Doris Fisher: Don’t mind The Gap

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of CFOAM motor treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

CFOAM!

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and specialized bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com slash strategic.

That's oracle.com slash strategic.

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Zing Sing.

I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

This is a story of a woman, a couple, who found a gap in the market, a gap in the generations.

Very good.

And decided to name their store after it.

Yes, her name is Doris Fisher.

And with her husband, she founded The Gap.

Doris Fisher, on her own, today, worth $1.5 billion.

At one point, she was worth over $4 billion.

And together with her family, she's still worth over $6 billion.

And if you were at any point around in the 90s, you will have seen that advertising.

It was everywhere.

Yeah, one of the most successful clothing brands ever.

It revolutionized the way the world shopped and dressed.

How would you characterize it?

You're the best dressed person I know.

Thank you very much.

And well, I guess I don't wear the gap personally, which maybe tells you something about the way it's perceived now, because it's all about all-American basics.

So So, we're talking about chinos, t-shirts, polos, jeans, usually quite brightly coloured.

You know, kind of think Ralph Lorraine, but less aspirational and a lot more accessible.

And yet, they started by inventing specialty retail.

The Gap started live selling just jeans and records.

But Doris Fisher is pretty private.

Don, her co-founder and husband, less so, but they were equal partners in the business, which was unusual for the 60s.

Now, it's actually been tricky to find out much about Doris specifically.

Unlike Don, who self-published a 724-page autobiography, mercifully only gave out around 200 copies to family and friends.

And Don is a big part of this story, but he's not the focus because this podcast focuses on billionaires who are still with us.

But we can tell you one thing Doris did say.

I'll tell you that I've been successful because I've worked hard.

Millions of people work hard.

That's not quite good enough.

That's not going to do it, I'm afraid, Doris.

And Don and Doris really did seem to do everything together, and that includes spending serious money on art.

They amassed a $1 billion art collection, which includes over a thousand works by 185 artists from Andy Warhol to Roy Lichtenstein.

But it's been a roller coaster.

This wasn't linear, unadulterated success.

Doris has described the gap as a store with a heart.

But the last two decades have seen the gap dramatically fall from favor amid allegations of sweatshops and child labor.

So, is Doris Fisher good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Let's go back to the beginning.

Doris Lee Feigenbaum was born in 1931 in San Francisco, USA.

There isn't a huge amount of information on her early years, but what we can gather is that she was born into a well-to-do Jewish family because her parents married at the Ritz-Colton and it was announced in the society pages of the New York Times.

And her father was a lawyer and a Republican state legislator for California.

Doris was the middle of three children, and she said, I just wanted to make my parents proud and to have them notice me, especially my dad I really idolized him I wanted to show him what I could do yeah she was diligent she was a Girl Scout she started volunteering at 12 years old and she pushed herself to get through school in order to graduate with honors she said I put that same energy into building the gap She must have been smart though because she graduated not the first of our billionaires to do this or drop out from it from Stanford University in the early 1950s one of the first women to earn an economics degree there.

Because remember we're not talking about the 70s or the 80s or the 90s.

This is someone who went to university in the 50s.

Yeah, and in 1953, straight after graduating, age 22, Doris marries Donald or Don Fisher.

Now, Don was actually a longtime family friend of Doris.

He was also from a middle-class Jewish family in San Francisco.

Yeah, he graduated with a degree in business administration from the University of California, Berkeley, despite once being caught cheating in an exam on industrial relations.

So quite a colourful character to pair up with Doris, the hard-working girl-made girl.

The hard-working Girl scout.

He was also six foot four, three years her senior, and had been captain of both the swimming and water polo team, so quite the jock.

Yeah, so like many women in 1950s America, remember that period, as soon as they got married, Doris spent the best part of the next decade having children.

Together they had three sons, Robert in 54, William in 58, and John in 1961.

And while she was raising the boys, Don started a commercial real estate business specializing in refurbishing old hotels.

And this is where the gap's origin story comes in.

So, Don had bought a hotel in Sacramento, and to make some extra money, was leasing out one of the ballrooms to a Levi salesman who had used it as a showroom.

And the 60s were really Levi's decade.

Well, they continued to be incredibly popular and iconic, but the 60s was when they became massive.

Yes, I mean, Levi's really, I guess you could say, pioneered the jeans.

So, you know, sometimes you'll see this pair of Levi's jeans called the 501s.

That's actually considered the first ever pair of jeans in history.

You know, the founders of Levi's even patented it.

Yeah.

And And the 60s, you think back to rock and roll stars, they were wearing jeans

for the first time.

James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause.

So jeans were really, and I know this seems crazy now because they are everywhere, they were very much a new trendy thing.

Yeah, they were sort of countercultural in a way.

They were workwear originally, and then they became fashionwear in the 60s.

