Staying consistent
It was Segal’s friend and mentor, Stanley Marcus, former CEO of Dallas-based Neiman Marcus, who prompted Crate and Barrel’s first store in his city, and the first location west of the Mississippi.
“He liked us a lot,” Segal says of Marcus, who died in 2002. “He had such a long-term perspective on what he was building, and he brought such excitement to a retail environment — certainly a very upper-end retail environment.”
Crate and Barrel expanded throughout Dallas, Boston and other existing markets throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and tapped new major cities on the West and East coasts and a handful of cities in the Midwest. The chain opens about five stores a year.
“Many of our competitors have more stores than we do,” Segal says. “What we’ve always believed in is we’d rather be the best than be the biggest. We don’t have public shares, so we’re not trying to make other people rich, we’re just trying to satisfy ourselves and satisfy our customers and our staff.”
Part of Segal’s security in staying private comes from $12.4 billion Otto Versand, the Hamburg-based mail order giant that purchased a majority of Crate and Barrel in 1998. The firm maintains a hands-off policy with most of its 90 subsidiaries, and allows Segal to operate and expand the company under his guidance.
“We don’t need to have a public constituency because they have a totally different motivation,” Segal says. “We’ve always decided that we’d be a better company psychologically as a private company rather than a public company.”
