Entrepreneurial spirit
When Gordon and Carole Segal returned from their Caribbean honeymoon in 1962, Gordon was inspired as he washed a set of Arzberg dishes the couple had bought during the trip.
“How come nobody is selling this dinnerware in Chicago?” he asked his new bride. “I think we should open a store.”
And thus the idea behind Crate and Barrel — to offer European and other contemporary housewares not easily found in the United States for a reasonable price — was born.
“We thought there had to be other young couples like us with good taste and no money,” Segal says. “So I said, ‘Wait a minute, there must be a market for this.'”
Both 23 years old, with no retail experience, the Segals opened the first Crate and Barrel with $17,000 in a 1,700-square-foot abandoned elevator factory. The rent and inventory ate up all their start-up funds, so they built shelves using crating lumber and displayed products out of packing crates and barrels, hence the name of the store.
“We were so nave, we were so lacking wisdom. If we would’ve been any older, any more intelligent, we wouldn’t have had the energy or would’ve had the wisdom not to do this,” says Segal, who can now laugh about the couple’s youthful hubris. “We had no idea how to price things because the invoices for much of the merchandise hadn’t arrived yet, so we wound up selling stuff below what it cost us.”
Luckily for the Segals, the St. Lawrence Seaway had opened just a few years earlier, allowing goods to be imported directly to Chicago from foreign markets. Accessible jet travel allowed them to find smaller factories, ateliers and other vendors in new foreign markets.
“All of a sudden, the world was becoming smaller,” Segal says. “More direct transportation, quicker means for people to travel. People were getting more worldly, people were getting a better sense of what was going on elsewhere. All of this started happening in the early 1960s.”