And, you know, we talk now about workwear being a huge trend.

You look at brands like, for instance, Carhartt.

You can talk about people wearing Carhartt who have never worked in manual labor a day in their life.

But Levi's was really the brand that kicked it all off.

So Levi's were gaining huge popularity.

Don himself, Don Fisher, bought a couple of pairs from the salesman, but he couldn't find the right fit.

So him and Doris began doing some market research.

And even the big department stores like Macy's didn't carry every style, size, and color, and they often sold out of the most popular ones.

So this was their light bulb moment, if you like.

They thought about a one-stop shop that brought together every style, every colour, every size that Levi Strauss had to offer.

Don said at the time, I didn't plan to go into the clothing business.

I just wanted to take the nightmare out of shopping for Levi's and to offer an easy, well-organized shopping experience that would appeal to a guy like me.

So he went to Levi's with this idea, and a guy called Bud Robinson, who was Levi's director of advertising, was pretty impressed and he agreed to a novel system of supply and inventory.

Levi's would guarantee every style and they'd never run out of stock by offering overnight daily shipments from their warehouse.

So in August 1969, Don and Doris open a shop of their own.

And now, really unusually for the time, Doris and Don decided to be equal partners.

And she said, frankly, I would have always assumed that women were getting paid the same amount as men.

I mean, they were doing the same jobs.

But back when we started GAP, of course they were.

That was a time when I don't think it occurred to many people that women could be leaders.

So Don and Doris invested $63,000.

They each put in $21,000.

And the other $21,000 came from a raid on their children's bank accounts.

And they promised to pay them back one day for the rest.

And boy, did they, and will they?

We'll see.

So, when asked why she and Don decided to contribute equally to the startup costs, she answered, Why not?

It didn't even dawn on me to do anything differently.

We were doing it together as partners, so of course, I put in the same amount of money as Don did.

So, their plan was to cater exclusively to teenagers, college kids, and the store was strategically placed on Ocean Avenue, right near two colleges and a high school.

Now, remember, we're talking about the 60s, the summer of love, in in San Francisco, which is really the epicenter of this new emerging youth culture.

Hate Ashbury area, you've got the Grateful Dead, you've got Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.

Asted Everywhere.

Okay.

And at first, all they stocked was men's Levi's jeans and vinyl records.

Now, Don had planned to call the store Pants and Discs, but Doris persuaded him otherwise.

I have to say, I don't think Pants and Discs would have turned into an international clothing email.

It's one of those sliding doors moments.

We would not be here talking about this if pants and discs was their name.

So, Doris came up with the idea, the gap, in reference to the generation gap, which a lot of people were talking about at that time during this period.

She had the idea.

They'd just been to a cocktail party, apparently, where the generation gap was discussed.

So, there was the kind of war generation, and then there was the post-war generation.

And this was seen as a big gap in terms of everything, really, in terms of lived experience, in terms of technological innovation, in terms of cultural freedoms, things like the contraceptive pill.

I think that's kind of an important part in all of this.

And also, you know, morals, values, ethics, you know, this entire idea of Summer of Love tuning in and dropping out, you know, that would have been absolute anathema to, you know, the people who served in World War II.

So the gap was really a kind of all-encompassing brand that signaled that the call was for cool young people, not your dad and mom.

Yeah, not for the so-called silent generation.

This is for you guys.

So Doris at this time was 38.

Dom was 41.

They were selling to a younger generation, but they both worked at the store.

Doris said, I used to wear the clothes, of course, and I could always sell what I was wearing.

And the Gap is credited with inventing speciality retail.

Now, at the time, clothes shopping mostly happened in department stores.

So, think of places like Macy's, which catered to the older generation.

But the Gap's concept was new and fun.

The store was painted in bright colours, it played rock music.

They actually soon dropped selling vinyl records because, as Don said, the pants were selling the records, not the other way around.

That's a smart spot.

They were also innovative at merchandising.

They would display jeans together by size rather than by style meaning you could go in and shop all the styles easily at once.

So you know here's my size, here's the range available for me.

Don said, I viewed things with the eye of a real estate man, not a retailer.

I always looked for ways to get the most out of square footage to go beyond the floor space.

I created a honeycomb of cubicles on the walls.

I'd never seen this done before, but it seemed so logical, I wondered why not.

So actually, when you think about it, a lot of the things we now associate with a traditional retail experience, the gap was basically at the forefront of it.

Yeah, all this means the store was gaining in popularity.

It was helped by a big marketing campaign.

And according to Bud Robinson, the guy from Levi's, Don had insisted that Levi's pay 50% of the store's radio advertising up front.

That's really interesting.

Yeah, and when you think about how few places there were at the time to advertise to young people,

actually demanding that as part of the deal is pretty smart.

