sudjic, who worked with Doug and later became the director of the London Design Museum. “The idea of doin
g a store-within-a-store—Japanese retailing was exactly that model.”

  Essential to Esprit de Corp’s success were the unique fabrics and mix of bright colors. Every month, the production cycle required that Susie order products from Asia. Japan provided the highest quality, so she ordered fabric from Tokyo by the kilometer. As the monthly deadline approached, Susie walked the office wearing colorful knitted gloves she had snagged in a New Delhi market. The colored gloves became her muse, the fingers her palette. “Should it be these two? These three? She would take a long time to make that choice,” said April Stark, her assistant at the time. “She had to decide exactly what three different colors she was going to dye these fabrics she was going to use to weave the plaid. . . . To be the color guru was a premier job. We had a colorful business and that was one of Susie’s geniuses.”

  Susie traveled the world investigating colors. A hotdog vendor’s awning stoked a bolt of inspiration. Susie copied the pattern, swashed it onto dresses, and had a three-year run. She found inspiration at museum exhibits and nightclubs and spent five months a year traveling. Her perusal of antique markets, garage sales, and Tokyo boutiques fostered original color combinations. “We’d always be deciding up to the last moment, so when we decided on the colors, I would print them up and rush to the San Francisco airport,” explained Susie. “We’d ask stewardesses to bring the samples to Hong Kong, and when they arrived there would be someone waiting to pick them up on the other end.”

  While designing a dozen different tags for her burgeoning collections, Susie looked at the different brands—Plain Jane, Sweet Baby Jane, Rose Hips, Cecily Knits—and decided to simplify the labels. She’d use the name Esprit de Corp on every tag. A single unified name. “I came back from Japan where I was working and told Doug. He was mortified—said it would be the end of our company. He hated the idea of a generic label.” Within weeks Doug recognized not only the brilliance of Susie’s idea but also the urgency.

  As Esprit de Corp boomed, costs rose. Manufacturing in San Francisco allowed for flexibility to adjust orders up to the last minute, and delivery was immediate, but margins were tight, so Tompkins broadened his horizons. What if he took the manufacturing out of the United States? Why pay $1.60 per hour for manual labor in San Francisco if he could pay ten percent of that in Asia?

  Tompkins expanded his operation in Hong Kong. Ying was hardworking and motivated and became Esprit de Corp’s principal Asian partner, a key owner of Esprit International, and a cog in global Esprit operations. In Hong Kong, Susie took over the design of sweaters. She was “busting her tail and living in the Far East for weeks and weeks at a time, being away from the kids,” said Doug, who managed marketing and image-making.

  Doug explored production centers throughout the world. He sought to move production from San Francisco to India, but it didn’t work out. Esprit couldn’t get the high quality he required. When the San Francisco workforce (most of whom worked at the Great Chinese American Sewing Company) got wind of the international ploy, they picketed the Esprit de Corp offices at 900 Minnesota Street. Doug and Susie told employees they were not leaving Chinatown to save money but were leaving to get better sewing.

  Doug—who never shied from controversy—stuck his mouth in the middle of the Chinatown–Esprit labor dispute when he met with union officials and admitted he was leaving to cut costs. “Doug said that we were moving overseas because we couldn’t afford to pay the union wages,” said Henry Gruchacz, one of his lieutenants. “You can’t do that. If you do, you lose the fight with the National Labor Relations Board and you pay a huge fine. But Doug did; he just stated that union wages were too much to pay.”

  Schwartz, the top salesman, sensed trouble. “You can’t put hundreds of people out of business because you’re moving abroad. You go to them, tell them ‘I’m gradually moving my production.’ You do it slowly, you let people get prepared for their next life. Not him.”

  Union protesters swarmed the Esprit de Corp offices. Tompkins had them arrested. Union organizers tried to unite “the spirit of the people” into a union, so Tompkins locked workers out. Gerda Kainz, a German seamstress with an encyclopedic knowledge of clothing production and design, knew Tompkins was about to go overboard. “Doug called a meeting at Great Chinese American Sewing and told them there would be no more GCA if the Union would come in. That didn’t go down well with them, and as a result I had the tires of my car slit right after that meeting.”

