The Exchanges

Q I mean, how do you remember coping with it? Did you try to fight it? Did you try to be like a, a sort of a macho teenager? What do you remember?

A Well, there's a couple things. One is, unfortunately, I'm embarrassed to admit that I was like a little bit of a bully against some of the effeminate kids with the other kids in school so that, you know, so that I wouldn't be known as gay. And the other part was that I prayed every night. I mean, I cried myself to sleep too many nights and just prayed that God would change me. I didn't understand why God hated me. I didn't understand what I did. Um, it's a horrible, horrible time for a gay kid. But I, um, I was really lucky. I eventually Got through things. I was in college. I found a psychiatrist, and I walked into the office, and he said to me, you know, what can I do for you? And I said, well, I'm gay, and I want you to change me. And it was the first time I had ever used the word gay out loud. And he looked at me and said, well, I can't change you, but I can teach you how to love yourself.

AI assessment note: “I was like a little bit of a bully against some of the effeminate kids”

Q How did they take it? Were they supportive?

A Well, it's a, uh, something I tell parents, be very careful what you say to your kids. Uh, when I told my mother, it was on a Sunday morning around 11 o'clock, she called me, because I hadn't called that week, and I was still sleeping, and I said, oh yeah, yeah, I'm ok. I said, oh, by the way, I'm going away on vacation to St. Thomas. Oh, that's so great. Who are you going with? And I said, I'm going with my friend Michael. Michael, I don't understand why you do so many things with Michael. Why don't you have a nice girlfriend? You're such a nice looking boy. Why don't you have a nice girlfriend? And I said, well, mom, today's the day. And I just have to be honest. Michael is my idea of a girlfriend. Silence. And her words to me were, don't tell your father. He'll have a stroke. You'll kill him.

AI assessment note: “her words to me were, don't tell your father. He'll have a stroke.”

Q And how did you, how'd you end up getting that job?

A So I, although I was a history major in college, I became friends with the dean of the business school, and I was going to go to law school because, of course, that's what my mother wanted me to do. And he said, oh, lawyers are such assholes. They're so boring. You don't want to be a lawyer. He said, you should be in retail because he used to work at Bloomingdale's, And, uh, he said, let me call and introduce you to somebody. Go get a haircut, because I had this long ponytail. Put on a suit, get a haircut, and go meet this guy, because it's going to change your life. So I went and met Mr. Brennan the next day. Had a series of interviews, and I, fortunately, my last interview was with Lester Grebetz, who was probably, you know, if there's 10 merchants from the 20th century who were really outstanding retail merchants, Lester is one of the tops. He turned The housewares department into a fashion department, a fashion gift department. He turned domestics into this wildly designer, successful look. So he was my last interview, and he and I really hit it off well, and he said, do you want to come to work here? I want to put you in my division. So I started as an assistant buyer in Department 80, blankets, bedspreads, pillows, and comforters.

AI assessment note: “he and I really hit it off well, and he said, do you want to come to work here?”

Q Um, Mitchell, when you, um, while you were at Lane Furniture, did you already start thinking about starting your own business? Was that in the back of your mind, or were you, were you happy working for a bigger company?

A Um, I was sort of happy. I really hadn't thought about starting my own business until I met Bob. Um, when we both moved down, we bought a house, and I had said to Bob, you know, how about if you get the house together and decorate it, and you know, I worked for this company, and you know, I had access to buy furniture from all the divisions, whether it was sofas, tables, and he really put the house together, and um, in the dining room, he picked out upholstered chairs, But what he did that was so different, because they, whoever had an upholstered chair, it was like in an oatmeal fabric, a beige fabric, but he picked out this beautiful floral, and then we got a table with a, uh, like a vintage metal base with a big octagonal glass top, and then for the chandelier, he took chicken wire and created like this cloud and put Christmas lights in it. Wow. And it was on a dimmer, and it was so cool looking, and in those days, uh, Dorothy Callens, who was the editor-in-chief of Metropolitan Home Magazine, which was one of the most popular home magazines at the time, she was coming down with her editorial staff, so she came to our house for dinner, and while at dinner she just looked at me and said, I love this living room, I've never seen anything like it. And, ah, it was really a huge signal to me about Bob's taste and his ability to think differently and to think the next step, so it …

AI assessment note: “I really hadn't thought about starting my own business until I met Bob.”

Q The play by, by, uh, uh, Fierstein, right?

