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JC: It seems like the Naito family has been blessed with the Midas touch. That everything that you started was very successful. Is that true or were there things that were difficult that weren't so successful?

SN: Oh, yeah. There were some things that weren't successful. I would say that, that this building here was a very tough building to rent. It was, you know, very expensive, very expensive. McCormick Pier Apartments, we didn't really make any money for it the first ten years. For some reason or another, it just didn't come, overrun cost was way over. Our Norcrest wholesale business became very, very competitive, so our business there has slowed down there. We don't, it's a shadow of what we used to do around the country. That's because the economic situation changes. When you are selling to lots and lots of small stores, corner drug stores, the hardware stores, little gift shops in all these smaller towns and so on, they've all disappeared because when the big box stores like Walmart, Target and all those stores came in, they just crushed all those small stores, the mom and pop stores and so on. And so the Norcrest business can't survive without some chain store. We'd sell certain line of things to Fred Meyer right now, for example, but we used to sell to big chains of 2000, 3000 store chains, you know. Some of those stores have gone in the wayside like K-mart is doing, and so, you see, things change very rapidly in the mercantile business. It's a very, very difficult thing. But there's so many, we tried other things. I can remember we thought that a candy shop would be great. We opened up a small candy shop in Lloyd Center, but it didn't go, unit sales were too small. We couldn't sell, we were selling jelly beans, jelly beans made famous by Ronald Reagan. So we were selling that, but you know, the total amount was too small and we had, we opened up different kinds of concepts, some good. We have to do that, otherwise, you can't...

JC: You had big ideas that were very successful, obviously. What's your connection with Dr. Martens shoes?

SN: Oh, Dr. Marten shoes. This man had a shoe store in Galleria and had that connection with us. And then he found this Dr. Marten shoes with another partner that he had to put, to sell Dr. Marten shoes in mainstream through a connection that he had in Nordstrom. And so he started, but we couldn't buy, we couldn't import Dr. Marten shoes directly. Of course, one thing is they needed financing, so we gave them the financing. So you went to the gray market and bought Dr. Marten shoes in the gray market and brought it in and sold it to Nordstrom, and it was just very hot at that time, and then made a contract with, finally the factory decided to make a contract with us and made us exclusive. And when they did that, there was another company that was importing Dr. Martens in Los Angeles, and we had a lawsuit because they were unhappy, so is, one thing's another. But the Dr. Marten shoes people were very happy to have us do it. What they were doing well, I didn't have direct, my brother and my nephew were the ones who were running the Dr. Marten shoe business mainly. But the problem was that, at that time the demand exceeded the supply, and it was very hot, you see. But we learned, you know, dealing with people like Nordstrom who takes back anything and gives you refund, kept on sending back all these worn out Dr. Marten shoes and deducting it, typical department store tactic. That's why we don't like to do business with department stores. Department stores will take back anything willingly, and then they send it back, send it back for credit, but it was good for a couple years for us. And then there was a contract in which, we had to sign a contract in which after two years that they would take the business back, so Dr. Marten took the business back. That was the end. That was not very good, after we built up the business for them with our contacts, with Nordstroms, with Meier and Frank, and Bloomingdales and all those people.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.