And also, to this day, you sometimes see co-marketing where you see one brand will be advertising another store.

There'll be sort of joint marketing.

So, I think this is the first time probably it's ever been done.

So, the radio ads would run on radio almost every day, and in Bud's words, bombard every hearing Bay Area teenager and surely drive them to the store.

And just a year after launching, they opened a second store in San Jose, a city close to San Francisco, and began selling Levi's for women.

Now, by 1971, sales were two and a half million dollars, but net profit was just $116,000.

So, the next few years, they began a big expansion plan.

They opened smaller stores to keep rent low.

This meant they could even open more sites and get their name out there.

This is the beginning of what, in retail terms, used to be called the space race.

The space race, the space on the high street.

Exactly.

So, by its third anniversary, the Gap had 25 stores across the US.

It was all about convenience and easy shopping.

For example, stores in New York were placed as close as possible to bus stops and big retailers to get as much footfall, as many people passing as possible.

And until now, they'd just been stocking Levi's, but in 1974, they started selling Gap-label clothing.

So, those wardrobe basics like cords, chinos, casual shirts, t-shirts.

So, that growth, plus the introduction of their own branded clothing, Big Moment, meant that by 1975, with 50 stores, Gap's net profit was 4.3 million US dollars.

And as sole owners of the company, it's therefore probably safe to say that Doris, at the age of 44, and Don at age 47 are millionaires in 1975.

Okay and that year they spent $211,000 that's around equal to 1.2 million US dollars today to buy a summer home 30 miles of San Francisco in the town of Atherton.

I'm not sure you could get the house they bought for $1.2 million today because real estate has also gone up massively in the Bay Area.

That wouldn't get you a broom cupboard these days.

No you'd have to fight 20 different programmers to get that kind of space.

Now over the next three decades they would spend $17.5 million to grow it into a big eight-acre estate.

And a few years ago, Doris put it on the market for 100 million.

There we go.

That's what I was talking about.

Although it eventually only sold for 50 million.

Oh, dear.

So they're millionaires, but how do they get to a billion?

So the next step is taking their company public.

But it's not going to go as well for them as some of our other billionaires.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam Motor Treatment.

C-Foam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!

Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my favorite social spin slot games on chumbacasino.com.

I looked over the person sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing?

They were also playing Chumba Casino.

Everybody's loving having fun with it.

Chumba Casino is home to hundreds of casino-style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere.

So sign up now at chumba casino.com to claim your free welcome bonus.

That's chumbacasino.com and live the chumba life.

sponsored by chumba casino.

No purchase necessary.

VGW group void where prohibited by law 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.

What if you could have all three at the same time?

That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters, and specialized bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.

How is it faster?

OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.

Cheaper?

OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

Better?

In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.

Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free.

Head to oracle.com slash strategic.

That's oracle.com slash strategic.

So how do they get from a million to a billion?

As we've said, with many of our billionaires, Doris and Don decide to take their company public, have an initial public offering at IPO.

So in May 1976, the Gap Stores Inc.

makes an initial offering selling shares at $18 per share.

But that same month, the Federal Trade Commission accuses Levi Strauss of price fixing across its retailers.

Years later, Levi Strauss settled this antitrust as a competition suit against it to the tune of millions, but without admissions of wrongdoing.

But at the time of Gap's IPO, these accusations against Gap's main supplier, biggest business partner, didn't look good.

And later that year, the Gap reported its first loss after 26 consecutive quarters of profit and GAP stocks fell to $7.25 per share, dropping more than half in less than a year.

That's a bad result for an IPO.

You don't want to lose half your money in less than a year.

And Don, in fact, wrote in his autobiography that stock went into a tailspin.

Investors screamed for our hides, accusing us of wrongdoing.

And actually, there were nine separate class action suits from stock purchasers who accused Don and Doris of trying to dump their holdings before the Gap announced its bad news.

Yeah, that's quite interesting, isn't it?

So you have your IPO, and then almost immediately you have this lawsuit that comes out, which sends your stock down.

And the suspicion you would have as an investor is like, you knew something like this was coming, you sold up before the bad news hit.

No evidence that's the case, but that's what investors would have thought.

Now, the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, actually investigated these complaints, but they found no criminal wrongdoing.

But they did say that GAP hadn't released all pertinent financial information to their investors.

Now, GAP eventually settled with the SEC and subsequently also settled the related related investor lawsuits for a total of $5.8 million.

Yeah, Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, who worked for Don in the late 1970s, said of that whole Levi's saga, it became a big enough problem that Gap strategically felt they had to migrate away from Levi's.

Big moment.

And so in 1978, Gap launches its own in-house jeans, although they continue to stop Levi's.

But people were starting to wonder if the Gap was really destined for success.

By the beginning of the 1980s, they had over 300 stores.