A Right, by Harvey Fierstein. And I had just seen it. It had just opened. So my mother said, oh yes, I've heard about that play. We're gonna get a bus and go. And I just, you know, my eyes popped out of my head. I looked at everybody at the table and I said, well, do you know what the play is about? Oh yeah, it's about a Jewish boy and his mother and how they get along. I said, okay. I wasn't gonna tell them. Because it's about a Jewish boy who's gay, and coming to a reckoning with his mother is part of the play. So I, uh, go back to New York, and I got tickets for the next night. They come in, they go see the play, the next day my father calls me, and I have to, I have to collect myself to say this, because I remember standing at this oak desk that I had in, in my little apartment, my little studio, and my father called and said, I just want to thank you For the tickets last night. And I just want to tell you that he said, I just want to tell you that all I care about is that you're happy and healthy. And it was just not what I expected from him, because my father was always such a macho guy. On a scale of one to 10, 10 being straight, my father was an 11. So I collected myself, and I started to talk a little bit to him, and he said, there's, he said, you don't owe me any explanation. And, um, So that was, that was really great.

AI assessment note: “Right, by Harvey Fierstein. And I had just seen it.”

Q Domestics, right, to, um, to furniture, to, like, constructed furniture, which, but presumably, I mean, you were not kind of, you know, in the manufacturing side, but did you kind of start to learn about it?

A Well, first of all, as a buyer at Bloomingdale's, you went to Furniture Factory, And learned how furniture was made so that you could participate in designing furniture and develop, and we call it product development. So as an example, when I was there, there was a new book that came out by Joan Crone and Susie Slesson called High Tech. And what they were showing is people had taken like a big steel I-beam, took two of them and put a glass top on it, or they took a tractor stool, a tractor seat and made a stool out of it. And it was a very popular book. And I looked at that and thought, wow, this is really cool, a new way of looking at modern. It was a very different modern than I grew up with. But what I gave it was saying, well, I think it's just a little too hard edge. I don't think it's going to be really appealing for consumers. So I went to some manufacturers that I had and worked with their designers and said, let's soften this up. Let's make these edges not quite so hard. And you have to know how things are manufactured in order to do that. And that's Very much what I became known for in this store is having this style sense that was kind of the next generation, not, not something that had been It popular, and then we just made it cheaper. It was really creating a whole new style, and I actually changed the entire department at one point to this look, and it became incr…

AI assessment note: “you went to Furniture Factory, And learned how furniture was made”

Q big order. 5000 dining chairs and 800 tables. So the question is, can they pull it off? First of all, was the supply chain relatively straightforward? All this stuff was just you could go to one place in North Carolina that made textiles, one place in That made the stuffing for the chairs, one place that, that, you know, had the lumber, one place that, was it all relatively local?

A Yes, for the most part. The fabrics were lots of different fabrics, so we were dealing with lots of different fabric mills. The foam we bought from a supplier that had been an established supplier with the factory that we were dealing with. And then the most, one of the most interesting things we did Was we came across a wood frame for the dining chair that was very different than what anybody else had been doing. Imagine a dining chair, and most guys, when they sit on a dining chair, they lean back on it and rock a little bit, and then the chairs can become, then the legs can become loose. It's called racking. Somebody had come to us with taking cross-banded plywood and cutting them by computer, so the side of the frame had no joints in it.

AI assessment note: “Yes, for the most part. The fabrics were lots of different fabrics”

Q Right. But, um, you know, those kind of perks, and we, we had, uh, Gary Erickson and On the show, Cliff Bar, and they do some of those things, too. Um, has that had a huge impact on retention?

A Oh, yeah. Well, early on, one of the things that Bob and I did differently is There's more business usually in the fall than in the spring in a furniture factory. So a lot of the factories would hire up in the fall, lay people off after Christmas. Hire up, lay people off. And in simple terms, we came up with this idea that rather than do that, we would talk with everybody and say, hey, we might have to work overtime in the fall, but in the spring, work four days a week or three days a week, but we want to keep everybody year round. We don't want to have this This roller coaster. And first of all, the employees in the area liked that. We were very cooperative with people on the opening day of hunting season. There's, there's different things that are important to some of these folks that are, that we weren't used to, I'd say.

AI assessment note: “Oh, yeah. Well, early on, one of the things that Bob and I did differently”

Q own bed frame, that sort of Japanese joinery. I see it all over Instagram. Um, and some of these products are good. I mean, they're, let's be honest, they're, they're very good products. There's, there's these companies that are financed by venture capital that are like modular sofas and, you know, all, all different kinds of focused on direct to consumer sales. Is that a threat to your business model?

A Well, a lot of that stuff is a different quality level than what we're doing, but it's, look, there's a lot of business out there. There's a lot of business for everybody. Um, if people like our style sense, they're not going to get it from some of those companies that are making those modular sofas. And that's the only thing they can buy from us. They can buy pillows that coordinate with it. They can buy lamps, but it's amazing what people buy online. Now, every day when I look at the sales figures and I see like a You know, a 7000 dollar sectional sold, or 6000 dollars in dining chairs and tables and stuff. I'm just, like, amazed that people do it, but it's not just that they're buying it online. They might have seen it in a store in person. They might have called and had a virtual appointment with one of our people. There's many different touch points, so it's all, that's why we call it omni-channel.

AI assessment note: “a lot of that stuff is a different quality level than what we're doing”