Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Gordon Segal: Crate & Barrel needed massive scale for exclusive distribution

Gordon Segal · Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal · Feb 20, 2017 · at 17:57

Crate & Barrel co-founder Gordon Segal explains why the retailer shifted from slow store expansion to rapid scaling between 1985 and 1995.

0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Well, we reached a different era where it was important to have scale to do the things we had to do with buying merchandise. So you had a guarantee to a factory you'd buy a certain amount of a product to make sure we were the only people in the United States that would be carrying it.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Gordon Segal

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Segal offered half of Crate & Barrel for $10,000 before opening
“I spent six months running around to everyone I knew who had any wealth and offering them half the business for 10,000 dollars.”
Gordon Segal Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 6:16 Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal (2017)
Insight
Segal: Youth and lack of wisdom are advantages in entrepreneurship
“The value of being very young is you have a lot of energy and passion and no wisdom. And so being that young was a great advantage”
Gordon Segal Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 8:29 Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal (2017)
Insight
Segal: Direct European importing enables significantly lower retail pricing for unique goods
“Obviously, the motivation of going into business was to find beautiful things for other young people, but if we could buy things from Europe directly and just mark them up normally as if you bought them domestically, not take a big margin, but take a short mar…”
Gordon Segal Feb 20, 2017 ▶ 3:56 Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal
Disclosure
Gordon Segal failed to sell 50% of Crate & Barrel for $10,000
“And I spent six months running around to everyone I knew who had any wealth and offering them half the business for 10,000 dollars. There was no such thing as venture capital in those days. There was no such things as startups in those days. Yeah. And I litera…”
Gordon Segal Feb 20, 2017 ▶ 5:50 Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal
Insight
Segal: Youth and lack of wisdom are great advantages for entrepreneurs
“I mean, the value of being very young is you have a lot of energy and passion and no wisdom. And so being that young was a great advantage, and we had no children.”
Gordon Segal Feb 20, 2017 ▶ 8:03 Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal
Insight
Crate & Barrel's core thesis: direct European sourcing with standard domestic markups
“Obviously, the motivation of going into business was to find beautiful things for other young people, but if we could buy things from Europe directly, and just mark them up normally as if you bought them domestically, not take a big margin, but take a short ma…”
Gordon Segal Nov 18, 2019 ▶ 4:22 Crate & Barrel: Gordon Segal (2017)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 800 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.