Mel Ziegler

Summary

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Episode: Mel Ziegler

Date: March 26, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between legendary music producer Rick Rubin and Mel Ziegler, writer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Banana Republic and The Republic of Tea. Ziegler reflects on his unconventional path through journalism, fashion, entrepreneurship, and Eastern philosophy. The discussion spans his early days as a journalist, the birth and soul of Banana Republic, his foray into the tea world, artistic creativity, personal philosophy, and the importance of not knowing.

Tone: Conversational, reflective, witty, and honest, with flashes of self-deprecating humor and philosophical insight.

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Table of Contents

• Founding Banana Republic: Serendipity and Army Surplus (00:23–13:46)
• Creativity, Catalogs, and Growth (13:46–25:24)
• Selling to Gap and the Aftermath (25:24–42:08)
• Post-BR: Tea, Philosophy, and Life (42:08–77:46)
• Art, Family, and Spiritual Practice (77:46–83:44)
• Reflections on Life, Observation, and Not Knowing (83:44–end)

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Founding Banana Republic: Serendipity and Army Surplus (00:23–13:46)

Inspiration from "Think and Grow Rich"

• Mel spots the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and is struck by its simple directive: "Think of how much money you want to make. Think of how long it's going to take you to make that money and get started." ([00:23])
• At the time, Mel and his wife Patricia quit their journalism jobs to travel, with just $1,500 saved—emphasizing how much easier it was to take risks in the '70s.

The Fateful Jacket in Australia

• While in an Aussie army disposal (surplus) store, Mel buys a distinctive 1940s British Burma jacket that gets repeated compliments back in the US, sparking the core idea: sell army surplus as fashion ([00:23–02:43]).

Early Operations and First Sale

• Mel, coming from journalism, dives into researching US surplus auctions. He and Patricia navigate insider club of surplus "jobbers" in Oakland, buying 500 Spanish paratrooper shirts at about $2 each ([03:18–06:00]).
• First sale happens at a dinner party to friend Herbert Gold (the sleeves were all too short, explaining surplus status) ([08:32–08:55]).
• Initial attempt to sell at Marin flea market: sales slow until Patricia suggests they double the price—then they sell out ([09:06–10:15]).
• Key Insight: "The best asset we had is having no experience whatsoever." – Mel Ziegler ([10:19])

Notable Quote:

"We were professional amateurs, and I've been one ever since."
—Mel Ziegler ([10:28])

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Creativity, Catalogs, and Growth (13:46–25:24)

Bootstrapping and Unique Branding

• First store opened in Mill Valley ($250/month, couldn't lock the door due to shared space) ([11:02–12:00]).
• Naming: "The name was Banana Republic. And the reason I named it Banana Republic is I knew it would get noticed...making a political statement on top of everything else." ([12:02–12:20])

Catalogs as Literary & Artistic Works

• Patricia hand-illustrated early catalogs; Mel wrote literary product descriptions ([12:58–13:46]).
• Mel leveraged his media connections to get attention, including sending catalogs to every city desk, which leads to a big break on New York's radio ([15:27–16:30]).
• Selling the catalog itself for $1 as a literary object; first influx of real money through mail orders ([16:33–17:15]).

The Power of Story and Scarcity

• Each item genuinely limited because it was real surplus; uniqueness created ongoing demand ([14:19–14:40]).
• Ingenious modifications: converting army sleeping bags to vests, later dyeing clothes in distinctive colors ([14:40–15:00]).

Notable Quote:

"It was all about creativity. Just do anything. Just make it fun and make it true, make it honest. Just no limits. If you can imagine it, you can do it."
—Mel Ziegler ([12:20])

Notable Quote:

"Would you buy a Swedish army gas mask bag without the gas mask, because it was written about, or would you...say, I have to own one...? But everything had its story."
—Mel Ziegler ([13:57])

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Selling to Gap and the Aftermath (25:24–42:08)

Scaling and Selling to The Gap

• Four years in, exhausted but hoping to grow, Mel and Patricia meet Don Fisher, founder of The Gap. Fisher is fascinated by the store's unique, lovingly curated surplus items, creativity, and customer love ([27:16–29:59]).
• Mel candid about business naiveté: "Everything wrong from protecting our asset, from getting the value that we really created — everything wrong." ([30:02])
• Don Fisher's offer: Mel and Patricia run Banana Republic as they see fit post-sale, as long as it's profitable.

Banana Republic's Creative Golden Age

• With Gap’s resources, BR grows to 50+ stores and 30 million catalog circulations ([33:33–33:47]).
• Company culture remains nontraditional—hiring talented "unemployables," creative staff amplify Mel and Patricia's founding vision ([33:48–35:14]).
• Stores each designed with unique themes, blurring lines between retail, theater, and fiction; catalogs continue as literary/artistic hybrids ([36:14–36:27]).

"When It All Changed"

• Black Monday, 1987: market crash causes The Gap to panic, bring in analysts, and second-guess the Banana Republic model ([38:02–41:15]).
• Corporate rigidities clash with creative autonomy. Mel and Patricia leave after new pressures make the environment "not what we bought into" ([41:16]).

Notable Quote:

"He said, what do you do for markdowns? Patricia said, we don't. We mark them up."
—Mel Ziegler ([29:00])

Notable Quote:

"The joy of growing older is really accepting how little I know — and enjoying it."
—Mel Ziegler ([82:29])

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Post-BR: Tea, Philosophy, and Life (42:08–77:46)

A Turn Inward: Meditation and Daoism

• After BR, Mel turns away from ambition to parenthood and spiritual practice: "I wanted to think in a completely different way or not think at all" ([42:32–42:56]).
• Long study of Taoism (esp. Chuang Tzu), Krishnamurti. Vipassana retreat catalyzes his next entrepreneurial idea ([42:32–44:10]).

Notable Quote:

"I just realized that I was like a wound-up toy. Succeed, achieve, succeed, achieve... It was in my DNA."
—Mel Ziegler ([44:56])

The Republic of Tea: Letters, Philosophy, and Sipping

• The idea for Republic of Tea comes to Mel during a tea-deprived meditation retreat; he calls himself the "Minister of Leaves" ([68:47]).
• The brand is founded through creative correspondence (faxed letters) with a young social entrepreneur — the process itself published as a book, Republic of Tea: Letters to a Young Zentrepreneur ([70:38–72:16]).
• Packaging that tells stories, round teabags in round cans, playful branding ("sip by sip, not gulp by gulp") ([73:12–74:33]).
• Republic of Tea eventually sold to family owner committed to original vision ([75:03–77:27]).

Notable Quote:

"It had to be different... Let’s make [teabags] round. And what would be on the can would be exceptional names and stories and witticisms from the Minister of Leaves or anybody else."
—Mel Ziegler ([73:12])

Business as Creating Categories

• Both Banana Republic and Republic of Tea "created categories," not just companies.

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Art, Family, and Spiritual Practice (77:46–83:44)

Artistic Practice Flowing from Emptiness

• Mel describes painting as a spiritual practice: "I can't start a painting until I accept and enter the emptiness...the blank canvas, the silence." ([77:49–78:24])
• Family life centered around art; family bought an “art house” so everyone could create together ([79:44]).
• Describes the balance between intention and openness: "It's a commitment, and I can't think about it. If I think about it, I won't do it." ([82:03])

Notable Quote:

"What matters is where [the work is] coming from. You can see the source in almost every work... When you hit the one that's not [an idea or concept], that's life."
—Mel Ziegler ([82:29–83:44])

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Reflections on Life, Observation, and Not Knowing (83:44–end)

• On belief:

"I don't believe in belief."
—Mel Ziegler ([83:51])

Journalism: A Way of Seeing

• Early career as a self-motivated observer striving for objectivity, not fixed identity ([48:30–49:17]).
• Experiences in 1960s/70s journalism described as exhilarating; contrasting objectivity then with today’s partisan media ([53:59–62:23]).