But what had initially been its strength, the narrow assortment of things on offer and targeted custom base, was beginning to look like a bit of a weakness.

So the question was, would the store age with them or would they keep targeting young people?

And by the end of the 1970s, a cultural change was in the air again.

And over the early 80s, the Gap's fortunes started to go down.

And I remember this.

I was around in the 80s, believe it or not.

Well, you probably do believe that.

The casual look was out.

This was the era of power dressing Wall Street suits big shoulder pads big hairs big hair huge hair and on top of that department stores have begun to get their act together they offered several specialty outlets under one roof and Don and Doris were both now in their 50s so you know they needed to move with the times and make some big changes their first gamble is purchasing clothing company banana republic in 1983 that was a banana republic customer i i'm sad to say it sold sort of safari and travel style clothes it made you look like a kind of casual indiana Jones right I would love to see a picture of you from this time you know I'm imagining safari chinos and the hat yes that look was popular they began a big expansion program of banana republic opened dozens of stores but within a few years unfortunately for simon in the 80s the safari look was no longer in style and banana republic was starting to struggle so they also had a go at buying something else they bought a homeware business called pottery barn but they sold it within two years after absorbing 14 million dollars in losses and dawn said that the failure was an important lesson.

He said, I decided I would never again get involved with a business I didn't already know and understand, which is quite a different attitude to some of our other billionaires.

That's true, yes.

Usually they think the rest of the world is totally wrong and they're completely right and they'll keep going until they're proved right.

So their next move was important though, because there was a little touch of humility, I think, which came in here, realizing they didn't know everything.

They're in their 50s.

They're in the fashion business.

You could argue this is a younger person's game.

So they found one.

So they did.

They hired a man who would become known as the merchant prince and the man who dressed America.

Yeah, retail expert Mickey Drexler was a 39-year-old from the Bronx where he'd had to sleep in the foyer of his family's apartment.

So he doesn't come from much, but he was known for his take-no-prisoners management style.

And over the years, he would actually often clash with Don and Doris.

So he was given a senior role as president of Gap stores and he set about overhauling their entire image.

He spent $8 million to remodel 500 stores.

That sounds pretty cheap to remodel 500 stores.

He painted them all white with wood floors polished twice a week and gave it a fresh, clean look.

That's the gap I think we would all recognize.

He slashed prices to sell off old merchandise so he could introduce new lines of clothing.

And initially, the markets were not into it, so profits and the company's stock initially plunged.

But Mickey Drexler had a vision and he stuck with it.

And he described the clothes he was going for as not high-risk fashion, but good taste, good style, not too far to the left, not too far to the right.

And they focused on casual, cool basics.

So, you know, those khakis, jeans, t-shirts.

But he also added a wider range of styles and all in an extensive colour range.

And that kind of range of colour, I think, is one of the most distinctive things about the Gap now.

Things like the classic pocket t-shirt, that was a big hit.

And in 1985, it was worn by both Mick Jagger, who was performing at Live Aid, and Marty McFly and Back to the Future.

So it's an 80s icon.

And they more than doubled the number of styles for women, adding things like blouses and dresses.

And because their original custom base, the baby boomers, were now becoming parents themselves, they also launched Gap Kids, followed a few years later by Baby Gap.

And they also expanded outside the US, so they opened several stores in London, England, and a store in Vancouver, Canada.

But their rapid expansion and the impressive work ethic that the Fishers cultivated led one British retail consultant to say, they were the most anal people I have ever met, comparing the Gap to the Moonies, which is a common nickname for the leaders of the South Korean religious group, the Unification Church.

They also revamped Banana Republic, so they got rid of that safari theme and they brought in sportswear.

Mickey's plan was working.

The New York Times at the time called it one of the most remarkable turnarounds in retailing history.

So by 1987, Don and Doris's net worth had reached $500 million, so they're officially halfway to a billion.

And at the end of the 1980s, they brought in the Navy and White Square Gap logo.

That was launched.

So the brand was ready for its heyday, the 1990s.

Now, enter 1991.

Gap Inc., as it's called, has 950 stores with $2 billion in sales.

It's the second best-selling brand in American clothing after their old partners Levi Strauss.

And that was the year they also stopped selling Levi's.

And at the time, both companies said it was a mutual breakup.

Although, in his autobiography, Don said that Levi's actually dumped them first.

He said, I clearly understood how much they feared the Gap label as serious competition to the Levi brand.

Now, that's interesting.

So, from being a reseller, essentially, of Levi's stuff, a retail outlet for Levi's, Levi's were now fearing the Gap label was going to be a serious competitor to the Levi brand itself.

And as we'll see, they were right.

That was the same year that Doris and Don are first listed together as billionaires by Fortune magazine, worth $1.9 billion with nearly 41% shareholding of the Gap.