  Union organizers plastered San Francisco with a “Wanted” poster featuring a bushy-eyebrowed, mustachioed Doug Tompkins talking on the phone. The poster listed four charges against Tompkins, including “locking out 135 unorganized garment workers, primarily non-English speaking immigrant women” and “ordering his truck drivers to drive through the picket lines injuring several workers.” The poster urged San Franciscans to be on the lookout for a bearded man “last seen driving away on a Triumph motorcycle headed towards Esprit de Corp.” The suspect was said to be wearing brown boots with “the fronts off like a brother from the street.”

  On January 31, 1976—the first day of the Chinese New Year celebrating the Dragon—saboteurs poured gasoline on the roof of the Esprit de Corp central offices in San Francisco. It was the third time that a suspicious fire had broken out at Esprit, including one blaze that caused over $100,000 in damages. This fire blazed longer than the previous. As the burning roof collapsed into the Esprit HQ, the company’s management team sat for a long-awaited gourmet meal at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’s restaurant across the Bay in Berkeley that was still wait-listed—even five years after its 1971 opening. Their meal was interrupted by a waiter who told them that a phone call had come in with urgent news: there was a fire at headquarters. But it had taken months to secure a coveted table and the team had already ordered, so the Esprit executive team waited. When the food arrived, they wolfed it down and impatiently sped back to San Francisco. Doug’s assistant Tom Moncho never forgot the view that night from the Bay Bridge looking into San Francisco. Enormous tongues of flames lit the night sky. Their Esprit de Corp was ablaze.

  Gruchacz, Doug’s right-hand man, who had not gone to the dinner, was at his home, just several blocks from the office. He had already heard sirens and smelled smoke when he received a call. “They said, ‘Henry! Go down to the factory. It’s burning! The union burned our factory down,’” said Gruchacz, who described rushing down Minnesota Street, the sky alit by flames. The heat inside the building was so intense that some seventy firefighters fought to control the inferno. Fire Department investigators never proved arson, but a firefighter told the San Francisco Chronicle “that’s not the way buildings normally burn.”

  Sweeney, the furniture craftsman, took a call from the property manager, Rex Wood, who told him there was a fire and that he needed to secure his woodworking studio. When they arrived, the building was nearly gone and exposed to the street. “Rex had a gun. And he gives me the gun. He holds the flashlight,” recounted Sweeney. “And we’re walking through this darkened space, water dripping everywhere, charred things about us. And we were walking toward my shop to make sure the shop was okay. And I think, Whoops, I don’t know how to use a gun. What if I shoot Rex by mistake?”

  Tompkins was in Germany sleeping on the couch of Jürgen Friedrich, the Swiss owner of Esprit’s European operations, when he received a phone call from his assistant, saying his company was on fire. “I’d never seen him crying,” said Friedrich. “But this night he was crying like a baby because his life’s work was gone. So too his priceless and rare collection of early American quilts. But it was only for an hour. Then he picked up the phone and started firing off directives. He was calling all around the world. The phone bill for that single day was four hundred Deutsche marks.”

  As Tompkins boarded the flight to San Francisco, a central question gnawed at him—the computer files. Were they safe? Tompkins knew that the building (now ashes) had been a winemaking factory and that the backup computer discs were stored in a vault b
uilt a century earlier by vintners. Tompkins had added a steel door, providing a second level of protection for a thick, fireproof safe holding IBM magnetic tapes. Those tapes, fragile and sensitive to heat, were the DNA of Esprit.

  Gruchacz entered the safe and found the discs covered with smoke and oily soot. “I knew that we were in deep shit if we didn’t have those discs,” he explained. “All of the sales and all of the accountings was on those damn discs. . . . I took them down to IBM. All the data was there. We still had a company.”

  Had the discs been destroyed, “we would have probably just folded because we would have been in such radical turmoil,” said Tompkins. “We didn’t have enough insurance.”

  Gruchacz and a clutch of top personnel went to the airport and picked up Doug and drove him to the scene of the fire. “He was not hysterical. He just looked at the wreckage,” said one employee.

  Outside the shell of their corporate headquarters, Doug joined Susie. “We were sitting on the curb,” she said, “looking at the smoldering ashes and he didn’t miss a beat. ‘We’ll just rebuild it even better’ and I was kind of stunned. He didn’t pause.”

  Chapter 5

  Esprit de Corp

  I was never attracted to fashion in and of itself. What interested me was not design per se, but the lifestyle that is attached to products. The products are not really all that important; it is the aura around them that counts in many cases, and that is what interests me. Ideas start with a view and reflection of society and then are articulated through the product. You breathe life into the product by weaving a personality around it.