Ask for It by Name!

“I couldn’t believe God meant a woman’s brain to bring 50 cents on the dollar,” Mary Kay Ash once said, and she spent the second half of her life proving that she knew more about earning dollars than most men.

She had been born into poverty in Hot Wells, Texas, and supported herself and her children after World War II working for Stanley Home Products, organizing “Tupperware”-style home sales parties. Mary Kay proved so good at sales that she became the national training director for another direct sales company, but she eventually quit, frustrated that the men she trained were always promoted to positions above her.

In 1963, while developing an outline for the book on sales she was planning to write, Mary Kay realized that she could and should start her own company instead of just writing about it. Starting with just 11 sales reps selling her line of cosmetics in distinctive pink packaging direct to consumers, Mary Kay Ash built Mary Kay, Inc. into a global empire with annual revenues of $1.3 billion.

Oddly enough, Mary Kay is probably best known for something she never sold — cars. She bought her first Cadillac in 1968 and had the dealer repaint it her favorite color, pink. Recognizing the stir the car caused, she turned it into a motivational prize for her sales force, awarding a pink Cadillac sedan to any employee who achieved sales of $15,000 per month for six consecutive months.

“There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared. Too bad he didn’t hang around long enough to shop at Banana Republic. If he had, he’d have witnessed one of the most striking re-inventions of American business history.

Back in the late 1970s, Mel Ziegler was searching for a replacement for his beloved but badly worn safari jacket. Unfortunately, it was the Age of Disco Polyester in America, and finding duds made of natural fibers was akin to looking for brown rice at Mickey D’s. Finally locating the jacket he sought at a secondhand store in Australia, Ziegler realized that a market existed for exotic safari-themed clothing, and in 1978 Mel and Patricia Ziegler founded their Banana Republic store and catalog business. The name was chosen to reflect the “jungle” theme of the brand, and the immediate popularity of the stores overshadowed the previously derogatory connotations of the term “banana republic,” a reference to autocratic Central American regimes in thrall to US fruit companies.

Adopting an “Out of Africa” motif, the Banana Republic stores were a cross between a clothing store and a movie set, complete with thatched huts and vintage jeeps on the sales floor, 1940s music on the sound system, and antique airplanes hanging from the ceiling. And as the Banana Republic chain grew, it single-handedly created the “adventurer look” so popular with 1980s yuppies, lending platforms at suburban train stations an air of the Australian Outback.

In 1983, Banana Republic was acquired by The Gap, Inc., and rapid expansion of the chain continued. But by the early 1990s, Americans apparently had all the bush vests and snake-proof wine coolers they needed, and Banana Republic sales nosedived. Only quick thinking and fancy footwork by management saved the brand. Within a few years the jeeps and huts were gone, the pith helmets ditched, and Banana Republic was reborn as today’s sleek, stylish purveyor of casual clothing and accessories for young urbanites.