On Growth, Openness, and the Value of Not Knowing

• Emphasizes humility, childlike appreciation, and creative fearlessness as keys to both business and artistry.
• Ending reflection: "The joy of growing older is really accepting how little I know and enjoying it." ([82:29])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• "We were professional amateurs, and I've been one ever since." —Mel ([10:28])
• "The best asset we had is having no experience whatsoever." —Mel ([10:19])
• "It was all about creativity. Just do anything. Just make it fun and make it true, make it honest. Just no limits." —Mel ([12:20])
• "Would you buy a Swedish army gas mask bag without the gas mask, because it was written about, or would you...say, I have to own one...? But everything had its story." —Mel ([13:57])
• "He said, what do you do for markdowns? Patricia said, we don't. We mark them up." ([29:00])
• "I just realized that I was like a wound-up toy. Succeed, achieve, succeed, achieve... It was in my DNA." —Mel ([44:56])
• "It had to be different... Let’s make [teabags] round... exceptional names and stories and witticisms from the Minister of Leaves or anybody else." ([73:12])
• "It's a commitment, and I can't think about it. If I think about it, I won't do it. Right." —Mel ([82:03])
• "I don't believe in belief." ([83:51])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Origin of Banana Republic: [00:23–06:00]
• First Surplus Sale/Breakthrough: [08:32–10:15]
• Catalog/Marketing Innovation: [12:58–17:15]
• Selling to Gap: [27:16–30:02]
• Growth and Store Design: [33:33–36:27]
• Black Monday and Exit: [38:02–41:15]
• Philosophy and Meditation Turn: [42:08–44:56]
• Republic of Tea Story: [65:27–77:27]
• Artistic Journey: [77:49–83:44]
• Reflections on Not Knowing: [83:44–end]

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In Summary

Mel Ziegler's story is one of embracing not-knowing, creative reinvention, and following curiosity without fear of failure. Alternately playful, philosophical, and practical, the episode offers a masterclass in authentic entrepreneurship and creative living — from the flea markets of Marin to the heart of Daoist emptiness, always with an eye for the next joyful surprise.

Transcript

[Podcast Host]

Tetragrammaton.

[Mel Ziegler]

One day I was in a lot. I was in the bookstore, library or something else. And I see this book. It says, think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It was just one of these very simple books. But I thought, there's some magic in me passing this thing. And I should look at this. And they gave a formula. It says, think of how much money you want to make. Think of how long it's going to take you to make that money and get started, is basically what it was saying. So in other words, come up with something, do something. And at that time, I was on an assignment, actually, in Australia. I was sent to Australia, was paying the rent by freelancing. We wanted to travel so badly that Patricia and I both quit the Chronicle on the same day. Without an idea of what we were going to do. Somehow we were going to do this. And then all this happened later. These are how the times were so different. You could be this impetuous. Things weren't this expensive. It wasn't this hard. It wasn't so stratified. It was just easier. And so I was in Australia. I went into a disposal store, which is their version of a surplus store. And that's all I ever dressed in, was army surplus. Only navy pea coats or these jackets or whatever. I just went to the army surplus. I never wore anything but army surplus. I love the idea of this here. I'm going to go in to a new place with new surplus. And I walked into the disposal store and I found this, like, old khaki jacket. I picked it up. It was an old British Burma jacket made surplus by the UK somewhere in the late 1940s. And somehow found itself into this thing. And when I got off the plane and Patricia picked me up at sfo, she saw the jacket. Where did you get that, Jack? That's. Where'd you get that? And then I wore to work. I wore it to play. Where'd you get that jacket? Where'd you get that jacket? Patricia started changing the buttons, putting patches on the sleeves. Leather behind the counter. I said, wait a minute. This is how much you want to make. This is how long it's going to take you make it. This is what we're going to do. We're going to sell surplus clothes as fashion.

[Interviewer]

It started as essentially army surplus.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, that's all it was. That's all it was. And all I had was $1,500. We had $1,500 between the two of us. Not anymore. That we had saved. You could do that. In those days. And I had this fail safe system that if I ever go below whatever it was at that point, like a thousand dollars, I wasn't going to spend any money. This is my part of me that says, sorry, you starve now. Well, you have $1,000 in the bank and figure it out. So we were down that low. I was down to $1,500.

[Interviewer]

How did you start the business?

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, I'm a reporter. I started researching it. I started looking at this. Well, this is how army surplus is sold. Well, in the United States, it was sold by the government in huge lots. They would just sell a huge lot and then take it off to places like Travis air force basin. Lot number one, lot number two, lot number three, used airplane propellers, excess toothpaste, shorts. You'd have to buy the whole lot and then sell it off. These were the jobbers who were the wholesale version. Who fed the.

[Interviewer]

One of those.

[Mel Ziegler]

We went there and tried to buy something. We just needed to get the jackets and we didn't need the toothpaste or the propellers or whatever it else it was. We didn't know what to do with them. We didn't have the money for them. So we had to go to the jobber and he was in Oakland. And we realized that there were only about six or seven of these guys who were really bidding these things up all across the country. They were all. They all knew each other. It was a little club. They were these Jewish guys, you know, really, who understood how to make the shmata business where everything else they had it, they had in their blood to make it work. So we found one of these guys in Oakland and we came to. We went over to his warehouse and started to look around.

[Interviewer]

Describe the whole warehouse for me. I'm interested in that dumb stuff.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, it was full of mold and sweaty clothes that had never been washed and. And greasy stuff. And. But it was. But orderly or no, they sorted it out. They did sort it out. And so over here was some shirts, old polished shirts.

[Interviewer]

Was it all military stuff or. Not necessarily.

[Mel Ziegler]

They were buying from the military. That's where they were buying it. And they were buying it from all these auctions. They would go around the. And bid against each other and then they would trade afterwards from my lot. I'll trade you this and I'll trade you that. That was too. We didn't have the money to do that and we didn't have the wherewithal to do that. That wasn't what we wanted. We wanted to find that was a.

[Interviewer]

Bigger Scale than what you were doing.

[Mel Ziegler]

We wanted to just sell qualified clothes. Other people. Well, if you can buy a surplus jacket. These were the polyester clothing years.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

So these were the natural fibers. The only way you could find natural fiber. And so. And these were the days when designers would just weren't really designing anything particularly great, but throwing their names all over them. My sense of fashion is, you know, the next available thing to pull off the rack in the closet. I didn't have it. I didn't think about fashion. But Patricia, she did.

[Interviewer]

Were most of the things that you saw either khaki or olive green?

[Mel Ziegler]

Yes, almost everything was khaki or olive green. Some version of both. If it was a textile, if it was a garment.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

But what we found in this warehouse was a whole pile of shirts with epaulettes on them that looked fantastic. There were these epaulets. These were the seventies. We wore epaulettes, beautiful safari kind of shirts. We asked, where did these come from? The Spanish. The Spanish. Yeah, the Spanish army shirts. They were paratrooper shirts. Spanish paratrooper shirts. Oh, interesting. How much? $5 a piece. So Patricia nudges me and we just walk away. She's good at this. He said, well, what. How many did they have? There were about 500 of them because that's what. We bought them all. And that's what. There were 500 Spanish paratrooper shirts. I don't know how or why I was driving a Pinto in those days, but we had a Pinto and we drove up to the warehouse and loaded the whole. The Pinto with these 500, by the way. It was five. Five dollars. No. How about a dollar? How about ending up at $2, whatever it was per shirt? Yeah, that's why. That's right. Because it was $1,000 and we had $500 left there. It was. So we drove them back to our. Our house in Mill Valley at that time, we renting a house and started washing them. One at a time, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. And we had a dinner party. Some friends were over. And one of our friends was one of my best friends over the years, Herbert Gold, who is a novelist, who, if you haven't read his book Fathers, is one of the greatest books of all time. In the 1950s, he wrote that book. He was sort of mentored by Saul Bellow, and he's of that same. He's written many books. He just died at 99 recently. Dear friend. He was at the dinner, and he's kind of a buy it at Goodwill. He doesn't no spend on money. He's just a bohemian. He was beatnik of the beatnik era in San Francisco. He walked downstairs, then he brought one of his shirts up and he's like, what is this? And Patricia said, well, it's a Spanish paratroop shirt. He said, I want one. I said, tape on her. And she said, 650. How come you charge my friend money for sure? Anyway? Oh, yeah. He takes out his Checkbook, he writes 650.

[Interviewer]

Was that your first sale?

[Mel Ziegler]

That was our first sale.

[Interviewer]

Oh, great.

[Mel Ziegler]

His first sale. Then he puts it on. This is hilarious. Then he puts it on and the sleeves came to here. They were short 3 quarter sleeve. It was. I don't think it was meant to be that it was. It was. It was surplus because it was too short. Because he went down and found five more and they were all the same. Now we knew why it was surplus.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Because they didn't fit.

[Mel Ziegler]

Didn't fit. We thought, this is crazy. What are we going to do? I said, well, we're going to sell a short armed Spanish paratrooper shirt. Yeah, that's what we own.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And this is probably because Franco had this crazy idea that he didn't want any belong armed people around or whatever. Just we made up some fun stuff and wrote some copy about it. At that point, there was a flea market in Marin City. They had a big dirty open lot there that every Saturday they had a flea market in. It was a huge flea market. So I said, we'll go to the flea market and sell our short arm Spanish paratrooper shirts. So we go there the first day, we have a signed short arm Spanish paratrooper shirt. 695 or whatever it was, 650. And people are fascinated with it. They're just fascinated with it. And they're coming by and looking at it. By the end of the day, we sold like three of them. I said, what are we doing wrong? Patricia said, they're too cheap. So the next week we went back and doubled the price and sold out. And then we began to realize, well, we're in like the strangest of strange businesses. We're buying surplus. There can be incredible margins in this business.

