According to Kanzer, Herman and Sidney were shocked when they heard his recommendations. And no wonder. Kanzer said the Timberland boot -- heavy leather, mile of thong, thick rubber sole, and all -- should be marketed as a fashion item. It had the outdoor look, he said, and the look was in. So take the boot to the "upscale" buyer, that growing crowd of well-heeled and well-educated urban backpackers that wanted the "look" and didn't care what it cost.Put it in Saks, he said, right up there with those sleek, imported slip-ons from England and Italy. Advertise it in, of all places, the New Yorker. And finally, he told them to increase their price by five dollars a pair so they could put the difference in advertising. "Herman and Sidney reminded me," Kanzer says, "that it was their company I was fooling around with and what was I trying to do anyhow -- ruin them?"
In effect, Kanzer had asked the brothers to abandon 20 years' worth of business practices. "I can tell you," Sidney says, "that decision used up a lot of rides to Newmarket. We agonized over it. Even raising the price was hard to accept. I mean, we were used to raising prices by nickels, not by five dollars."
Neither Herman nor Sidney knows exactly why they agreed to try Kanzer's marketing strategy. It certainly had something to do with intuition which, in turn, is arguably close to magic. Herman liked the approach, and Sidney thought it was taking the company in the right direction which, for him, is forward, with vigor. "Let's face it," Herman says, "to a great extent we committed our profits from the volume shoe business to a flyer. It was all up-front money. We couldn't be assured of anything."
On a spring day in 1975, Herman and Sidney were in their office trying to reassure their national sales manager that what they were about to do was best for the company. Sidney ended the futile conversation by telephoning Kanzer in Boston and telling him to go ahead with the plan. "We literally had to pick our sales manager off the floor," Sidney says. "He kept telling us that we had just ruined the company."
A few months later, the first Timberland ads began appearing in the New Yorker. They were masterpieces of creative advertising and eventually won more than 50 industry awards. They featured a colorful cast of straight-talking backwoods characters who clearly knew a good boot when they saw one. There was a family of moonshiners that included a mother whose face, even in wire-rimmed granny glasses, looked like a pick-ax, and her three boys sporting shotguns, suspenders, and outrageous high-water pants. They all thought Timberland boots were just fine.
And there was an old man testifying for Timberland from the seat of a log hauler. Not only was he satisfied with his own boots, but he also said he asked the Timberland salesman for "a pair of 13-wides for cousin Luther, double-wide on the left foot where the tractor run it over." Every ad closed with the refrain: "A whole line of fine leather boots that cost plenty, and should."
The ads had just the right touch of down-home sincerity to attract the "upscale" buyers -- when they could find the boots. Unfortunately, the company hadn't yet signed up any of the big-name upscale stores where the upscale buyers are supposed to go. "Obviously," Kanzer says, "we wanted to include department store names in the ads, but we didn't have any."
Most of the company's salesmen didn't know how to sell to upscale department stores. "They were used to the Army-Navy-store relationship," Herman says. "They didn't have the self-confidence to sell the department stores, except for a few of the younger salesmen who simply were too inexperienced to get scared. But it took Stanley to put the program over the top."
Stanley Kravetz, Timberland's 48-year-old executive vice-president, originally introduced himself to Herman and Sidney with the idea that they might use him as a consultant. He had 20 years of experience in the footwear and sporting-goods industries, including positions in sales and management. He was, according to one industry observer, a "fearless salesman who would knock on anybody's door." "At the time," Kravetz says, "working for a small, family-owned business was the furthest thing from my mind. I thought I was going to find a sleepy New England shoe manufacturer, and then I saw what they were trying to do."
Kravetz was hired early in the summer of 1976. By July, he was tramping up and down Fifth Avenue in New York with a green plaid suitcase stuffed with samples. One day he marched into the shoe department at Bergdorf Goodman and found the manager in his office sipping tea. The manager looked on incredulously as Kravetz unpacked his bag. "Here I am buying women's shoes," the manager exclaimed, "and you want me to buy boots?" Kravetz sold him eight pairs of women's boots and, with that sale, he uncorked a gusher.In the next two years, Kravetz and his remodeled sales team signed up 2,000 new accounts, including a crowd of fancy department stores and an assortment of smaller, upscale retailers.
By 1979, company sales had reached $16 million. Out of a total production that year of 600,000 pairs of footwear, 500,000 bore the Timberland trademark, a complete reversal of the business mix only two years earlier. "With numbers like that," Herman says with a smile, "you don't have to be told that you've got a brand name that sticks."
Even the competition was properly amazed. Says Rick Sherwin, vice-president at Dunham's, "I was very impressed with their marketing approach. It's the kind of thing where you ask yourself, 'Now why didn't we think of something like that? Why didn't we do more?' They simply did a fantastic job, helped the whole outdoor look, and created a tremendous market."
In 1979, as recognition that the subsidiary was now running the parent, the Abington Shoe Co. formally changed its name to the Timberland Co. For all their success and notoriety, Herman and Sidney Swartz seem remarkably unaffected. Maybe it's the memory of all those lean years that keeps them humble, or maybe it's simply hard to believe that you've lived a real-life fairy tale where every dream comes true.
CORRECTION-DATE: May, 1982
CORRECTION:
In "Sole Success" (February), the Abington Shoe Co. was mistakenly identified as being located in "a former piano warehouse in South Boston." The building was in Boston's South End -- a different part of town.