So Doris and Don are officially billionaires.

She at the age of 60 and him at age 63.

So, how do we go beyond a billion?

The 1990s is considered by many to be Gap's best decade.

It was one of almost total commercial and even cultural domination.

It was a big cultural thing as well.

It was a huge cultural force.

And actually, you can tell because for the front cover of US Vogue's 100th anniversary issue, so this is a really, really big deal.

They got 10 supermodels, and that includes models who are called the supers, you know, people like Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, and they were all put in white jeans from the gap and shirts.

So that tells you a little bit about how cool the gap was considered at the time.

Sharon Stone wore a $25 gap black turtleneck to the Oscars and they were even satirized on Saturday Night Live, famous satirical show in the US.

The skit featured Adam Sandler, David Spade and Chris Farley as Gap girls.

Don and Doris thought this was great.

They thought it was the ultimate compliment.

And a New York Times article from the 90s said this about the gap.

As ubiquitous as McDonald's, as centrally managed as the former Soviet Union, and as American as Mickey Mouse, the Gap Inc.

has he covered from the cradle to the grave.

I've got a feeling that the seeds of the demise of the gap are being sown with editorials like that, because when you go on the cover of the 100th anniversary of Vogue and everyone's wearing your stuff, the only way is down.

But they didn't rest on their laurels.

In 1994, they founded a new startup brand selling lower-priced clothes to compete with the popularity of the rise of discount stores, things like TK Max, TJ Maxx in the US.

Now, this was actually Mickey's idea, and it was originally called Gap Warehouse, but Don was concerned it would negatively impact the profit margins of the Gap.

Yeah, why would you go to the Gap when you can get the cheaper stuff at Gap Warehouse?

So, they changed the name of it.

To distinguish it from that, they changed the name to Old Navy, apparently after a bar Mickey had seen in Paris.

And Mickey's bet was right.

Old Navy was the first retailer to make a billion dollars in under four years.

And within 10 years, Old Navy had a staggering 800 stores.

And perhaps because of the success of Old Navy, in 1995, Mickey took over from Don Fisher as chief executive of Gap Inc., with Don remaining as president.

And by the end of the decade, Gap Inc.'s net profit was over $1 billion.

So Doris and Don's wealth was now listed separately by Forbes.

They were each worth $4.3 billion, making them the joint 92nd richest people in the world.

So they're sitting pretty on the billionaire list, but fashion really is a cruel mistress because the Gap was about to go go out of fashion it had been founded on rebellious youth culture during the summer of love but it was now seen as a corporate giant it was known for blandness ubiquitous consumerism basically boring basically boring bland and tasteless so actually if you watched the popular gen x film reality bites with winona rider it actually portrayed working at the gap as the ultimate sellout job and in the 90s there was no bigger insult than saying you were a sellout yeah even joey the character in Friends, was disgusted when he sees Ross sporting the same Gap shirt as him in a 2004 episode of Friends, and he moans, stupid gap on every corner.

So it turns out that actually having hundreds of stores and being that ubiquitous in fashion at least works against you.

It ultimately always does.

There's always going to be something new and the people first to fall are the edifices, right?

Exactly.

So if you want to stay popular, you have to continuously reinvent yourself to stay relevant.

And, you know, Gap at this point hasn't really expanded its offering or made any interesting pivots into anything else that is why I think partly it began its descent yeah and also at this time they were also getting some bad press over the conditions of workers making their clothes in developing countries including the use of child labour now we should say the company responded over the next few years by putting in place systems to eliminate such practices although it won't be the first or last time they're found to have used child labour or the only company to have had those problems it's been a widespread problem in the clothing industry but unfortunately the damage had been done the gap was seen as a symbol of consumerism and the damaging effects of globalization.

And that showed up in the profits.

They started to plummet.

From 1 billion in 1999, it made 875 million in 2000 and just 475 million, so half of that in 2002.

All this meant that Mickey was replaced as CEO in 2002.

The board said he stepped down, but Mickey has repeatedly said that he was fired.

He said, Don and I would both agree that it didn't end pretty, but we had a hell of a run together building a really great company.

But it was the end of an era.

That dynamic threesome of Don, Doris, and Mickey that had proved so successful was now over.

Now, don't feel too sad for Mickey because he went on to become the chairman and CEO of J.Crew, another big American retail giant.

And he kept his colorful character there.

He got a tannoy system installed in the office to blast his comms out to staff a dozen times a day, which included musings on sales, moccasins, lady gaga, and the weather.

I bet the staff loved that.

Back to the Fishers, though.

In 2003, Doris stepped down as chief merchandiser, aged 72,

and a year later, Don stepped down as chairman, age 76, to be succeeded by their son, Bob.

And Don and Doris also transferred control of half of the 19% stake in the company to their three sons.