[Interviewer]

Most people in business school would tell you, if you raise the prices, you'll sell less.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yes, of course. This was the first reason that we knew that the best asset we had is having no experience whatsoever.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was. Absolutely. It was just. We were professional amateurs. And I've been one ever since because.

[Interviewer]

Of that how did she get the idea to double the price?

[Mel Ziegler]

She was interested in fashion. She worked at Macy's when it was a real store in the 1960s down on Union Square in San Francisco. She worked under some people in the fashion department helping to buy. And so she was very. She was very aware of the fashion world. I had zero visibility to it, but she could see it. I would never have known that, but she know.

[Interviewer]

It's fascinating.

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, look at today. Look at the price of some of these. Of some of the clothing that's out there with certain label names on it.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Do you really think that's not a 90% margin? It's absolutely a 90. I mean, this is public thievery. But look at how many happy people who have been stolen from. I mean, it's just crazy. It's craziness. It's because this whole world we live in now is that is about, you know, manufactured scarcity. Anyway, so that became it. We got enough money to open a little store on a side street in Mill Valley. $250 a month. The only thing is, we couldn't lock the door because there was an aikido studio upstairs and we had to let people come in for evening classes. So we had a store with all our merchandise in it, but we couldn't lock the door. And people had to walk in and out all night even though we weren't there. But it was 1970s.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What did you name the first store?

[Mel Ziegler]

The name was Banana Republic.

[Interviewer]

So Banana Republic, the first $250 a month store was Banana Republic. That was the beginning.

[Mel Ziegler]

And the reason I named it Banana Republic is I knew it would get noticed because, you know, you just didn't name stores. Banana Republic in those days. That was not what you did.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And it was making a political statement on top of everything else, which I was going to leave the rest of me behind to go into the fashion business. I mean, Patricia wasn't going to leave the rest of her. But so we went into it as a writer and an artist. And when we look back now from where we are and look at it in the early years before it was destroyed by the Gap, there was nothing quite like. Was all about creativity. Just do anything. Just make it fun and make it true, make it honest. Just no limits. If you can imagine it, you can do it.

[Interviewer]

Think and grow rich.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, right. And because we were who we were, we were drawn to other unemployable people who were just amazing when you hired them. And so the whole thing became wacky and Creative. And the catalogs were just. I don't know if you ever remember them, but in the 1980s, they were. Each one of them was lovingly created. We never ran a photograph. Patricia, in the beginning, is an artist. We couldn't afford a photographer, so the first catalog she would draw. So illustrated clothing with a description, with a literary description. Yeah, I was a writer. This is what I did. So this is the only place we felt comfortable.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

We didn't know anything else, but we did know how to write the copy and we did know how to do the job.

[Interviewer]

How much do you think the combination of the illustrations and the copy sold versus the item itself, do you know what I'm saying?

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, it was a unique experience because some of the items were a Swedish army gas mask bag without the gas mask. Now, would you buy that because it was written about, or would you. Would you say, I have to own one of these things? But everything had its story. There was a story for everything.

[Interviewer]

And everything it sounds like was limited.

[Mel Ziegler]

Because it was genuinely limited, because it was surplus. When it was gone, it was a thousand.

[Interviewer]

And when those were gone, gone, you didn't have that anymore.

[Mel Ziegler]

Gone.

[Interviewer]

So it was always turning over what you. So that would be another reason for people to either check out the catalog or come to the shop is because everything was going to be different next time.

[Mel Ziegler]

Absolutely everything was new. And they were unique things. We were finding the way we were doing. We were sort of. Well, okay, there was a British army sleeping bags, but they had sheepskin liners. So we stripped the sheepskin out of them and made sheepskin vests.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Would you ever dye them or do.

[Mel Ziegler]

Anything to them later on? We dyed everything. We had all kinds of colors. We dyed everything. Not in the early years because we didn't have the money to do it, but when we had the resources to do it. We would have done all that earlier. We were working with what we had. And there were basically the two of us doing everything in the beginning. Stapling the catalogs at the kitchen table.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Hand printing them.

[Interviewer]

How many catalogs? First catalog. How many print?

[Mel Ziegler]

500.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And where would you distribute them?

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, I come from media, so I knew the only way I was going to make this thing work is to get attention. So I sent it to every. To every city desk, to every newspaper, to every magazine, to everywhere I possibly could, hoping somebody would open it and realize, banana Republic. Look at this crazy thing. Look at this copy. And it so happened. It landed one day on the desk of John Gambling Wor. Radio New York, Tri State area Broadcasting. Huge listeners broadcasting. Patricia One day we're desperately. It's raining. Nobody's coming in the store in Mill Valley. She goes in to open the store. She picks up the phone. We were so desperate that she would try to take wrong numbers and turn them into sales. And this happened to be. Hello? Who, who am I talking to? Patricia. And who is this? John Gambling in your on the air W New York.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Mel Ziegler]

That's how it happened.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was amazing. So she's funny and she's great and she told wonderful stories and she described some of the crazy merchandise. And he said at the end, he said, well, how does somebody get one of these things? And because we manufactured 500 of them and they were expensive, we decided we were going to sell them for a dollar. We sold the catalog for a dollar. It was a literary beautiful catalog. So Patricia said, send a dollar to post office box 745- Mill Valley, California. Blah blah, blah, blah blah. And we were right across from the post office. Four days later, the postman walks over with two sacks of meal. Every one of them had a dollar in it.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Mel Ziegler]

And that was it. And from that we never raised any other money. It was our fifteen hundred dollars. We were working on cash flow. Although I wouldn't even know what it was then. It was just, let's open 25 envelopes and go to dinner.

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[Mel Ziegler]

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[Interviewer]

Tell me more about the name, about how much thought went into the name.

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, I knew it was naughty. Yeah, I just knew it was naughty. I didn't know What? I just knew I was not gonna. It was gonna get attention. And I had to get attention because I had no other money and I was still in business and I had to get attention.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

I mean, I realized later on that I'm a marketing guy. This is what I do. I mean, I knew how to do it. It was innate to me.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Walk me through the growth of the company. The next step. People are ordering catalogs.

[Mel Ziegler]

Ordering catalogs.

[Interviewer]

What happens next?

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, we need help. We're doing this all ourselves. So a beautiful woman walked in and it's just shopping and just said, oh, are you hiring? And Patricia said, yeah, but I could only pay you $5 an hour, so it's okay. She came in. Then we had an employee. We had a store that was your first employer manager. It was. It was.

[Interviewer]

Have a lot of repeat customers.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, they were really people who were devoted to it. A lot of creative people. Mostly create. I mean, a lot.

[Interviewer]

You put a Banana Republic label in the clothing.

[Mel Ziegler]

Oh, yes. Banana Republic.

[Interviewer]

From the beginning.

[Mel Ziegler]

From the beginning, it said Banana Republic. And not only that, but the original logo were two bananas and a star, a red star. Because I remember that particularly because after a while I realized we could probably get a bank low. So we went to the local place that had our checking account. And we met Fred, the London officer. And he looked at this. He said, well, you have a business card. Looked at the business card with this red star in the middle of it. I said, oh, no, no, no. We're just. This is. We're just making up this name. We had to explain it to him. And we talked to him. We talked to him. We talked to him. He says, well, look, you know, here's how you get credit. You gotta have capacity, which is basically collateral. There were three Cs. I'm forgetting what the third C was. You have to have character. He said, well, you don't have those other Cs, but you are sure. Two characters. He said, well, I'll tell you. Have you thought about Net30 asking your suppliers for Net30? I said, what's that? And that's what happened. We financed through net 30, which then became net 60 and net 90. We always paid early. And years later, when we walked around before the company really evolved into more broadly, we would show up at the surplus conventions in place in Las Vegas. And these were other people with Army Navy stories. How the hell you guys do this? Because we were just selling it as fashion. We were just selling it as fun. Yeah, because this is what we wore. This is what we did. We didn't even. We don't live in boxes.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

You framed it as a different thing than army surplus. Yes, because there are plenty army surplus stores. But Banana Republic wasn't an army surplus store. Even though you sold army surplus.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So it starts with just the clothing, and then over time, you would start dying it. What other modifications would you do? You said you would take something apart.

