Wunderkind Holiday Speech 2022

It was more than a year ago, at our opening dinner, that I talked about the core value of pride. Pride in what we do, pride in having what I hoped would become the best damn store in the state, pride in seeing everyone succeed together. And you have more than lived up to that core value. What I see on a daily basis is simply astounding. I am so proud of Philip and of each of you. They don’t have enough Best of Scottsdale categories to capture the extraordinary environment that you have created.

But, to celebrate this first year, I want to talk about how proud someone else would be, someone that, in this crowd, only Philip has met: Pop. Pop, my grandfather—Mimi’s husband, for those of you that met my wonderful grandma a few weeks ago—had a name (Jerry), but for basically all of my life, everyone around me called him Pop, because, well, he was just a Pop. His hair went fully white in his 30s—he looked kind of like Giorgio Armani or Ralph Lauren—he had his first grandkid (me) when he was only 49, and he ended up with 13 grandchildren and even a few great-grandkids before he died in 2019, so everywhere he went, he was just Pop. And it’s important we do right by Pop, even though he’s not here any more, not just because I loved him, and he was a huge influence on our whole family, but because, in a very real way, Wunderkind is actually his store. Let me tell you why.

Pop started out in the retail business, but in a very different way than our beautiful, luxurious store. He graduated from pharmacy school after failing out once and redoing a year, and eventually he opened what became the first ever discount pharmacy in the whole state of New Jersey. He loved the little tricks of the trade in retail. Back then, you couldn’t open a pharmacy without a pharmacist on site, so he’d pretend his dad was a pharmacist so he could stay open seven days a week. He would learn enough about his customers so he’d feel comfortable letting them charge to house accounts before credit cards were popular. And then there was a trick particularly appropriate for this crowd: he used to save the little free perfume samples he’d get from Chanel or Dior during the year, and then, unbeknownst to his reps, sell them in the store during the holidays to customers as stocking stuffers. Since he got the little sample bottles for free, his margins were 100% on those items. Brilliant. Philip—let’s discuss.

He built that pharmacy business up and sold it, and then he was in a few other businesses like banking, travel, and real estate. He earned and saved enough money to leave a nest egg to each of his grandchildren. He also left us the lessons, the values that he learned in business. Don’t be afraid to bet on yourself. Love what you do. And always do right by your customers and your colleagues. 

So Philip and I took that little nest egg and those lessons and we…well, first we bought a house. Yes, we used the money from Pop to buy a house we loved in California, but I think we always sensed that Pop didn’t necessarily want the money he left us to be just a house. So, a year later, we sold that house, and we put every dime of it into Wunderkind. Pop had been gone for more than two years when we opened, but the money he made bought us the chandeliers and the wallpaper, the furniture and the fixtures, plus the dresses, the shoes, the jewelry that you all do such an amazing job ordering, inventorying, marketing, selling. Pop even bought us the Toto toilet, which, by the way, he would have been thrilled about: one day about ten years ago, when he was out of the office for a while, my Dad and Uncle secretly had a Toto installed in Pop’s office bathroom, and boy did he love it. I’m glad we have one too. Just in case anyone else’s Pop comes in and needs to use the john.

Now let me go back to pride: Pop would have been so proud of the business we’ve built in only a year. He sometimes pronounced the word “beautiful” as “beaut-ee-ful,” and that’s the first thing he would have said when he walked in. He was not into fashion or fancy things at all—he actually bought most of his wardrobe at Costco (the man loved a Kirkland-brand black t-shirt)—but he knew a great store when he saw it, and he would have loved this one.

More importantly, he would have loved you all and the experience you create. He would have loved that people spend so much time at the store, that customers come back again and again—those are the kind of businesses he built. And he would have loved how fantastically everyone works together. You see, Pop didn’t have hobbies, he didn’t collect anything, he didn’t golf or swim or smoke cigars or drive fast cars or drink fine wine: he honestly just loved working in small businesses, with people he liked, having fun, doing things the right way. So even though in some superficial respects Wunderkind is the opposite of Save-Way, the discount pharmacy he started a lifetime ago, in terms of values, it’s a continuation of what he was about, of his legacy. 

I didn’t tell you anything about Pop before, because of course it would have been far too much pressure. Think about it: my grandfather grew up with not much money, and he worked his whole life to earn enough to give me this incredible gift. And then Philip wakes up one day and says to me “I want to open a store in Scottsdale,” so we sell the house we bought with Pop’s money and pour it into a retail store in a city we’d never lived in, in a place that hasn’t had a store like this in decades, and we convince ourselves we’ll find a staff crazy enough to leave their jobs and come to work at our kitchen table on the promise that, trust us, one day, this can be great. If, with all that, I had also said: oh, and by the way, to do all this, we’re using the money that my grandfather worked his whole life for, and he was like maybe my favorite person ever, so don’t fuck this up—then, well, if I had applied that pressure too, I probably would have just stayed in bed, whimpering, wondering what in the world we’ve done and how this could possibly work out.

Of course, that’s not what happened. You all have made me so proud; being a small part of this adventure has made me so proud; seeing Philip work his ass off to make Wunderkind succeed has made me so proud. But the best part is: wherever Pop is, you’ve made him really proud too. You never met him, but you’ve already done right by him. And for that, there truly is no way I can ever thank you.

So: enjoy tonight. Enjoy the holidays. And keep up the great work, because we’ve got really big things ahead. Pop would think so too.