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CHAPTER 10
Our first order was from a chain called One Plus One. It was for $450,000. We also got an order for Eaton’s, the department store. We did close to $3 million in sales in our first year. This is equivalent to over $10 million in 2024. It was truly astonishing. Nobody had ever seen the line before, and we had incredible success. My brother and I were over the moon. I’ve got newspaper articles from that time. It was an unbelievable experience.
Orders kept pouring in, and then, in 1981, a vast recession hit. We were vulnerable, and things were not going well financially. My brother is very much like me. We’re not accounting people.
The truth is the first order we took from One Plus One became a problem. We took the order, which was risky because they eventually went bankrupt. They were vulnerable then, but we wanted the business because they had 30-plus stores. These shops suffered financially during this recession, and we couldn’t collect the money.
When you take an order, sometimes you go to a factoring company, and they advance your money against the order. These factoring companies would only support us once, so we ran out of the ability to operate our business. We should have been less over-leveraged, as they say.
But it was a great collection. Everybody loved it. Everybody was buying it. But nobody wanted to pay for it. So we wound up paying for it. In the end, it was terribly unfortunate. We built something that looked promising and failed in the end, not for any reason other than lousy control. Well, that, along with a horrifying recession that wiped out many businesses at the time.
My second wife thought I should have done things differently. She felt that instead of carrying on and building these businesses and my ideas, I would be better off getting a job with an excellent salary. I thought I had the ability to do things on my own. I didn’t like her idea, so I fought it. Forty-plus years later, I’m still the same. I’ve not changed. That mentality doesn’t change; it’s embedded in me.
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