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, we knew we were selling a lot of khaki, so we couldn't manufacture. We didn't have any money. Want enough money to really even manufacture at that point. We were getting all the surplus we could, and we were running low on some things. So we would go and find a company that was making natural fabrics and making things in khaki, and we would say, well, could you just take that shirt and change these buttons and make a few of these for us, or could you just do this? Put. And put a label on that pant? And that's how we sort of expanded, and that's how we began to do more. But we still didn't have the money to die. I'll never forget the moment when we got that idea. I was in Lower Broadway in New York. I was there visiting. Patricia was back in Mill Valley at the store. And there was a store. I forget the name of it. It was a wonderful store that was on Lower Broad Something clothing. But what they did is they took everything and they dyed it in these outrageous col. And I walked into that store, I said, this is what we should be doing. I went out to a phone booth and noisy lower bronzers. I called Patricia. She said, hey, how you? What's up? Diet, diet, diet, diet. She said, are you saying I'm fat? Are you telling me? She was joking, but she got it because we had more than caffeine.

[Interviewer]

It was the first thing that you manufactured yourself. Or did you ever get to that stage?

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, here's what happened. The deficit began to show. I had no interest in business. I had no education in business, and Patricia neither. We were just two creative people bumbling along through this whole thing. And we had some customers who just loved what we were doing. And there was a fellow by the name of Mert Shuri who lived in Marin county, who was a shopping center developer. And he came in often, and he said, I want to put one of these in my shopping center. This is great. And I couldn't even imagine how I was going to do that. Nobody loaned money to. I mean, people today could not possibly understand what it was like in the 1970s venture capital, if anything, was for a few little companies making chips and Silicon Valley. The very idea of financing a brand or a clothing, nobody would do anything. That was just ridiculous. And then particularly one named Banana Republic. I mean, this was too dissonant even for those times. And Merritt would come in. I said, merritt, I can't. We don't have the capacity to do it. We don't have the money. We don't have. I just can't do it. We can't even. We're not sleeping. We're filling orders at night, which is in the store. We're trying to make this thing happen. We're WR Catalog. We were. I mean, those days, you had to set the catalog in line of type. It was crazy. Patricia was so tired one night she was driving past after three nights of no sleep over the Golden Gate Bridge and swerved into the other lane. Wow. I mean, we were just. We were just.

[Interviewer]

We were years in. Were you now?

[Mel Ziegler]

We were now four years in. And we were doing it for us. We could travel. We could. We had. I mean, what. But we weren't really making any money. We had two stores. I said, take a day off. Just go walk on the mountain. Just walk in the mountain. And I went and I meditated. I didn't know I was meditating, but I was actually letting my mind just go free. And I thought, you know, the only solution here is not to. Not to close the catalog or not to close the store, but to grow. Pretty obvious. But for intelligent person, I was pretty stupid. I didn't see that. But then when I saw that, I said, okay. So she said, what do you. So I came back and I said, here's the solution. We're going to open a second store. What? We're gonna get another store in San Francisco. So we did. We went. We opened the store in San Francisco. And it was gangbusters. It was. People lofted. It was on Polk street between Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. And we did. We did really well in there. And is the store still there? No, it's long gone. It's long gone. So we still. All we wanted to do was travel. And we were bone tired. Bone tired. And so our friend Mary said, well, come to my shopping center and put this in. I said, not only can I do it, but I'd sell this company tomorrow if I could. He said, well, oh, you ought to meet Don Fisher. Well, Don Fisher is the guy who started the Gap. He started the gap maybe 10 years earlier in San Francisco by selling Levi's and Records. And the Gap was the thing from the 1960s, the generation gap.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Remember that?

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer]

And so I didn't know that's what the Gap was.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, it was named after the. Don't trust anybody over 30. By that point, the Gap had 500 stores. It was a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.

[Interviewer]

Were they still only selling Levi's?

[Mel Ziegler]

They. No, by that point, they were.

[Interviewer]

They had switched again.

[Mel Ziegler]

They were in malls.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

They were manufacturing clothes with a lot of different self. Different labels in it, none of which said Gap. And they were putting them on these rounders, and nothing was on the wall and on shelves, and it was just clothes in a white space called a store in a mall.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

He walks into this thing, store, and he's Don Fisher. He was an exceptional person. I will say he really was an exceptional person. Very bright, very smart. Real estate was his background, but he got. Found his way into the clothing business through real estate. And he started walking around the store and picking up things and says, what's this? And the salesperson would say, well, that's a Falkland Islands bathing suit from the British surplus from the Falkland Islands. What? He would look at this, and he would look at. He started looking at every item and reading the tab and reading the letters. We used to post. All the letters people sent us in the dressing rooms, they were all posted over the walls because people were just. They would love the company and they just sent us love letters all the time, and we just post. Interested in.

[Interviewer]

That's a nice idea.

[Mel Ziegler]

He said, yeah, yeah, he was interested. He actually wanted to buy the company. And he said, let's have lunch. Let's go around the block. There was a place to have lunch. He brought his CFO with him. Then he got in, drilling down questions. He said, well, where are you incorporated? He said, well, I don't know. I incorporated myself. I figured how to incorporate even accountant. No, I'm the accountant. I did everything. I was the lawyer. I was the accountant. I did everything. I couldn't owe money for this stuff.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, do it yourself.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was. It was mom and Pop. This is mom and Pop business. He said, well, what do you do for markdowns? Patricia said, we don't. We mark them up. He said, what are your margins? He says, about 80%, 90%. You're lying. This was the CFO. He was like. He was a really. He was. You're lying. The truth is, we didn't really know our margins because we didn't even have. We couldn't even keep Inventory. We didn't have the capacity to even keep inventory. We were just buying surplus. This is probably what we should charge selling it. It was just all on the. We were just going. We were in motion. There was no way out of this thing, but. Except through it. And it wasn't getting us anywhere just yet because everything was going wrong all the time, and we had to be there to fix it. And so anyway, out of that, somehow or another, we ended up selling the company to the Gap.

[Interviewer]

Was it a good thing to do? Was it a bad thing to do? Tell me more about that.

[Mel Ziegler]

That question from where I am today. It was a great thing to do because my life took the best turn ever. The best turn. It was the great thing to do from a business perspective. It was insane. We did everything wrong. Everything wrong from protecting our asset, from getting the value that we really created. Everything wrong. I thought, well, I'm going to get a lawyer to help us. So how do I go find a lawyer? I asked my friend Herb Gold for a lawyer. And who does he pick? He has his friend Bernard Petrie, who's just this wonderful human being, but he's the strangest human being. I put him up against the Gap, and he tries to do the best he can, but he knows about as much about business as we do, Even though he's 10 years older than we are, and even though his father was a Cleveland tailor who started a chain called Petrie Stores, which is a massive chain. He's the son of this man who I once sat next to dinner at, who knew the sales in every one of his 12, 13 stores the day before when he was. He's 85 years old.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Wow.

[Mel Ziegler]

So you can imagine what his son, who didn't want to be that man. Yeah, he was our lawyer.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Lovely. We loved him.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

So we just. Whenever we negotiated, we negotiated and it was okay. We were going to take. Was enough money. I forget, we're going to go. We had enough to travel. We're going to do it. The last minute. Don Fisher, shrewd, says, I can't do this. Why can't you do this? He says, you can't do this because I wouldn't know what to do with this company. I said, well, we're not looking for a job. I'm not talking about a job. I said, you just show me how this company could be profitable. I'll give you whatever you need to make it be profitable, and I'll give you a percentage of the sales, gross margin, whatever it was down the line. So we looked at each other at that point. Although Bernard wasn't very expensive, we hired a CPA from Arthur Anderson who was going. And we had owed about $50,000 in fees, which we didn't have. And I didn't know whether to sell or whether or not. But he said, I promise you I won't interfere. This is your company. You do whatever you want. I don't care. It's yours, just as long as it's profitable. So Patricia and I talked about it, and ultimately I was like, well, maybe. And she was, let's do it. So we did it, and then we began to. Basically, with funds, we began to really start to have fun. Of course, Don would walk in, and he says, well, why don't you make jeans in khaki? We said, no, Don, we don't do that. You know, in other words, we test. There was a tester if, too. And then he really did retreat. He didn't do anything except support us in every single way. And we grew the company for years doing that, and. But we weren't fitting into a regimen.

[Interviewer]

How much longer did you stay at.

[Mel Ziegler]

The company after we were there for another. Basically, it was almost five years owning it, and five years, four years with the Gap. And he was true to his word. Until he wasn't. And it was a good experience. It was a good experience.

