"Gordon doesn't deal much with the media," points out Ronald Fippinger, managing director of the National Housewares Manufacturers Association, "but his influence on this industry is enormous. He really helped create the whole gourmet-cookware craze in this country. And he certainly woke up the department stores to the fact that they weren't providing a high enough degree of service."
The toasts to Crate are as ubiquitous as the crystal on the store's shelves. John Gabbert, chief executive officer of Room & Board Inc., a Minneapolis-based furniture and accessories chain with two links in Chicago -- Crate's home city -- observes that while Crate does almost everything well, "they're the very best at product presentation. They're just known for that." One Dallas retailer told the Chicago Tribune that he holds his sales-training sessions outside Crate's front windows. His sole complaint: "My people manage to copy [Crate] for two days, and then it falls apart because they can't keep it up." And Stanley Marcus, retired chairman of Neiman-Marcus, the store that practically invented upscale retailing, flatly declares that Gordon Segal is "one of the great merchants of this century."
"I don't know what made him this way," says Marcus, who befriended Segal 20 years ago and later convinced him to open a pair of outlets in Dallas. "Maybe Gordon was born hungry, maybe he's always had the natural enthusiasm to do what he does. I do know that plenty of people have tried to copy Gordon, but nobody's really caught up with him.
"The big difference between them and most department stores," adds Marcus, "is that Crate is merchandise-oriented, whereas department stores are merchandising-oriented. Gordon makes a profit, but profit is not his first priority. He just plain loves to display his wares, and that kind of love is contagious."
The passion reflected in Crate's signature displays -- "we put the stockroom in the showroom and lit everything with spotlights," is how one old-timer describes the method -- is the same ardor that drove Gordon and his wife, Carole, to take a fling at importing back in the early 1960s. He had been in restaurants and real estate, she in teaching, but neither felt wed to a career. On a honeymoon trip to the Caribbean, they marveled at the variety of elegant, functional housewares available: items like French copper and German cutlery, which, if sold back home at all, were found only in "gourmet" shops, usually at several hundred percent above cost. Some months later, Gordon was doing the dishes (Arzberg dinnerware, a personal favorite) when he looked up from the suds and said to himself, "Hmmm, why not?"
"I was always interested in things like history and foreign affairs," Segal said one morning, sitting in his office at Crate's new $6-million Northbrook, Ill., headquarters, "so [launching] this seemed more like an adventure than a business. Carole and I had absolutely no experience in retail. We were so green, we forgot to buy a cash register until three days after we opened our first store. At that point, we had one employee and $17,000 in capital. But we also had this burning desire to learn."
The learning process reached both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and both ends of the vendor-customer equation. At first, the Segals and their company, Euromarket Designs Inc., were content to import quality items they had seen and used themselves. Taking advantage of the newly opened Saint Lawrence Seaway, they had everything shipped directly to Chicago. The more they sold, however, the more curious they became about the anonymous craftspeople whose work they so admired. In 1964, what became known as the Marco Polo Effect took hold, and Gordon and Carole were off on a personal buying tour of the Continent. They quickly found that most small European manufacturers were loath to deal with a couple of footloose Americans following in the often muddied footsteps of department-store buyers.
"It wasn't exactly the Ugly American syndrome," offers Segal, "but we ran into a lot of horror stories about department stores placing large orders, manufacturers expanding production to meet those orders, and then, zap. No reorder. Or no more buyer, because he'd been transferred to another department. It was a tremendous liability for them. Europeans tend to deal more on trust than Americans do. Our first challenge was to win their confidence, even if that meant paying them several visits before we bought anything. We spent two entire days with Gerard Hofmann, a wonderful French potter living down on the Cote d'Azur, and got nowhere. On the third day, he finally agreed to sell [to us] -- probably just so we'd leave him alone."
The Segals threw the Old Town store together in a scant two weeks; the name was a derivative of the open-shipping-container-and-dyed-burlap look they improvised out of necessity. Customers found them -- one regular shopper was designer Mies van der Rohe's daughter, who often carried Crate stemware home to her papa. (If Gordon were into tattoos, van der Rohe's adage, "God is in the details," would be a strong contender for his chest.) But Gordon didn't always understand what they were up to. He could talk for an hour about a Bengt Bengtner goblet and not seem to care particularly if he sold one, six, or none. About half of the store's initial inventory went out the front door at cost: ignorance, not charity. Crate's revenue curve, moreover, was a picture of consistency; sales his $8,000 the first month, half that the next, half that the next.
