A Wild Idea

by Jonathan Franklin

  As a prize for top division employees, in 1982, Esprit offered a whitewater rafting trip to the Biobío River in Chile, among the most rugged rivers in the world. The Biobío was the same river that Tompkins crossed on his Fun Hog trip fifteen years earlier, and now he brought his family. Doug, Susie, Quincey, and Summer all went on the rafting trip.

  The Esprit team flew to Santiago and were met by guides from Sobek, a pioneering whitewater rafting expedition company working in a Chile that was still under the dictatorship of army general Augusto Pinochet. The military government was brutal. Armed forces members assassinated an estimated 3,000 civilians using a technique known as “detain and disappear” in which activists were arrested, tortured, murdered, and their bodies dumped from helicopters into the ocean. Given a popular insurrection and weekly street riots against the dictatorship, tourism was nonexistent. Pinochet’s secret police recorded the Esprit team’s visit in their files: Señor Tompkins, who had gotten in trouble with the stolen BMW motorcycles, had visited Chile yet again.

  To raft the Biobío, the Esprit team left Santiago and headed south through a long valley filled with orchards, wineries, and fields of wheat. They passed near Colonia Dignidad, a German compound that offered roadside dinner and fresh-baked cookies for weary travelers. Situated on 40,000 arable acres, Colonia Dignidad was a mysterious spot cloaked in rumors and legends. Stories abounded that surviving rulers of the Third Reich were hiding inside the compound. No one ever spotted a war criminal, but it was a common sight to see rows of uniformed men in paramilitary training exercises. Massive arms caches hidden underground only added to the doubts about activities beyond dairy farming. Male and female subjects were kept under harsh discipline and forced to reside in separate living quarters. Beyond the milk cooperative and a public health clinic, the Germans were also running a classified intelligence gathering operation on behest of extremist right-wing movements seeking to crush leftist rebel groups in South America. General Pinochet sent a regular stream of prisoners and visitors to Colonia Dignidad, including mothers to be tortured and his own children to enjoy fresh air and a secure location to frolic in the countryside. The Esprit crew didn’t stop for cookies.

  Arriving in the Biobío region, the Esprit team boarded a locomotive up the valley. The steam-powered train puffed into the mountains. Like pioneers from the 1850s, the Esprit crew purchased pots and pans at a rural outpost where cheap wine came in five-liter glass jugs. But hours after they arrived at their first riverbank launch spot, a stomach virus erupted. Employees doubled over in pain, vomiting, half-paralyzed, barely able to walk. Instead of the promised hot weather, the temperature dipped to near freezing. One Esprit employee slipped into the icy waters of the Biobío River and had to be rescued. “Nobody got hurt, but it was a nasty swim for someone with a terrible, cheap wine hangover,” said Dave Shore, one of the guides.

  Yet for the Tompkins family it was a rare moment of togetherness. By day they floated the headwaters of the Biobío and at night camped at “Santiago’s Wall”—home of a toothless cowboy, dressed in a black poncho, who brought a goat or sheep for a riverbank BBQ. Romances between the grizzled river guides and the Esprit women on the trip led to numerous affairs and, within a year, a trio of marriages.

  Doug descended the river in his kayak, exploring with his expedition buddy Royal Robbins. For Susie and the kids, who played with Royal’s daughter Tamara, the trip was a break from the chaos of separate travel and increasingly disconnected lives. Susie was now spending months a year in Hong Kong, often taking her young daughters. Doug stayed in San Francisco, then escaped on adventure excursions that consumed several months a year. The family was fragmented, but the cracks were invisible to all but those in the inner circle of Esprit.

  In 1983, Esprit sales topped $1 million a day. Doug and Susie were San Francisco business celebrities, and their guest house was a crash pad where neighbor Steve Jobs or comedian Robin Williams might be found. “Robin Williams drove Doug crazy. Doug thought he was way, way too hyper,” laughed Rick Ridgeway. “Robin was a runner. He was staying at the house, and Doug was so tired of listening to him talk that Doug said, ‘Let’s go for a run.’ Doug ran Robin all over the city just to make him exhausted. Doug said that night Robin was so quiet, it was the best night he had with Robin Williams.”