Both Doris and Don remained members of the board and never missed a board meeting until.

Unfortunately, in 2009, Doris lost Don.

He died at home in San Francisco from cancer at the age of 81.

At that time, sales at Gap were down, but they were still a staggering $15 billion.

They employed more than 134,000 people in over 3,000 stores across 25 countries.

Quite the thing.

And earlier that year, Forbes had still listed the Fisher family on their rich list as being worth $4.9 billion.

Well, since then, a lot of people listening will know the story.

Gap struggles on, but it never returned to the heights of its 1990s heyday.

In 2019, the Fisher family lost a billion dollars in under a year as Gap Inc.

stock plummeted.

Doris, by the way, still owns 6.1% and her sons have just under 30%.

Yeah, so

what happened to Gap then?

We've talked a little bit about how they became a symbol of globalism, consumerism, exploitation, just boringness.

And as always in fashion, the competition never sits still.

Yep, there was just simply too much competition from other cheap, casual clothing lines.

You know, we think about companies like Indertex, which own Zara, H ⁇ M.

You know, you've also got the rise of supermarket clothing brands.

In the UK, for instance, we've got supermarkets like Asda creating their own fashion.

Yeah, and you've also got, of course, the likes of ASOS and what have you, the crushing rise of online retail.

Yes, and the rise of, don't forget, fast fashion, which continuously pumps out new lines of clothing and new styles.

Yeah.

Now, in spite of the fall of the gap, the house of gap, the Fisher family itself are still all billionaires.

So together, Doris's three sons are worth $6.1 billion.

And Doris, aged 93 on her own, is worth $1.5 billion.

And she still serves as honorary lifetime director on the board of Gap Inc.

at 93 years old.

So a woman whose life has spanned the summer of love to the power decade of the 80s to the 90s to now and still a billionaire.

Incredible, really.

And actually, what was interesting is that they were quite a bit older than their target market throughout.

And she's still on the board at 93.

So got staying power.

You've got to give her that.

Yeah, even though the fall from grace has been pretty steep, if you're able to sell to people half your age in fashion, I mean, we've got to give her props for that.

So let us judge 93-year-old Doris Fisher worth $1.5 billion.

We have a number of categories, as people familiar with the podcast will know, and we start out with just absolute wealth.

And this is not just how much you've got, but how you spent it in your life.

So together with her husband, Doris has amassed one of the world's leading private collections of contemporary art worth around $1 billion.

Some of it you can actually see at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Yeah, but they both had a great interest in art.

They made a pact from the outset that all the pieces they bought had to be mutually agreed.

I just love that.

Can you imagine being the salesperson for like a, I don't know, $10 million piece of art?

You got Don on board, but Doris isn't convinced, or Doris is on board, but Don's not convinced.

You're saying, please, please agree.

Please, my commission depends on it.

Exactly.

Since the death of Don, Doris has almost completely stopped buying art, maybe maybe because she couldn't get his agreements.

Rather sad story.

So how would you judge her based on wealth?

I'm going to give her a four

because she's not a one and a half billion on her own, 6.3 billion with her family.

She's nowhere near the top of the tree, but amassing a $1 billion art collection is a pretty wealthy kind of thing to do.

So I'm going to give her a four.

I think I'll give her slightly less new actually.

I think I'll give her a three out of ten.

She reminds me a lot in some ways of do you remember Muchaprada?

Yes.

Who has also collected a vast collection of art but has also started exhibiting it to the public.

Okay, you're three, I'm four.

Rags to riches, this is how far have they come from their either humble or not so humble beginnings to be featured on our podcast?

Well, I think if your parents' marriage is announced in the society pages of the New York Times.

And it's held at the Ritz-Carlton, one of the glitziest hotel chains in the world.

I don't think you've got a very good claim to saying you've got a rags to riches journey.

He's a Republican state legislator, so you know well placed in powerful circles.

She was really well educated.

She went to Stanford at a time when not a lot of women were going to university in the first place.

I think what we've proved on this podcast is that going to Stanford or getting in and then dropping out is literally a license to print money.

Well, if you're an A-level student or an 18-year-old wondering where to go to university and you want to make a lot of money, think about Stanford.

Spoiler alert, it cost about $100,000 a year to go there.

So I think Doris would probably be well placed to afford that given that she didn't have a particularly working-class background.

Fine, so Ragster rich is low.

I would say she'd get pretty rich, but she's not like hundreds of billions like some of ours.

So I'm going to give her a

four.

Yeah, I would think I'll give her a four out of ten as well.

Okay.

Villainy.

What have they done to get to the top?

Who have they done over?

What sharp moves have they made?

Well, some of the stories that have come out around workers' conditions for the gap in their outsourced factories are really bad.