[Interviewer]

How did the company grow over that four years?

[Mel Ziegler]

In those four years, we opened 50 stores, I think, and we. And we had a circulation of 30 million catalogs, which was a lot in those days. Something a lot, I think. I forget exactly what the number. I can't recall. 50. 50 or 60 stores.

[Interviewer]

Were you still writing the copy for.

[Mel Ziegler]

The catalogs by that point? We had a creative department, and they were amazing. They were just amazing. We hired people who, as I said, could never get a job anywhere else, but they were in that playpen. They had so much fun. And so they took the way Patricia drew, and they took the way I wrote, and they just amplified it much better than we ever could. I mean, they're just beautiful. They did a beautiful job. And that went on for. For a while, and. And it was. It was fun. And we traveled and found things, and we did unusual things at that point. We became. Well, we would go to Italy. We would find our. We would pass by something that was a restaurant trade show. What's in there? And we'd go into the restaurant trade show, and we'd say, look at those jackets. Italian waiter jackets. Wow, those are really cool. Italian waiter jackets. So we would buy 10,000 Italian waiter jackets and dye them all different colors. The vendor would say, how many restaurants do you have? But we would do things like that. We would fly to Israel and find Israeli army paratrooper bags or something like that. And we would get a prototype of it and send it back and make more of those things. We would go to England, manufacture to match the surplus as well, as much as we could.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Or we went. For instance, in England, we went. We found a man by the name of Mr. Brady. Mr. Brady would make these beautiful bags, these khaki leather bags that the fishermen used. And they never broke, no matter how many years later. If you send it back to Mr. Brady, he would fix it. And we would ask Mr. Brady if he would make some bags for us and change this and Change that. And Mr. Brady would make some bags for us, and we would sell those bags as part of the catalog and things like. We did that, a lot of that everywhere we could.

[Interviewer]

Would you say it still felt like your company for those four years?

[Mel Ziegler]

Oh, entirely. Our company. He was not. It was entirely. It wasn't even. It wasn't kicking out enough money for them to worry about the analysts. It wasn't really kicking out earnings yet because their volume was so big. And we were. It's only when it began to get that way that were they helpful in.

[Interviewer]

Terms of opening stores or other things.

[Mel Ziegler]

Like the real estate? They had a real estate department. Yes. That we realized. And they helped us build the stores. That was machine. They knew how to do that. And. Yeah. But we. Again, there was a little bit of conflict.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Because what Don liked was mall stores. I said, I don't really shop in malls. I like street stores. And so we got as many street stores as we could. There weren't that many, but we would find street locations that we really loved and thought, this is the right place to put a store and build a store there. But no two stores were alike. That was the rule. No two stores were alike. This one's going to be a safari camp. This one's going to be an embassy. We were always playing with the metaphor. We were always inside this apocryphal country called Banana Republic. And everything was about that. The gift boxes were announced, the rhinoceroses. The gift paper was the Banana Republican newspaper. And it was every single thing. We had a climate desk. And you could call the climate desk and hear what the climate was going to be, where you were going to go. I don't know. People today listening to this and thinking, how could there have been a life without Internet. But there was no Internet in the initial days. Those catalogs, we had to get an order form in there, put an 800 number, and if you wanted to order from us, you had to either call the 800 number and give us your credit card, or you went out and got a stamp, found a post box, and dropped it in the mail. That's how you ordered.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

We're dinosaurs today.

[Interviewer]

It's a great story.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was. It was fun.

[Interviewer]

And then what happened at the end of the four years?

[Mel Ziegler]

At the end of the four years, a stock market event called Black Monday. The Gap had reported earnings maybe a month earlier, and they missed earnings, and the stock fell a lot, and then on Black Monday, it fell 50%.

[Interviewer]

And did that happen just to the Gap or to the market in general?

[Mel Ziegler]

A conference somewhere at the Claremont Hotel with all our store managers. And I went out and saw this Black Monday headline. I had no idea. It just.

[Interviewer]

I'm saying, did Black Monday only impact the Gap or did. Was it across the board?

[Mel Ziegler]

Across the board.

[Interviewer]

The market.

[Mel Ziegler]

The market. It was the. It was one of the biggest crashes of all time. Black Monday, 1987.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Right.

[Interviewer]

So the market changed. It wasn't that the Gap failed in that moment.

[Mel Ziegler]

No, the market. It wasn't the Gap. It was the market. But the Gap. But everything went down with the sinking shit.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And they had already gone down. So they were down once and now down again. And they panicked. And the analysts, at that point, they were trying to say, look, we have Banana Republic. It's coming up. It's looking really great. Blah, blah. The analysts were saying, this safari thing can be nothing more than a trend. And to us, it was. This is the most ridiculous thing ever that we weren't safari any longer. We were travel clothing, and we were really functional travel clothing. Buttons that buttoned to something, zippers that worked. Everything was functional and beautiful and exquisite fabrics, natural fabrics. We really were. But at that point, they decided, well, things like this, this is the kind of things that would happen. We'd have a shirt, a beautiful Indian cotton shirt, and we'd sell it season after season, and we would change the colors. It would be great. And Patricia at one point said, you know, this is getting old. We got to change it. Well, the data monsters at the Gap said, how do you throw out an item that is selling this kind of tongue that you can't really. And she would have to argue. There was suddenly now an argument. We would still throw the thing out of the catalog. It didn't matter. But now there was an argument. And that didn't work for us. This isn't what we bought into. The good fortune was that for many years we were trying to have a baby. And we did, and my son was born and I was already 43 years old. We had just signed a huge contract for lots of money. And I said, I'm not doing this. I don't care. We have enough. And we left. And that's what happened. And it was strange to. All of a sudden, your progeny was. Was gone. They killed everything. They killed the catalog, they killed the magazine that was going up to change the clothes. For years, customers were furious. Then they hired creative people, people who posed to know what they were doing. And they made it even worse.

[Interviewer]

Professionals.

[Mel Ziegler]

Professionals, right. That's what happened. And it took them many, many years. In fact, I would say because of the way it all happened, it wasn't really. It wasn't classy and I didn't like that. The way that the exit happened. I just never really looked back at it. But finally, now I can see. I've been noticing that they're coming back to the roots of the company, but more from a 21st century standpoint. They're trying to regenerate the products that were there. And I think there's some pretty nice things that they have. I haven't really looked at it, but people have brought my attention to it. Interesting to relive all that.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Then you started your life of meditation and being a fatherhood.

[Mel Ziegler]

I love. Still do love being a father. I'm a writer and I have been working on a book forever that someday I'll publish. Is called Bringing Up Dad. They raised me. Yeah, they really did. They still raising me. Even in the 30s. They're raising me.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

But it's. This is it. And I went. I started to study Taoism and I was fascinated. I would. I would fly to England just to get into the British Museum to read these texts that I couldn't find any. I was really into it and I was trying to crack my mind. I wanted to think in a completely different way or not think at all. And it took a long time. I mean, I've been. I'm a writer at the core who's wandered into other paths in life. But I found my way into Eastern philosophy. After I sold my company, I decided to go to a retreat. I had never done it, and it was one of the Vipassana retreats somewhere up in Santa Rosa. And when I went there, I didn't know anything about it. So I took a whole pile of books and I took sketch pads and I was just going to pour out everything on those pages. And the teacher said, well, here's Sproules. No talking, no reading, no anything. Just sitting for 45 minutes and walked for 45 minutes. I said, what? I'm like, okay. I was game. I stayed for was odd. I was unsettled for the first day or two. And then I got this excruciating headache and it wouldn't go away. And I said, I'm never going to let this happen to me before. It's because there's no coffee here. I'm going to start a tea company. Which is exactly what I shouldn't have been doing in a meditation retreat. So for the first next several days, I was dreaming up the Republic of Tea. And then I finally fell into the meditative state and I could hear further than I could. I didn't realize I could hear so far. Yeah, I was stunned at what I was hearing. And hearing, I would say, is my strongest sense. It always has been. And so after that, I came back and told my wife and she just. And of course, we had just sold a successful company. We were very visible and we were getting all kinds of offers. Let's do this, let's do that, let's do this. I said, I'm going to do nothing. I'm going to just do nothing. Because I just realized that I was like a wound up toy. Succeed, achieve, succeed, achieve, succeed. It was in my DNA.

[Interviewer]

Had it been like that your whole life? From childhood?

[Mel Ziegler]

In an intense way, Melvin, maybe you'll be a doctor, maybe you'll be. I mean, I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There was a lovely part of town that was called the Hill section, which was a Jewish community.

[Interviewer]

Suburban.