  Once a year Doug hosted a day-long “Pepper Party.” Tompkins, an accomplished cook who mastered the magic of marinade and slow-roasting red peppers, held sway over a crowd that included his heroes in climbing and kayaking together with artists of all stripes. To guarantee a collection of a dozen mad geniuses, Tompkins printed different versions of the invitation, each one custom formatted to inform a VIP that he or she was guest of honor. Even when the celebs understood the trick, they found reason to attend. “Yvon Chouinard is there, and Diahann Carroll, the singer,” said Rob Lesser, the kayak photographer and filmmaker. “The problem was you didn’t know who the hell they were, and they probably were captains of industry. But you would not find Doug associating with people who were blowhards or full of themselves. You found Doug with people who were interesting, and who stimulated him. His mind was so damn quick that he could see through you in a second. If he was in a conversation with somebody who was wasting his time, he was adept—without being offensive—and would melt away.”

  Inside the main house, his art collection included paintings by Botero and a tryptic by Francis Bacon. “When Doug was in his art acquisition phase, I was often with him, in London, where we were going to galleries,” said his friend Peter Buckley. “He would, first, look at the entire repertoire of that artist. Then he’d get the stories. And then he’d isolate; he’d say, ‘This is the one. This is the masterpiece.’ And it was a sort of methodology he took to every artist that he was looking at.”

  When Ridgeway slept over with his wife, Jennifer, Tompkins told them to be careful and not touch the painting above the headboard. Rick thought, “Of course, he doesn’t want some oily hair or head to leave a scratch.” And then Doug said, “Because if you shift it at all the alarm goes off in the downtown police station.” The next time Ridgeway viewed the artwork it was on display in Paris, at the Centre Pompidou.

  Doug Tompkins had become the bad-boy prince of American retail. Esprit’s colorful clothes exploded off the shelves. Magazine covers framed his face with banner headlines like “The Word According to Doug.” Esprit was among the hottest global brands, and the DNA was all Doug. “The ethos he was projecting—and after a little bit of practice, he was able to articulate it—was ‘we’re in the business of creating image,’” said Dwelle, his business partner. “You have to live in that mind frame. You have to project an image, the ‘me image,’ which is clean and sociable and exciting and sexy and dynamic, because you can’t very well project that image in your work if you don’t internalize it.”

  Tompkins considered the title CEO far too corporate for himself, too straight. So he had his business card—after numerous prototypes—printed with the title “Image Director,” which justified his jaunts around the world, learning Italian, and buying airplanes. For nine months a year he was “Image Director” and for the other three months he experimented with what he called “my own MBA,” which Yvon jokingly called “Management by Absence.” Their wild adventures never failed to invigorate new thinking and provoked deeper responsibility and independence in their senior staff. Neither man had any desire to take their companies public and risk sacrificing intrinsic value for what they mocked as “stock value.” With virtually no corporate debt and little outside financing, both Patagonia and Esprit were profoundly designed to cater to the leadership of their founders. Leaving the office for months at a time was part of their routine. “It didn’t bother any of us,” said Robertson, who worked at Esprit during monthslong absences by boss Doug. “It might have even been a relief at times.”

  Exploring the wild corners of the planet also allowed Tompkins to scout retail opportunities. For nearly two years he negotiated with the Peopl
e’s Republic of China in a bid to become the first American clothing company to sell retail clothing in the PRC. Given the restrictions on clothing imports into the US, Tompkins obtained special tariff exemptions to import tens of millions of dollars of clothes and accessories from Hong Kong. In the entire US Doug held the largest single import quota from Hong Kong. He’d seen the market early, grabbed a share of the world’s top-quality and low-priced manufacturing, and was now selling those clothes to some 7,000 stores worldwide. His empire was based on inexpensive, mass-produced clothing. When the catalog was printed in Pennsylvania, the final tally was 1.5 million copies, which, as the company newsletter bragged, was the equivalent of “22 railroad cars filled with raw paper just to print that all up.”

