No one stopped buying I.B.M. because Tom Watson wasn't there, but they stopped buying Elizabeth Arden because she wasn't there.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I did not sell Amway, but I sold Shaklee, which was an Amway-type product sold through multi-level marketing.
When I arrived at Campbell on January 8, 2001, the company had lost half its market value in the prior year. They had to cut costs to the point where they were literally taking the chicken out of chicken noodle soup and the product was no longer competitive.
Gone are the days when Virgin Records was owned by Richard Branson, a fan of music. Now they're all owned by some guy who bought it off some guy who bought it off some guy who wants a return on his investment.
A lot of the American press at the time was saying 'just watch what happens when Bertelsmann tries to buy EMI, that will be a moment of truth that will show the Commission's true colors.' Well, that deal never happened either.
My books didn't fit a marketing niche.
I didn't buy Bentleys. I didn't live large. I invested in me. I invested in a lot of other people.
I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water.
Hardly anyone liked R.E.M. who didn't like them way too much, so part of being an R.E.M. fan meant getting wildly overinvested and then feeling vaguely disappointed by whatever they did next.
When we bought it, Spiegel was in a difficult situation; it made a loss at that time. We invested in it and then it turned around, and then we bought Eddie Bauer and Newport News.
Well all the big companies are really panicked by the internet thing and all that, and sales went down, although sales have gone up again in this country a bit and also the big companies, because they're so big, they need big sales really so they're not really interested.