[Mel Ziegler]

No, it was in the town. Scranton's about 100,000 people. It's an old coal mining town about two and a half hours from New York as you go through New Jersey. And somehow Jews had found their way there and set up a little community there. And it was middle class, 1950s, you know, everybody had come home from the war. Everything was so comforting. What a difference. When I even talk about the 1950s, what a difference it was to today. But it was a very sweet place and it was a very sweet way to grow up. Later, many years later, when I brought my wife back, she said to me, nobody's mean here. It was a high school reunion, the 50th high school reunion. The sweetest people ever.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

So I grew up in that. But my grandparents were first generation and my parents were second generation. They didn't go to college and a lot was expected. I was going to go to college and I was going to do that and my dad said you should be a pharmacist. What's a pharmacist? He was in the war in Germany. He was a very simple, sweet man. I loved him so much. He was a bodhisattva. I realized long after he was gone. He died at 59. Anyway, I found my way out of there.

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[Interviewer]

You think of yourself as a writer. You started as a writer. Do you think of yourself as a writer or a journalist? I think of them as different.

[Mel Ziegler]

They are. And I should say, actually, even though I said that neither. I'm an observer. I've tried for many years to shed the amazing amount of judgment and screens I had in order to see the world. And what I have tried to do is reach that objective space. I'm hardly ever there, but it's my goal to be in that objective space. Space A student of ancient Chinese philosophies, particularly Taoism. And I read a Taoism book where the statement was forget yourself, follow objective circumstances. And that's pretty much what I try to do. I don't think of myself as anything fixed.

[Interviewer]

When did you first come in contact with the Dao?

[Mel Ziegler]

After the retreat. I swallowed every Krishnamurti book first because I'm a thinker. I think obsessively. I'm full of concepts, I'm full of ideas. And I found him. He gave me a path to just make me realize that I'M just living in a swarm of thought and seeing nothing. And I read every single book and I listened to the lectures and then somehow or another I picked up Lao Tzu. But the one that really did it to me was Chuang Tzu. I don't know how you pronounce his name. He's the one. He's the rogue. I really related to this guy. He was just making fun of everything and having fun and having a good time. And at the same time, through him, I began to realize that the dao that can be told is not the dao you can't. How am I ever going to describe it to you? But it was this total vision of observing in tune with nature. Everything was part of nature, including human beings. In fact, I remember having this conversation years ago with Jack Kornfield. I said he was frustrated because I just. Well, I'm just the same thing as that, you know, I'm the storm, the web. It's the same thing. So it really spoke to me. Yeah, it spoke to me and it got me to a place where I really tasted emptiness. Tasted it.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

Is there anything more delicious when you think about it than emptiness?

[Interviewer/Commentator]

That's it.

[Interviewer]

Peace. I love the dao. I love.

[Mel Ziegler]

Oh, I bet I could see from your book that you. That you live it. And I, and I. And I admire you. I just, it's. It's something you don't really want to talk about because it's.

[Interviewer]

It's hard to talk about.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, it defies that.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your writing days.

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, I was a journalist. The way I was going to get out of Scranton was to write my way out of Scranton. Scranton was wonderful in many ways. What it didn't introduce me to, I think regret to say, was music and art, which became my passions, is particularly art. As the time went on years later and is currently really now, I. I paint, but I was a journalist and I wrote for my high school magazine and I enjoyed it. I was just writing little stories, actually short stories at that point. But then I got a job at the Scranton Tribune writing a front page column called the Weather. That's all. It was cloudy with a chance of rain, but I was so excited.

[Interviewer]

How would you know?

[Mel Ziegler]

There was a weather bureau, I guess you called and they told you, and the temperature range and everything else. And then I became a copy boy and then it was time to go to go to college and I went to Penn State. It's all we really could afford at that time. And it was a state school and it Was a wonderful school. It was in State College, Pennsylvania. I don't know if you've ever been there, but beautiful, wonderful school.

[Interviewer]

And did you study journalism?

[Mel Ziegler]

I studied journalism, and then I heard that the place to study journalism was really Columbia. And so I applied to and went to Columbia, and I happened to be there in the vintage year 1968, when everything exploded. It's very similar to what happened this last year. This was the year of Berkeley and Columbia. And there were protests on campus about the university's expansion into Morningside Heights, taking away the neighborhood. I mean, it's very prescient, all of that happening.

[Interviewer]

I didn't know about that.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, it was in the 60s, and they occupied the buildings. They were total occupations of the buildings.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Wow.

[Mel Ziegler]

So here I was, a journalist in the journalism school, and two buildings over was low Library, which is where the president was. And I'm walking out one day and the whole campus is full of protesters. I'd never seen anything like this in my entire life. And when I went to Penn State, they were hoot nannies. That dates me when I was leaving. It was protest songs. It was the beginning.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And so I caught up in this in my. And yet I was a journalist. And so I. I saw this. The students that occupied the president's office, Grayson Kirk, they were all over the campus. But the big thing is they were occupying his office. And it was remarkable, as I remember, because the women had set up a kitchen in the office. I mean, thinking about that, the women were setting up the kitchen in the office, and the guys were. Whatever they were doing. There's a ledge that goes around Low library. It's about maybe 8, 10ft tall. And that you could. If you get to that ledge, you can go into the. To the office. And I wanted to go into the office as a reporter. I wanted to find a story here. And I wasn't sure whether I was a reporter or. I didn't know. I wasn't sure who I was or what was what this was all about. I was just learning about it myself.

[Interviewer]

Was it exciting?

[Mel Ziegler]

It was extraordinary. It was exhilarating. I mean, they shut down the school. We never had a graduation. It was like last year. It was the first. It was the precursor and probably the only time to the unfortunate protests last year and much more justified, I would say. Anyway, so I didn't know if there was a reporter. I didn't know if I was it. And I came out and it was time to go and graduate, and I wrote a story and. And the story Was published in the Miami Herald, had just interviewed me for a job. I sent them the story. They published the story and offered me a job. And I also was. I think I also wrote a story for New York magazine at the time, which was just starting up again. It used to be the earlier was the Sunday supplement of a paper called the. It was a fusion paper, Herald Tribune, the one that became the International. And it was sort of a really elegant newspaper. But Clay Felker, who was the editor of New York when it was in, and that paper bought the rights to it when the paper folded and then regenerated New York magazine. And that's how it came to be. And one of my teachers at the time was Dick Shapp, the sportscaster, and became very good friends. And he introduced me to Clay. And then I started writing for New York magazine. But I got very tired of New York after a couple of years and found my way west. But I was still a journalist. And at that time I came to San Francisco and I was going to write a novel.

[Interviewer]

How did you choose San Francisco?

[Mel Ziegler]

I chose it in Colorado. We were driving across the country and I was either going to go to Mexico Point south, and I had a girlfriend. We were driving an old French Simca that we had bought the year before and shipped over. We didn't find out what it was, but what it certainly was going to be was not New York. Because the 1970s in New York was hell. I mean, garbage strikes, dog shit all over the sidewalks. Nobody picking up after themselves, no regard. It was just. It was, what am I doing here? And I had a friend who is in Hastings Law School in San Francisco earlier, and I'd flown out to see him. It was a beautiful February day and San Francisco was really enchanting after that. And I said, I sort of feel like I belong here.

[Interviewer]

What year was this?

[Mel Ziegler]

This was 1972, I think. 1972.

[Interviewer]

So summer love had already happened.

[Mel Ziegler]

It hadn't already happened. What I didn't know is that four years earlier my wife was happening with it. She grew up in San Francisco.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Oh, great.

[Mel Ziegler]

So there's an interesting story there. But I did what I do. There were two papers at that time. San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner. I got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle and I had a great time. It was fun. I was on the city desk. It was a room that was a huge room with reporters sitting here, the art department there, the photography studio there, the Sunday section there. It was huge. It was like a little city city room. And there was a It was almost out of the movie, the front page. There was an editor by the name of Abe Mellenkopf who read a monocle. And he would stand up and he would say, you know, Zeigler 474, hide baby in a trash bin. Get a photographer. And you get a photographer and you would just basically go find the abandoned baby in the trap. I mean, this is the. This was it. And it was wild. These were the years of the zebra killings.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Wow.

[Mel Ziegler]

And the zebra killings were happening. And I was there on the night beat writing the story about what just happened in the streets. And at 2 o' clock in the morning, going down to catch a bus at fifth admission to take me to. To Mill Valley, where I lived completely by myself. But anyway, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed working. I enjoyed being part of the city. I enjoyed learning everything.