  Tompkins was able to abandon his role at Esprit for weeks at a time only because Esprit was a privately held corporation. Loathe to dilute ownership or power, Doug and Susie kept Esprit resolutely in their private hands and thus immune from shareholder revolts, stock price concerns, or issues of management control. Even as annual revenue neared $600 million and sales expanded to dozens of countries, Doug would often escape from the San Francisco corporate offices for three-week-long expeditions to Bhutan, or for a month to notch the first descents of whitewater rivers around the globe.

  * * *

  Doug and I decided to run the south fork of the Maipu River above Santiago [in Chile]. It had never been run before. We got dropped off, and we are running this river and we came across one area that had a sharp corner. We could hear a roar on the other side, so when you are running a new river you’ve got to get out and scout it. I stayed in my boat and Doug got out and walked up a knoll to look around the corner, and while he is looking around here come two soldiers. They stick their guns in his back and demand to see his passport. He said, “What the hell you talking about? I don’t have a passport, I am a kayaker. Look at me? I got shorts on!” They are calling in, back to headquarters, and he takes off and comes running down the hill and jumps in his boat without telling me anything, and zips around the corner. I am freaking out. I am thinking, Oh my God, I don’t even know what is around the corner, these guys could shoot us, so I go around the corner and I am so freaked out that I am sitting way up stiff in my boat and, sure enough, I hit this reversal and I go over and I am upside down. And I am thinking, How can I stay upside down as long as I can? I don’t want to come up and get shot. Later that night we found that we were at [dictator] Pinochet’s summer estate, which we didn’t know anything about.

  —YVON CHOUINARD

  * * *

  Tompkins no longer needed the ego boost of a Ferrari. Instead, he strapped a bright red plastic kayak to the rooftop of a beat-up, black station wagon and bombed around the Bay Area. People gawked. A kayak atop a car in the city was strange. People stopped and questioned him. “I had one kid sitting around the car until I showed up. He said he had been waiting there fifteen minutes to find out about this thing. This guy was a surfer, in Monterey, and he had to know about this weird-shaped thing. They know it is a boat, but where does it go?”

  On his trips, Doug avoided five-star hotels. He preferred to sleep on the couch of a friend with his sleeping bag, always the first item crammed into his travel bag. “I can have a private jet, but I can’t imagine it,” he said. “I poke along in my little, single-engine propeller airplane and land on beaches.”

  Tompkins’s appetite to learn more about design grew. He read book after book about both the cutting edge of design and architecture, and then recruited superstars Joe D’Urso, Ettore Sottsass, and Shiro Kuramata to build Esprit stores in Manhattan, Milan, and Tokyo. For those in the know, it was like having Maradona, Messi, and Pele on the same soccer team. “Doug loved the experience of working with designers who were going to shape the places he worked and lived in,” said Peter Buckley. “In Japan he got Kuramata, who designed the Singapore and Hong Kong stores for Esprit, to do a house, which is where Doug stayed when he was in Japan. He loved those experiences.”

  After hiring John Casado to redesign the company’s logo, Doug invited him over to his house on Lombard Street. “It was this fabulous green shingled house on Russian Hill, it went from block to block,” recalled Casado. He immediately noticed the white plank floors, and the very modern look. Doug was busy doing something in the kitchen, and told him to hang his coat up in the closet. It was a walk-in closet, and as Casado hung up his jacket, he had a realization: it wasn’t a closet at all, but a library. “Every book on the wall was about design, or style, or architecture. I was flabbergasted, because I have done pretty extensive reading on design. I recognized he had very esoteric books on design. When I walked out, I said, ‘I give up, are you a closet designer? What is all this?’ Doug replied, ‘No, I just love design.’” That calmed Casado down. He realized he was working with a client that he didn’t have to educate: someone who would appreciate what Casado could do for him.

