How I Did It: Paulette Cole, CEO, ABC Home
Your partner wants to focus on growth. You want to follow a passion more than a strategy. Could you walk away? Paulette Cole recently did that with ABC Home, and she recently made a joyous return.
Published October 2005
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEAs told to Lora Kolodny
In 2000, more than a decade after co-founding the New York City emporium ABC Home--the store that gave jumble a good name--Paulette Cole reluctantly left it. She and her husband and partner, Evan Cole, had separated. And they were increasingly at odds over whether to emphasize rapid growth (his choice) or socially responsible sourcing (her passion). She left control of ABC in Evan's hands and returned to the travel that had inspired much of her approach to the store.
Three years later, it was Evan who wanted a change. He went to Los Angeles and opened H.D. Buttercup, a furniture store that leases space to manufacturers and lets them sell directly to the public. Paulette moved back in--literally; she has an apartment on the top floor of the flagship store--as ABC's CEO and creative director.
Today, Paulette Cole wants to transform ABC into a 100% socially responsible world market. The trick, she acknowledges, will be to do it without sacrificing the company's $80 million in annual revenue, its 350 employees, or what more than one New Yorker has called the ABC magic.
My father ran this New York institution, the ABC Carpet Store on 19th and Broadway. It looked exactly the same for 20 years, all broadloom.
When I was young, I really believed the worst was to go work for my family. So I started as a waitress at age 14 and never went without a job from that point on. Instead of going to college, I assisted an established designer in New York for two years. Finally my father convinced me--for a supposed trial period--to see how I liked working at ABC.
He wanted me to understand each aspect of the business: buying, sales, the warehouse. Everything. Right away I went to Europe to visit international markets and a factory in Spain that we worked with. I didn't even speak Spanish, but I could oversee design, and make sure this big order for wool carpet we had placed came through on time.
In the middle of that, the factory workers went on strike. It was like a coup; they were locking out the owner. They wanted to make it into a cooperative. We were determined to make our order happen and keep the factory running--we couldn't lose the business and have them lose their business. It worked. The owners and workers went through mediation and the workers got partial ownership. We placed orders for years for both the workers' looms and the owner's.
I'd witnessed firsthand how you could advance a community and its economics just by doing business.
Traveling also taught me new things about design. In the States, as a people, we're too young to know how to create a home the way they do in Italy, Turkey, or Spain. But cultures of indigenous people who have done design and craft through the generations have made it a part of their whole being. They have incredible ways to create a feeling of home, and I wanted to do this in my own life.
That was my first instinct to begin importing some of this knowledge, and to take back to New York a little piece of each place I fell in love with.
Actually, I met my husband in New York when I sold him carpet! Evan Cole, when I met him, was an agent at William Morris. His side project was an eccentric little Christmas store on 52nd Street. We really hit it off, and after the sale he invited me to visit his store. Once we were married, he came to work at the family business.
Evan was a gambler with a brilliance all his own. He was a perfect balance to my father, who taught me how to be frugal, how to stay grounded, how to make a commitment about things like real estate. Evan was passionate but operational about it all. Working with him, I learned to invest in what I was feeling.
We didn't have a business plan. But around the mid-'80s, the trend of Oriental rugs, as they were called, began. Demand in the States was so strong! We started importing.
We'd be in Europe and Asia buying rugs, and we'd fall in love with other things. That's how we started with ABC Home, just bringing back antiques. If I loved it, Evan and I trusted our customer would love it. We just started to buy things. It wasn't about a plan. Eclectic was the whole thing.
Later, just like with the Oriental rugs, I realized there were no high-thread-count linens, no beautiful jacquard sateens like I found abroad. I brought some back. At first it was like, Linens have nothing to do with anything! Where are you going to put that?
This wrinkle on my forehead--I call it the linens wrinkle because that whole phase really wasn't easy. But when people started buying and kept on buying sheets, Evan and I were fully focused on ABC Home. We incorporated early on and were always separate, financially and creatively, from my father's business.
