Customer focus
Perhaps borrowing from his mentor Marcus, who preached customer service throughout his career and later wrote a newspaper column on the subject for the Dallas Morning News, Segal is a strict customer service advocate. He invests in exhaustive employee training, promotes almost exclusively from within and structures each store to include several levels of supervision.
“Gordon Segal is the only retailing executive I have met who purposely seeks to hire school teachers to work as sales associates in the store,” wrote Leonard J. Berry, a professor of marketing at Texas A&M University. “Segal has a clear vision of what he wants Crate and Barrel to be.”
That vision may look a little different than that from the small abandoned elevator factory run by a husband-and-wife team. But according to Segal, it’s actually not that far removed from the original spirit of that quirky shop on Wells Street in Old Town.
“We went into this business to make customers happy, to satisfy their needs,” he says. “That’s still our mission, 40 years later. That means if somebody buys something and for some reason they don’t want it — they got it home and it didn’t look right, they showed it to their spouse and they didn’t like it — all we want when they return something is that it’s a joyful experience. As joyful as it is to buy something.”
HOW TO REACH: Crate and Barrel, (847) 272-2888 or www.crateandbarrel.com
