Gymboree

“We also ran kind of an interesting strategy. We ran editorials... In the Wall Street Journal, so that Daddy could read them on his commute to his real job that he had to do to pay for the family, and he'd say, oh my God, this is perfect for my wife.”

“It's one thing, I'm a visionary. I could conceive what the store would look like. I can get it operating, but I'm not going to be the right person to replicate this in, in, you know, up to hundreds of these things. I'm just not.”

“Within the next year, we raised, Six million dollars.”

“Each location would maybe pull in, a good one would maybe pull in a quarter of a million, maybe.”

“We had Random House doing our books, Health Text, which was kind of a cool brand for clothing. They ran, they did a clothing line for us. We also had Connor Toys did Some really like a big climbing gym that you'd put in your... And it was sold in Toys R Us.”

“I said to the board, or said to my main investor, I am going to let these people go as you, as we both know they need to. Do you think it maybe it's that you want to replace me too, because I, I'd be down for this. No, the press loves you. Everybody thinks you…”

“He tells me he's going to put up 300,000 dollars for 30% of the company. He values the company a million dollars, which is sort of ridiculous, I think, but whatever And he put up the 300,000 and said, you go for it.”

“I gave them some equity, you know, because they had investment in this business, and so they were running it.”

“And somewhere along the way, I bought my partner out. I realized I'm doing all the work.”

“It's best to start a business when you're young and ignorant, because I just figured I could figure it out.”

“Yeah, so first they just thought they were going to do a corporate investment, and then they thought they would buy the company.”

“It's 6000 dollars, you know. I mean, that was the total sum of my investment in this thing.”

“From the, that, that press story, we were oversold right away.”

“I realized that the franchise model was flawed. That no matter how many franchises we had, it wasn't about scale. The revenues that the franchisees generated, and therefore the percent that they would give us of their revenues, was never going to be sustainabl…”

“He said, it's a great idea, Joan, but you need to know we're opening Gap Kids in six months.”

“Probably a year later, maybe a year and a half later, we were dropped by all of them... Because we didn't have the sales.”

“And if any one of the management team of the company thought that this person was not a good fit for us, that was a veto.”

“The next day, the lead investor called me, the guy that put in the first 300,000 dollars, and he would, he said, Joan, I always believed in you. We'll give you a bridge loan, get over to Hong Kong, produce the line, and when you get back, you'll find a locatio…”

“I said, Stuart, I'm like any other entrepreneur. I want a million dollars. And he said, okay, well, there is no public market for it. I'm going to leave you with 30%, and I'll take 70%.”

“Yep. For 1.8 billion.”

“We were, we did the highest dollars per square foot in both malls of any other store during that holiday season.”

“It went up 58% on the first day of trading.”

“We laid people off, and the one, those of us who remained in the, I called it the life raft, we all took 50% pay cuts. I took a 75% pay cut, and everybody hung in there.”