[Interviewer]

Do you think the fact that you came from a different place added to it? Like, part of your job was you're like a fish out of water in this new environment and your job is to observe it and report on it.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drink it in. Take it all. Yes. It was absolutely. I didn't. The west coast was totally new to me. It was a completely different. It was a completely different mentality, one that I summarized this way. Clive Felker, who was the editor of New York magazine at that time, later went out to come teach at Berkeley, and I ran into him at a party maybe 15 years later, and he said, didn't you used to be Mel Zigler? That's New York.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And so I was very happy not to be there. Yeah, I was very happy not to be there. I was learning a whole new way of life. You could do anything. It was free. Freedom is wealth. It's not money. It's not. It's freedom. And I felt that freedom.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah, just.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was exhilarating being there. And these were good years. They were crazy years because it was also. I was also there when the Patty Hearst kidnapping took place, which was really crazy. I mean, it was just crazy. I mean.

[Interviewer]

Did you cover that story?

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, I was part. I was part of covering. I was part. Everybody covered that story. If you were on the shift and you were down there, you were in front of the Hearst mansion in where Atherton. And somebody would say, hey, Ziggler, your tree is ringing. They'd have a phone hooked up to the tree. It was wild being in the newspaper business. It was wonderful. I loved it. I loved it. Journalism was different in those days as well. I mean, these were the days Of Walter Cronkite. You know, I mean, these were the days when at least there was an effort to be objective. I mean, the world hadn't seen Rupert Murdoch yet. It was going to brand news and brand point of view and create this situation where everything became contrary to everything. I mean, it was just. Then it was just, here's the story. You couldn't even use the word I. A reporter said. A reporter saw. You know, you wrote about yourself in the third person.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And I. So I loved it.

[Interviewer]

But the only point of view was what you saw. You weren't given an agenda to try to make the story mean something.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yes. Or to come. Put it through the filter. Yeah, put it through.

[Interviewer]

There was no filter.

[Mel Ziegler]

No filter. It was just objectivity. Your job is to be objective. Give us both sides of the story. Quote them both. You know, just lay it out.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And it's nice hearing both sides of the story. Yes. Isn't it?

[Interviewer]

I love it.

[Mel Ziegler]

I mean, this is what's wrong. This is really. This would fix everything if people would just. Hey, you know, why do you feel that way?

[Interviewer]

It's funny. You talk about going back to Scranton and the people being nice. You'd think that the people in San Francisco would be really nice. There was a time when they were where they were.

[Mel Ziegler]

Do you remember those days? Yes, they were.

[Interviewer]

Well, everybody was nice.

[Mel Ziegler]

I mean, my wife will tell me stories about. She hitchhiked here and they. Somebody said, come to dinner and she'd stay three weeks with somebody who. Beautiful people who were working in Stanford and this. I mean, it was that kind of a city. Yeah. I don't even know when it happened. Did it happen? I don't know how it happened. I guess the answer is always day by day.

[Interviewer]

How many years did you continue being a journalist?

[Mel Ziegler]

I was a journalist until I met my wife there. She is an illustrator. I told you about this big city room. Well, one day, this very beautiful woman was walking in and turning into the art department, which was right behind the Xerox machine and all the way at the other side of the room. Somehow or another, when I saw her, I saw my other half.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Wow.

[Mel Ziegler]

But I'm pretty shy. I think that's one of the reasons I like being a reporter is I couldn't be shy. I had to get out there and do what I did. It brought me out of that, but I could. So I. During the Christmas party, two of my other two other buddies of mine who were both reporters, we all decided to walk over and find out who this new Girl was. And so the three of us walked over. Something happened in that moment where the two of them somehow disappeared. And Patricia and I got into a conversation that we're still in.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Mel Ziegler]

I love her now more than I've ever loved anyone. She's my wife. It's almost 50 years.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful. Congratulations.

[Mel Ziegler]

Well, we've had our troubles. I mean, this is. We didn't get here. It wasn't a clear road.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

I mean, we really had, but. But we knew we were connected at the core. And so she was there, I was there. We were having a great time. I was my late 20s. I wanted to travel, you know, I wanted to see the world. And the Chronicle was just a very cheap paper. It was known as being a cheap paper. They wouldn't send you anywhere to do anything. And there was no other game in town. It wasn't like today with media. You go here, you go there. There were three television stations of hero journalism. There was two newspapers. Then it became one newspaper. There was nowhere else to go. I could freelance, which I began to do, writing magazine articles for different magazines and doing that kind of thing. But I wanted to travel. And we didn't have any money. We had nothing. I mean, I basically lift off our salaries, which four or five hundred dollars a week. Then I can't even remember what they were. They weren't much.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about Republic of Tea.

[Mel Ziegler]

I wanted to learn about tea. I mean, I'm that kind of person. If I want to learn about something, I just jump in. My path into tea was flavored. Black teas were magical for me for a while. And then I just sort of got more into the quinoans, the more Chinese, deep tasting Chinese teas. But I saw a hole in the market that was sort of unbelievable. This was the early 90s. Didn't matter what restaurant you went to, if you ordered a tea, they would bring you out a Lipton's tea bag.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

How could this be? Yeah, I saw that. And on the other hand, there was a hippie brand book called Celestial Seasonings from a guy named Mo Seagal and lived in Colorado. It was beautiful. Had all these different herbal things. And other than that, there was a sprinkling in there, maybe a brand called Twinings and a few other things, but nothing. Nobody was really revering tea. And so I thought this is this.

[Interviewer]

And historically, tea has been revered.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yes, it's the. I call it the second oldest product in the world, you know, and the nuances are fantastic. Just like wine. It never really. It still hasn't come fully realized. But at that point, that's why, again, I didn't realize what we were doing.

[Interviewer]

How did it start?

[Mel Ziegler]

We were creating a category. We weren't creating a company. Because now if you go into a. A store, it's all there. So I went to a year or so after two years after Banana Republic, of my doing nothing years, which was dance with study and writing and travel and things. But I went to a conference of a group called the Social Venture Network that was just starting out up somewhere in New Jersey. It was the first time I really left my son, who was maybe then 2 years old. And I left the conference early and I started flying back. And a young guy there saw me at the conference, sort of chased me down and found me on the plane and started talking to me. He knew that I had started Banana Republic. And for some reason I mentioned to him if I were to ever start another company, it would be a tea company. And he was all over it. He was all over it. He really thought this was the greatest idea ever. And I said, okay. But I wasn't sure about him. I wasn't sure whether I didn't know, having gone through the. It was. I would say it wasn't a pleasant experience at the end of Banana Republic. So I didn't. I didn't need this. Look, my goal is never to be rich or wealthy. I just want to be independent. And I had enough to be independent. And so I wasn't really looking at this point to do anything. But he was very engaging and smart. And I just happened to say, I just get these things. These names just come to me. I said, if there's another company, I'm going to call it the Republican Tip. And I'm going to be the Minister of Leaves.

[Interviewer]

Was that the first time you said it?

[Mel Ziegler]

Yes. I'm going to be the Minister of Leaves, which I kind of loved because, you know, I'm not only leaving, but I'm the Minister of Leaves. You know, it's like, it's okay. So I did. I appointed myself ministers. He said, well, I'll be the Minister of Progress.

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[Mel Ziegler]

And he really started banging together. And this was. These were the years when there were the fax machines. So I go home the next morning and my fax machine is chattering in my study and he's saying, the minister, we could do this. And I would answer him and we would go back and forth with faxes, back and forth with fax Texas. And I had another friend who came over one day and he saw this pile of facts. I didn't know whether I was going to start it with this guy or I wasn't going to start it with. I didn't know what I was doing. I was playing out the idea of what should a tea company be. I was imagining it. And a friend of mine came over, a friend by the name of Bruce Katz, who started Rockport. He unfortunately recently died, fell from his roof. Miss him dearly. Came to my house one day and I had these things naturally came printed out. So he saw this pile of stuff, he started reading through and he said, this is great, you should publish this. So he knew somebody who knew somebody and there was. The next thing I knew, I had an editor from Doubleday who was visiting and she read it and she wanted to publish it. So she published the complete exchange of. Of how to Start a Business. Republica T. Letters to a Young Zentrepreneur or something. I forget what the subtitle was. It was changed along the way. And I just didn't want to tear myself away from my son.

[Interviewer]

You sound like someone who, when you dive in, you. You're all consumed.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

So you're wary of becoming all consumed again.

[Mel Ziegler]

That's exactly right.

[Interviewer]

I understand.

