Suburban sprawl
In 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. prompted riots in most major American cities, including on Chicago’s West and South sides. Between April 6 and April 8, the city battled widespread looting, violence and arson.
Buildings on Division Street burned to the ground, just six blocks from Crate and Barrel’s store on Wells Street.
“With the political issues that were going on at that time, we started getting a little afraid of just having one store in the city,” Segal says. “We thought, ‘Well, maybe we should have a suburban store.'”
Crate and Barrel’s second store opened in the Plaza del Lago shopping center in Wilmette. The chain’s first large mall store opened three years later in Oak Brook.
“Those things became so popular that we realized that there was a concept there,” Segal says. “People like (design and display director) Ray Arenson started joining us in those days, and they evolved into our store display people, and they figured out how the architecture should work and how things should be built.”
Segal was careful not to oversaturate the Chicago market, and the first store outside the Windy City opened in 1977 in downtown Boston. With the arrival of that store, and one later near Harvard Square, Segal diversified the chain’s products by offering more furniture, such as living room and bedroom sets.
Initially, he planned to keep furniture and housewares stores separate. But when he brought the furniture concept to Crate and Barrel’s flagship store on Michigan Avenue, he decided to combine the two, which was a turning point for the chain.
“This combination of a bigger store, housewares and furniture is what truly made us really, really successful,” Segal says. “In this era of a lot of competition, this has brought us a whole level up to where we wanted to be.”