So in 1999, the Independent newspaper reported Chinese workers making GAP clothing were forced to have abortions.

In 2000, the BBC Panorama program uncovered sweatshop working conditions and child labor at textiles factories in Cambodia.

And in 2004, GAP released its first social responsibility report and admitted to widespread problems, including child labor violations and unsafe machinery in factories it used around the world.

So the GAP responded to some of these discoveries, these exposés, by terminating contracts with scores of factories.

But in 2007, the Observer filmed a 10-year-old boy making GAP clothes who said he'd been working for four months without pay, while another 12-year-old boy said he was beaten if bosses thought they were not working hard enough.

And at the time, a GAP spokesperson said, We have a strict prohibition on child labour and we are taking this very seriously.

Now, there's no defence to this, but it should be noted that lots of clothing manufacturers have had similar problems in basically ironing out or being vigilant enough or auditing sufficiently their supply chain because often they'll have contracts with independent contractors in countries where they have got very little oversight and visibility.

That generally is improving through the industry, but the gap is not alone in having these problems.

No, so how should we judge them for this kind of oversight?

Like you say, a lot of clothing companies fall foul of this as well.

Yeah.

I think they are probably middle of the pack when it comes to oversight of this.

There are worse examples.

A Primot Factory, for example, collapsed, killing dozens of Bangladeshi workers.

So I think they're middle of the pack in this area.

On villainy, the other things we talk about of villainy are what did they do to

their colleagues, their business partners.

And on the colleagues and business partners, there's nothing outstanding, it seems to me, from their story that they were particularly ruthless or villainous.

No, I mean, the person you'd look at is how they treated Mickey Bowen.

He still seemed, even though he said he'd been fired, to have looked back on his time at the Gap relatively fondly.

I got the feeling that in the end, there were no hard feelings there.

We had a good run, we clashed a few times, it didn't end very well, but that's life.

I think also the gap maybe, when we look back on all of this, maybe one of the first brands to be considered part of the fast fashion wave.

So, you know, that trend of cheap, accessible clothing.

You can buy a white t-shirt and you can buy another one a week later because it's so cheap.

It's funny, I don't associate gap with fast fashion.

I associate them with kind of basics you don't have to replace because they're so plain, they're so ubiquitous.

They're the kind of basics that you just have in your wardrobe like a t-shirt, which actually lasts quite a long time.

That's interesting.

Maybe this is the generation gap, the gap spotted in the market.

Gap squared.

Yeah.

Inception gap.

Okay, so villainy, I'm going to say, I'm going to go less than average, I would say, on this one.

So I'm going to go,

I'm going to for a three.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

I'm going to go for a six out of ten, actually.

Wow, this is a big divergence.

Yeah.

The biggest divergence of opinion we've almost ever had that could begin the generation Gap.

Exactly.

Philanthropy.

So how much have they given away?

What have they done for society and communities in which they work?

So they started the Gap Foundation in 1977, the year after Gap went public.

At the time of Don's death, it's actually donated more than $100 million to various causes.

They're interested in education.

Doris and Don used quite a lot of their wealth and resources supporting U.S.

charter schools, which are schools that are publicly funded but independently run.

And they've donated $100 million of their own money to that.

Now it's worth noting that charter schools are also the subject of quite a lot of criticism.

So in the past they've denied enrolment to low-performing and other potentially

inverted commerce undesirable students.

They've also suspended African-American and disabled students at higher rates than traditional schools.

So what credit you give them for their donations to charter charter schools will depend very heavily on what you think of charter schools.

But, philanthropy is clearly important to Doris.

She said, Some people my age play bridge all day, but I love the work I do in our communities.

I love being able to help people who have fewer opportunities.

My family and our employers are that way too.

It makes me proud to see and hear about the things they do to help other people.

Tricky one.

Tricky one, this.

I feel like I'm tempted to go straight down the middle and give them a five out of ten for this.

I'm going to go lower than that.

I think one of the things that offends me is people who spend

things on their own pet projects.

You know, for example, Charter Schools is a pet project, which not everyone agrees with.

So they get no marks of that for me.

That leaves $100 million to various courses from the Gap Foundation.

And also, when you compare that to the $1.1 billion they spent on their own art collection,

they get a three from me.

That is very true, actually.

I think maybe for the first time, you're going to convince me to go down to three.

Yes.

I finally convinced you rather than the other way around.

This is a first.

So now we come to power.

How much power does Doris Fisher and Don, when he was alive, wield?

Well,

they're both Republicans and prominent political donors.

They were financial backers of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and President George W.

Bush.

But they also donate across the political divide.

They've donated to Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein and the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I just love the way rich people do that in America.

They back both horses in the race.

Yeah, they spread their bets.

They hedge the bets.