[Mel Ziegler]

But I waited for my minister of progress to sort of see what he was going to do and make it happen. He was not quite making it happen until they gave us a book advance. And so since we were both writing these faxes back and forth together, it was really our book. It wasn't my book, it was our book. So I said, the only way I'm going to do this company is if you start it with the book advanced. I thought that would be Great. Just take the book advance and start the company. And he did. He basically started the company with the book advance and a little help from another friend of ours. And we were able to build that up a couple of years. And again, I was operating, but it wasn't the same and I didn't want to operate. So we ended up selling it a couple of years later to a lovely family.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about the years of doing it. What was the process?

[Mel Ziegler]

The process was creating different brands of tea and working with the herbs or working with the dark teas and creating flavored teas and then somehow creating a way of packaging that was going to be different. It had to be different because it couldn't be just another tea company. So we came up with the idea that. And nobody had ever done this before, that teabags were square. Let's make them round. Okay. And what about the can? The can has to be round for that to go into. And what would be on the can would be these exceptional names and stories and witticisms from the Minister of Leaves or anybody else that it. And so we use the. We use the. The cans basically to advertise a life of sip by sip as opposed to gulp by gulp. Yeah, I mean, it's always fun to create a villain, and the villain here was the gulpers. You know, you really can get your teeth into something if you have something to work off of.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

And it was this, you know, like, people just.

[Interviewer]

We're not like them.

[Mel Ziegler]

Yeah, well, we're not going to gulp and miss life. We're just going to gulp our way through life. We're going to sip our way sip by sip by sip by sip by sip.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Ye.

[Mel Ziegler]

We created just really lovely teas and learned a lot and tried to make them more. Earl Gray was Earl Greyer, for instance. I mean, that was the name of that tea. I forget a lot of the other names, but I think we probably should have opened stores. But we had another ask. If you ever considered we wanted to.

[Interviewer]

And if you would have opened shops, would it have been a store to buy the tea or would it have been more like, like the Starbucks of tea?

[Mel Ziegler]

It would have been the Starbucks of tea, yeah. Still no external. Howard Schultz found us early on, and he had already thrown tea out of the Starbucks in those years and was trying to find a way back in. And there was a time when I thought he might buy the company. We flew up to see him, and one of my partners is a good talker, but not a great listener. And at that point, my dear Friend at that point was there were some sparks that were wrong between Howard and him, and it never really worked. And I said, let's sell this thing to somebody who can really make something out of it. And there was this fella in St. Louis by the name of Ron Rubin, and he was in the beverage business. His family was in the beverage business. Bottle of beverage business. And he read the book and he flew out to meet us, and he said, I'd love to buy this company. And I just really liked him. And to this day, they run that company. From the book, he'll say on page 276. And we were just wild ideas that we threw out.

[Interviewer]

It's a beautiful story. I've never heard a story like that before.

[Mel Ziegler]

Really?

[Interviewer/Commentator]

No.

[Interviewer]

Where the idea phase is documented and ending up becoming exposed in advance of the actual product. There was no Republic of Tea. We always hear the story after. We've never heard the wild ideas of what this thing could be in print and then have that thing actually come into existence. That's a very unusual story.

[Mel Ziegler]

Interesting. Yeah. It was fully imagined. Of course, 25, 30 years later, it's still evolving. But the core of it, the culture.

[Interviewer]

The philosophy of it, was in the book.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was there. I mean, if the Gap had done this with Banana Republic, they would have a wildly successful company. If they had just done this.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Mel Ziegler]

They didn't have the courage to do this.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yes.

[Mel Ziegler]

But if they did this, it was so classic. I mean, we owned khaki, but we weren't all about khaki, but we owned khaki, and we owned the. The practicality and functional clothing that stood apart from all the design that the opposite experience happened.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

With the Republic of Tea. And there's good evidence now, it's not. Republic of Tea is not amalgamated, gigantic, like the Gap. But, you know, when is enough enough in this world? I don't think people ask that question enough.

[Interviewer]

Tell me more about your spiritual life.

[Mel Ziegler]

I paint. I can't start a painting until I accept and enter the emptiness, the blank canvas, the silence. And when I do that, then I'm always excited to start. And I. Something draws me to a color. Something draws me to a brush. Something draws me to a stroke. And everything, once it starts, becomes resolution. It's all just resolving.

[Interviewer]

You're reacting to something that you see.

[Mel Ziegler]

I'm responding to the materials. I'm responding to the choices that I made earlier. I'm always in response. I'm not really generating. I'm responding and I'm listening to me. That's what empties me out. And in the end, sometimes when I, when I finish a work, I look at it. It's abstract work, very colorful because I. There's so much vividness in what happens. I see something that's familiar. It's some kind of a structure that it. That existed. That and it came out and it showed itself to me. Yeah, I didn't do that. It showed itself to me.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

That's so energizing. Love to paint. Love to paint. And my son is a painter. My wife is a painter. My daughter is a fashion designer. When they were kids, we bought the house across the driveway from us that was being sold by a Marin county judge, a very sweet man. And it became our art house. So we would go over there just to create art.

[Interviewer]

Fantastic Together.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was so great.

[Interviewer]

Beautiful.

[Mel Ziegler]

It was so beautiful. I mean, we have these art. We'd be sitting there and each one of us would be doing our own thing. And I was playing like they was learning, like they were learning. And I've been doing it ever since. And in the last several years it's really kind of matured. But I don't even. I didn't try to make a career out of it.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

It. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

How do you know when a painting is done and do you know for sure when it's done?

[Mel Ziegler]

It's never done. I've gone back and repainted paintings. I've done. It's. They're framed. I tear them out of the frames and do them all over again. It's like, yeah, it's never done because that painting was in that time, in that place and that it's. But sometimes I like the fact it's like a photograph.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yeah.

[Mel Ziegler]

It is done. I can accept it.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

It.

[Mel Ziegler]

I could change it. And the ones that I'm most proud of are the ones I just leave alone. I'm going to leave them alone, but I could change them. And some of the best work I've done is basically repainting, not just painting. And I try to always find out if I'm following some kind of rule I didn't know existed. You wrote about that in your book. I was fascinated about that. I'm always looking for that. And because I am a. A self taught painter, I watch my, my wife, I watch my. She's very respectful. She knows I'm an autodidact. And I want to. I don't want noise. I want to discover. And my. And my son, who's prolific and has never. He's fast and he's deterred on the faucet and he's. Something comes out and he never makes a mistake because there are no mistakes. He just keeps going. And somehow then he resolves and it's over. So every once in a while, I get a tip from one of them or the other. But my wife years ago gave me one tip to start with. The first tip, when I painted, she said, don't use black. Don't use black. So for years, I would not use black. I would do everything I could. And one day I discovered, hey, I don't have to follow this rule anymore. But I learned so much by not using black.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Are you precious about the first stroke?

[Mel Ziegler]

It's a commitment, and I can't think about it. If I think about it, I won't do it. Right. You look at my paintings now. You were thinking there, Mel. I don't want you to look at my paintings and think that. I was thinking. This is my way of.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Of.

[Mel Ziegler]

Of not thinking. And I. I'm a great fan of not thinking. I think.

[Interviewer]

Did you say you've lived most of your life in your head?

[Mel Ziegler]

I do that, yeah. And I realized it just. Basically it's just noise that tunes out everything. So, I mean, the joy of growing older is really accepting how little I know and enjoying it. I mean, I know how to do a thing or not, but know in the big sense. I'm constantly surprised. I could never explain, and I was a great explainer, but I basically trapped myself. And I'm an appreciator of things that are really finely done. I love things that are beautiful and well done or well thought or authentic and come from the same place. You can see when somebody. It doesn't matter what they're creating. It doesn't matter. What matters is where it's coming from. You can see the source in almost every work. And often it's a thought. You can go flick through the television show, and it's one thing after another. It's one concept after another. You can listen to music. It's one concept after another. There we go.

[Interviewer/Commentator]

Here we go.

[Mel Ziegler]

But everyone's. When you hit the one that's not, that's life. That's. That's what we're here for.

[Interviewer]

Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

[Mel Ziegler]

I don't believe in belief.

[Interviewer]

Tetragrammaton is a podcast.

[Mel Ziegler]

Tetragrammaton is a website.

[Interviewer]

Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.

[Podcast Host]

What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton Counterculture Tetragrammaton Sacred geometry Tetragrammaton the avant garde Tetragrammaton Generative art Tetragrammaton the Tarot Tetragrammaton out of print music Tetragrammatin Biodynamics Tetragrammatin Graphic design Tetragrammatin Mythology and magic Tetragrammatin Obscure film Tetragrammatum beach culture Tetragrammatin Esoteric lectures Tetragrammatin off the grid Living Tetragrammatin Alt Spirituality Tetragrammatin the canon of fine objects Tetragrammatin Muscle cars Tetragrammatin Ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.