It was 1983, and Don Fisher knew something was wrong. His company – Gap Inc. – recently surpassed sales and earnings records, recording the highest figures in the company’s 14-year history. In theory, Fisher should have been pleased, but when he walked into his stores, he saw chaos. Yellow-labeled sales signs were scattered everywhere; advertising methods seemed cheap, accentuating the discounts more than the quality did.
Fisher wanted to run an elegant, full-priced business, not a shopping cart that found success because of its low prices and could see long-term writing on the wall. This was not a sustainable way to run a company. It was profitable, but it lacked something.
“Making money is one thing,” he said in his memoirs, “Falling Empty,” “but you have to be proud of what you do. At this point, I was very frustrated and not very proud.