Walter Hoving - Tiffany & Company

Tiffany & Company

In 1955 he bought control of Tiffany's, which was on the brink of going out of business. He started his regime by getting rid of everything in the store that did not meet his standards, holding a giant sale - the first in the store's history -of everything from silver matchbook covers at $6.75 to a diamond and emerald brooch marked down to $29,700.

Under his guidance, the faltering store reacquired its cachet and a new popularity - Tiffany's salesclerks were under orders to treat everyone, even the most obvious browser, as a potential customer - until by Christmas 1980, its aisles were jammed with shoppers.

Hoving took control of a somewhat stodgy Tiffany's in 1955 and, with his fine eye for quality, gave the store its special stamp. Good design meant good business and Tiffany's sales grew to $100 million from $6 million under Hoving. Hoving initiated the idea of good quality, said Labarr Hoagland, who retired from Tiffany as executive vice president. Before, you felt you had to have a million dollars to come into the store. But Hoving introduced mass merchandising, not in the ordinary sense, but in the sense of affordable and good quality.

One of the first things he did when he arrived was to hire a Design Director, Van Day Truex. He told him Design what you think is beautiful, don't worry about selling it. That's our job. His conviction of the correctness of his taste allowed him to give great freedom to designers he continued to add to the stores roster, like Jean Schlumberger, Angela Cummings or Elsa Peretti, and a "window dresser" from Bonwit Tellers, Gene Moore, who designed Tiffany's now world famous eye-catching Fifth Avenue windows windows.

No item was too small to escape his notice. No cellophane tape, he decreed, was to be used in gift-wrapping boxes with that special Tiffany Blue paper, and there were to be no knots securing the white bows.

His concept of "esthetic excitement" was supremely important to him, and he was able to make it sell. Give the customer what Tiffany likes, because what it likes, the public ought to like was his motto. His skill was knowing that a well designed product would be attractive to consumers in somehow making the public want to like it, and pay for it.

A tall and distinguished-looking man, always impeccably tailored, Hoving was not hesitant about expressing his tastes outside the store. He won the battle against a plan to put a cafe in a corner of Central Park, and he lost the fight against making Fifth Avenue one-way.

Hoving resolutely maintained Tiffany's and his standards, which included no diamond rings for men, no silver plate and no charge accounts for customers found being rude to the salespeople. His firmness in matters of taste took Tiffany's from $7 million worth of business in 1955 to $100 million for the Fifth Avenue store and its five branches in 1980, when he stepped down as chairman.

The only exception to the no-silver-plate rule during Hoving's tenure at Tiffany's - small pins with the message, Try God - illuminated another facet of Hoving's character: his conviction that he was guided by God during his entire career. Hoving was a deeply religious man who had long been actively involved in charitable work. All the proceeds went to the Walter Hoving Home headquartered in Garrison, New York. The Walter Hoving Home is a non-profit, faith-based rehabilitation center serving women 18 years and older who have been involved in drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution and other life-controlling problems.