Well, Forbes also reported that Doris was among 20 billionaires who who were part of a dark money group in Inverted Commons that opposed Barack Obama's election campaign in 2012.

Along with her sons, she donated nearly $9 million to the group called Americans for Job Security.

So she's in the weeds.

You know, she's in there in the political circles.

I wouldn't say that she's a particularly powerful figure.

No, because I guess you have to put it into a context of the fact that political donors in America are spending silly amounts of money.

Millions, billions.

Everyone who's rich in America, pretty much, is a political donor.

Everyone.

And she's nowhere near the level of other billionaires we've covered, like Sam Bankman Fried, who was donating way more than that, millions and millions to the Democrats.

Or Elon Musk, who said he was going to, for example, to bring it right up to date, was going to give $50 million a month to President Trump's re-election campaign.

So not in that category at all.

And obviously he doesn't also own a global website where you can publish your own opinions.

If Doris tried to call the White House right now, they would say, Are you calling for give me fashion advice?

I think they'd say, please hold the line, we'll get back to you.

Yeah, I think Power, I would give them a two.

Yeah, I think Power Chiefs would score, unfortunately, quite lowly, so two out of ten.

But not legacy.

I think the Gap is quite an interesting story, right?

It's right up there.

It really is.

And I think in the 90s, at least, you could say that the Gap was one of those all-American brands that were completely ubiquitous.

You know, brands like, you would now say things like Apple, Google, Levi's,

McDonald's.

At the time, Gap was right up there.

Yeah, and it was a cultural export to the rest of the world as well.

There was, you know, what does America look like?

And when you said, what does America look like?

It looked a bit like the Gap.

It looked a bit like the Gap campaigns of happy, smiling, multicultural families wearing colorful clothing on a white background.

I mean, you can basically see the campaigns.

I can see that campaign in my mind's eye, and that's quite a powerful legacy.

So I would score them high on legacy.

Also, a sanitary tale about how when you become too big and too ubiquitous and too kind of all-encompassing when it comes to fashion you've got a massive target on your back as well it's interesting that fashion is one of those few industries where the phrase too big to fail doesn't come in that's really interesting it's not like google for example you know breaking google stranglehold on search engines has proved almost impossible we'll see whether chat gpt can do that but bringing down a fashion giant like gap and saying that that's not trendy that can happen overnight almost and it's interesting to think that other billionaires we've covered like bernard and all are in fashion but the reason why they've become so rich is because they've kind of spread their risk across several different massive clothing brands.

Bernard Arnaud and his empire is a house of brands rather than the brand in itself.

So the gap in terms of legacy I think is a really interesting one.

I would actually score it really highly.

I'd say even an eight, nine out of three.

I'm going to go eight, definitely.

So finally, we come to the ultimate judgment.

Is Doris Fisher good, bad, or just another billionaire?

This one's pretty easy for me.

She's just another billionaire.

You know, there's nothing particularly good about the story.

There's nothing particularly bad about the story, about her.

It's interesting that she clothed America and gave us a vision of what America looked like, and that eventually was bound to crumble at some point.

But I don't think I can put her in the good or bad category.

She's just got a very nice art collection, and she is just another billionaire.

I'm going to agree with you.

For me, she's just another billionaire.

I mean, maybe the corporate blandness of Gap has kind of seeped into my judgment.

So, do you you find that almost offensive?

I think that, and maybe this is very much a product of being in the 21st century.

I think that there's no longer a way that any one company can dominate the visual aesthetic of a generation in the same way that Gap has done.

I think that, you know, even Levi's have had to innovate and change their image repeatedly and continuously, and Gap never managed to do that.

So, for me, she is just another billionaire.

Okay, that was a fascinating critique of, what did you say, never dominate the aesthetic of a generation ever ever again?

Watch this space.

Maybe there's another, yeah, maybe another gap will appear in the market.

And for our last of the current series, good, bad millionaires, sad times, who are we going to end with?

We've got none other than the man who has been called the dungeon master for reasons that will become very clear in the episode.

For me, one of the smartest, most odd people I've ever interviewed.

His fingerprints are all over some of the biggest tech companies that we've discussed.

His story links him with many others, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Oh yes, right.

It is Peter Teal, angel investor in Facebook, seemingly an enemy of government democracy, but also has some lucrative contracts with them too.

Good, Bad Billionaire was produced by Hannah Hufford and Louise Morris with additional production support from Emma Betteridge.

James Cook is the editor and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, the podcast commissioning editor is John Minel.

Want to to stop engine problems before they start?

Pick up a can of C-Foam Motor Treatment.

SeaFoam helps engines start easier, run smoother, and last longer.

Trusted by millions every day, C-Foam is safe and easy to use in any engine.

Just pour it in your fuel tank.

Make the proven choice with C-Foam.

Available everywhere.

Automotive products are sold.

Seafoam!