  Steve Jobs would later mold the early Apple flagship stores as indirect tribute to the beauty and flourish of the emotional retail experience crafted by Esprit. When Tompkins published Esprit: The Comprehensive Design Principle, Jobs ordered his team to buy copies of the six-pound book. “When I was working on the Apple retail store concept design with Steve Jobs in 1999, he wanted to emulate his store on one of the stores within the Esprit book, and he bought fifty copies from me to show his design team. He called it a ‘design bible,’” said Yagi. “Douglas Tompkins reminds me of Steve Jobs, or should I say Steve Jobs reminds me of Douglas Tompkins?”

  Tompkins was eclectic in his ’80s tastes. Perhaps the lack of a defining style for the decade itself allowed him to graze among different flavors. For a few years he tried Italian. He had a love affair with all things Japanese, and then fell (briefly) for the sleek, modern, hi-tech style of the British architect Norman Foster. Sir Norman and Doug were indeed an odd couple—the Lord and the kayaker.

  Foster was as revolutionary as Doug. He had upended the London skyline with a building popularly known as The Gherkin, his futuristic curved dome. In a fit of empire building without limits, Tompkins tasked Sir Norman with designing Esprit headquarters as a multimillion-dollar art project, a sculptured city where a whole world could be created. Esprit offices would be surrounded by a soccer field, a daycare center, and a gym. The corporate organic garden was as well designed as the natural lighting for the conference room. South of San Francisco, real estate prices were lower, and redwoods still dotted some of the hills. Tompkins picked a little-known city on the San Francisco Peninsula called Cupertino. Although Tompkins never built his campus there, Steve Jobs did.

  Cupertino became the world headquarters for Apple, and Jobs was praised for his visionary thinking. Tompkins, meanwhile, was busy berating Jobs himself. “I used to fight with my friend Steve Jobs, who believed that the Internet, the personal computer, and eventually of course the cell phone were the roads to paradise,” he remarked. “These were going to lead us to the Promised Land. I told him they were ruining the world. He’d get huffy about that.”

  As a forty-three-year-old New York native who’d never finished high school, Tompkins’s high-flying life in the mid-1980s was intoxicating. But his love of design and architecture was also wildly expensive. “He was over in Italy building all these monuments to himself. Big store in Milan. Twenty million dollars down the rathole just so he could play with the designers,” said Susie, his full-time business partner and, by the mid-1980s, his part-time wife. “Same thing in London with Norman Foster. This is what was going on. And it’s just driving the company into the toilet. We couldn’t make the US payroll, and he’s spending millions of dollars all over the world.”

  For fellow executives at Esprit, Tompkins’s largesse created a dilemma. Clearly the company could not continue without his drive. But could it survive with him at the helm? “In the long run, you have to say, ‘God, you worked with all these great architects—Norman Foster, the Japanese, Joe D’Urso—and yet nothing survived. Nothing,’” said Dan
Imhoff. “It’s sad. When I was in Italy, they moved a wall three inches, at the cost of a million dollars in a building that they didn’t even own. It was a leased building. He had lost his mind, in my opinion, and I have a lot of respect for a lot of things that he did, but in some ways, he went over the top. He couldn’t ever stop these fanciful things that he would get doing. But, hey, it was his money to play with.”

  By 1983, Tompkins was afflicted with an overdose of self-confidence. Faith in his unique aesthetic compass was leading him astray. Without fully recognizing the error, Tompkins had let his trademark motto, “No detail is small,” mutate into “No detail is too expensive.” He custom-ordered steel staircases for his stores, then added chrome bannisters. After picking out his Venetian stone tiles, Doug then became involved in the design of the shipping crates. He collaborated with his mentor Ettore Sottsass, of Milan’s postmodern “Memphis Group” design movement, to design the furnishings for Esprit’s Milan showroom. One critic described the result as a unique collision of geometry that was “part Bauhaus, part Fisher-Price.”

  But it was on the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica boulevards in Los Angeles that Tompkins sought to create a retail showroom like no other—a shrine to design where he could pack underwear into transparent yogurt containers and display towels inside plastic bags designed for a baguette. Tompkins purchased Flippers Roller Boogie Palace, the roller skate disco known as “L.A.’s answer to Studio 54—on wheels.”