Published: January 12, 2013

Today, Banana Republic stores are fixtures in shopping malls across America — meccas of office-appropriate trousers, Oxford shirts and pencil skirts. But in 1978, there was only one Banana Republic shop, located in Mill Valley, Calif., just north of San Francisco. It had two employees, its husband-and-wife founders. The store was unheated, and some days most of its foot traffic came from aikido students using it as a hallway to get to the martial arts school upstairs. Back then, instead of classic styles, Banana Republic’s shelves were full of military surplus clothing that had been nipped, cinched and restyled to have an air of hipster cool.

“Wild Company,” a memoir by the store’s founders, Mel and Patricia Ziegler, tells how the two former journalists with no business experience parlayed a homespun idea for safari-inspired clothing into a multibillion-dollar business. Even though the reader knows that the venture will ultimately succeed, the Zieglers’ account of the early days is still absorbing because it is so hard to imagine how they will climb out of some major financial and conceptual holes. Read more…