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Susie's triumph was celebrated among shadow wives throughout America. She was the subject of profiles crafted by Working Woman, CNN, and countless other media. Morale at the company was the best it had been in years. Unfettered by the marital bickering that had poisoned the company during the previous five years, Susie would return Esprit to its glory days, with new, more mature-minded clothing lines that offered the kind of fashion verve Doug threatened to strip from the company.
Esprit's advertising played on the new hubris.
"When I was little, I wanted to be a nun, a cowgirl, a cheerleader, a professional ski racer," Susie muses triumphantly in an advertising video produced not long after the buyout. "Mother said to me a dozen times: 'You'll never amount to a row of pins.' "
With Federico as CEO and Stein as chairman of the board, the company hired Neil Kraft, a Barney's department store advertising executive, to become the new director of image. Susie fired the design team Doug had installed, and hired a new team she felt would best craft the more mature look she hoped to create.
But just as Susie had assembled her new team, Federico resigned. Stein was appointed to replace the former CEO, and Susie went about putting her imprint on the company. The first obvious evidence: an $8 million advertising campaign in which customers were asked to suggest ways they would change the world. The answers -- including "I'd keep a woman's right to choose"; and "I'd teach the world to groove" -- were fashioned into print and television advertisements. The ads were a rousing success from a publicist's standpoint. But they didn't seem to be selling clothes.
In 1992, Kraft, who had overseen the production of the ads, resigned.
In what was to become a continuing string of CEO turnovers, the Swiss fashion executive Fritz Ammann was hired in early 1992 to replace Stein, and, it was hoped, bring an overarching fashion/business sensibility to the company. Ammann instituted a series of cost-cutting measures, including the elimination of Esprit's "eco desk," which helped employees volunteer for environmental projects. He canceled the Esprit lecture series, the Esprit newsletters, and the Esprit employee stock ownership program.
"They were eliminating this trivial stuff, which didn't really cost that much, and not taking care of the essential stuff," Buckley says.
The most notable touch of the Susie era was the introduction in March 1992 of the Susie Tompkins Signature Line. These were the mature-minded clothes that Susie had dreamed of designing, and their initial presentation at an avant-garde New York fashion show appeared a triumph of the Susie sensibility.
This was no ordinary fashion show. Susie flew San Francisco minister and political powerhouse Cecil Williams to New York, where he gave a rousing sermon about violence, racism, drug abuse, and love. The show closed with a gospel choir concert. It was scandalous, it was innovative.
The clothes were a dud.
"It looked like old ladies-wear," recalls David Wolfe, creative director of the Doneger Group, a New York fashion consultancy. "It was such a shock to everybody. There were dowdy housedresses, dark colors. It was totally out of sync with the rest of the season. This meant she was terribly ahead or terribly out of touch, and since it didn't sell, it meant she was out of touch."
The year the line was introduced, Tompkins was removed as the company's design director.
While Esprit's management, fashion, and advertising troubles may have appeared daunting yet repairable, the company's back office -- its nuts-and-bolts business end -- was an absolute disaster.
Though the fashion industry is very much like the movie business in its emphasis on style and glamour, it is also a manufacturing business with narrow profit margins.
Companies must decide months ahead of time what sorts of clothes will sell, buy acres of cloth to sew them from, and deliver hundreds of samples to sales agents in time for the pre-season. Once garments are sold on the basis of these samples, complex orders must be filled, on time, to department stores, free-standing retail outlets, and other sales locations. The more different types of garments are produced, the more exponentially difficult the logistics of this process become.
And in its new-era anxiety, Esprit was trying to cover its bases by producing hundreds of different pieces.
"In the U.S., tons of uncut cloth would end up in warehouses in Hong Kong. I looked at their operations, and I knew the shit was about to hit the fan. Fundamentally, it looked like the people they had in charge did not understand the business," says Buckley, who bought Esprit's then-insolvent European arm from Doug Tompkins in 1978 and turned it into a $400 million corporation.
"Clothing is a very low-cost business. Department stores were getting leaner when Susie took over, and there was a lot of pressure on prices. Esprit simply didn't have the discipline to operate on a low-price basis. The whole sequence of events, from their bookkeeping to manufacturing, wasn't functioning. Their motor wasn't firing on all cylinders."
It became very clear, very fast, that Susie and her backers had got in way, way over their heads. The fashion industry was much more complicated than Stein and his S.F. deal-makers had fancied. And for Susie, running a company wasn't nearly the enjoyable experience it had appeared it might be in 1990. She came to bitterly resent the executives she was forced to hire.
"It isn't my fault that it was having problems. There was management that I hired, but the problems weren't ones I was responsible for," Susie recalls. "It got to a place where we couldn't control what was going on. We had to hand it over to business types to handle it, and that just wasn't something we were into. I had an understanding about how a company should be handled. You should have a beautiful workplace, you should have benefits for the employees. To live with the way of the new management, to make the company lean and mean -- that was a big adjustment."
