Gary Friedman, the co-CEO of Corte Madera-based Restoration Hardware, is taking some time off after an internal probe at the upscale furniture retailer showed he was involved with a 26-year-old female employee. To the 54-year-old Friedman’s credit, he offered the company board his resignation right after the relationship came to light. (The New York Times first reported the relationship between Friedman and the employee was consensual and that she has left the company.)
“Resto,” as employees call it, which filed to go public through an IPO in September 2011, is concerned that the image of its CEO’s involvement with an employee could spook investors, considering the company’s stock in a marketplace with less stability than a Melkey Cabrera drug test. And management is dead serious about getting the company ship shape for the IPO. The company hired the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges to head up the investigation. It’s the same firm that aided National Public Radio in its probe of the firing of commentator Juan Williams last year.
The company has done its best to get past the CEO dating crisis, introducing Friedman’s resignation as part of a corporate restructuring. Friedman becomes the founder and CEO of a new company, Hierarchy, which Friedman controls, and in which Resto has a minority position. Hierarchy is designed to incubate new lines of business to support Restoration Hardware. In turn, Restoration Hardware will have the option to acquire any of the businesses should they become profitable. Among the new undertakings for Hierarchy will be lines of shoes, jewelry, clothing and accessories.
Next, Resto’s other co-CEO, Carlos Alberini, will go solo, heading up the furniture company. But wait, there’s more: Friedman remains the largest shareholder of the company and will serve as both non-director adviser to Resto and chairman emeritus. According to the company’s statement, Friedman will also “serve as creator and curator for Restoration Hardware with a focus on strategy, creative and design direction.”
So to review, Friedman is non-director adviser, chairman emeritus, creator and curator and largest stockholder for Resto, and he’s CEO of Hierarchy. If he’d been that busy before, it’s a pretty fair bet he wouldn’t have had time to fish off the company dock—and it wouldn’t be stretching like a Bikram yoga instructor to assure investors its IPO is all good.
Resto went public in 1998 in an IPO that raised $47.8 million. In 2008, the company was taken private by Catterton Partners in a transaction that valued it at $179 million. Tower Three Partners, another private equity firm, is also an investor.
Chick-fil-A tries not to lay an egg in Marin
And now, from the Atlanta-based company that told the Baptist Press in July that it was “guilty as charged” because its fast food outlets supported “the biblical definition of family,” comes word that Chick-fil-A will open in Novato.
Chick-fil-A’s president, Dan Cathy, unsure which foot might taste better, added, “I think we’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.”
Cathy’s remarks drew fire from folks who believe two people in love should be allowed to marry regardless of whether they’re the same sex. On the other side, social conservatives applauded Cathy’s viewpoint.
After running into a buzz saw of public opinion, the company decided the best way to sell America fried chicken was to leave social policy alone. Hence this quote on the company website: “From the day Truett Cathy started the company, he began applying biblically based principles to managing his business.…Going forward, our intent is to leave the policy debate over same-sex marriage to the government and the political arena.”
The company paid $2.7 million for the parcel where Carl’s Jr. is now located on Rowland Avenue. Chick-fil-A doesn’t plan to open its new restaurant for a year or two.
Straus’ new product is Greek to me
Straus Family Creamery, which got its start in the charming hamlet of Marshall, has rolled out its version of organic Greek yogurt. While yogurt isn’t my thing, I can say it’s a pretty good summertime treat.
The yogurt joins Straus’ lineup of organic milk, butter, ice cream and sour cream chilling out in refrigerated sections of supermarkets up and down the West Coast.
As for a possible new location for the company’s effort to consolidate its facilities, the search is ongoing according, to spokeswoman Helen Lentze.
Your Marin moment
About 40 students from San Rafael’s Sun Valley Elementary School’s “Kids That Care” have learned an interesting lesson in business, thanks to their idea about felt-tip pens and recycling. The group reached out to Crayola Co. in Easton, Pa., through Change.org and told the company officials they should begin a recycling program for worn-out markers, and turned over petitions with 80,000 signatures of folks who agreed with them.
But Crayola company officials told the kids they couldn’t make it happen. And the kids thought that was that.
But Dixon Ticonderoga, a company famed for making old-fashioned pencils, heard about the Mill Valley students and their recycling efforts. And the Heathrow, Fla., company, recognizing a positive public relations opportunity when it drops in its lap, put its own recycling program together for its Prang Art Markers. In a press release about the new program, CEO Timothy Gomez said, “This shows that even one classroom can change the way a global company does business.”
The school picked up a year’s supply of free art markers on Dixon Ticonderoga, and the kids learned that not all companies are powered by a bottom line…and some like a little positive PR.
