The packing material was good enough to sell from. In 1962, Gordon and Carole Segal had European housewares, a rented space in an old Chicago elevator factory and very little money left for the niceties of retail. So the crates and barrels stayed. They held the goods, furnished the shop and supplied the name. The business would eventually sell furniture. For the moment, its own furniture had arrived free with the dishes.
There is something pleasing about a company named for the practical problem its founders had to solve. Crate & Barrel sounds considered, almost architectural. At the beginning, it also described the available equipment. Gordon Segal’s career grew around that meeting of taste and necessity: find something worth having, buy it intelligently and help another person see where it belongs.
The shop was still in its packaging
The first shop occupied about 1,700 square feet in Old Town. The startup money was $17,000. Its proposition came from an observation the newlyweds had made while traveling: European tableware could be attractive, useful and reasonably priced. Why was so little of it available to people setting up homes in Chicago?
The Caribbean honeymoon mattered because it supplied an explanation. A shopkeeper told them about buying directly from European factories. The distance between a good object and an affordable price could be shortened by changing the route it took. Gordon had already traveled in Europe and noticed its cookware, glass and ceramics. Carole shared the interest and the appetite to try something of their own.
They bought abroad, brought the merchandise home and discovered that enthusiasm was easier to acquire than retail experience. Segal later recalled selling some early goods below cost because invoices had yet to arrive. The shelves might have been improvised, but the arithmetic still expected professional attention. An attractive plate has many virtues; immunity from a bad margin is rarely among them.
An education in paying attention
Segal’s preparation had begun in his father’s restaurant in Chicago’s Loop, where he and his sister worked after school and on weekends. His mother taught school and kept the restaurant’s books at home. Service and accounting shared the family’s evenings. A customer’s experience had a human side and a numerical one; both required somebody to notice what was happening.
He spent a year at Wharton before transferring to Northwestern, graduating in 1960 with a Bachelor of Commerce. He remembered being more interested in history, political science and international affairs than in business classes. That curiosity suited a future buyer. Before he could select things from elsewhere, he wanted to know something about elsewhere.
He and Carole met at lunch in the student union. Travel and a spell working in New York interrupted their proximity, and letters kept the connection going. They married in 1961. By then, his experiment with restaurant management at the Four Seasons had brought him back to Chicago, where real estate failed to hold his interest.
The shop gave them work they could shape. Both sold, swept floors and cleaned windows. Gordon credited Carole’s ability to arrange displays. Remembering the long opening hours, he described days that stretched into late Friday and Saturday evenings. A shop’s atmosphere may appear effortless to a visitor. For its owners, somebody still has to clean the glass.
Please touch the merchandise
Years later, when asked to condense his business thinking into a page, Segal began with a declaration: “I’m a store person.” His pleasure was specific. He liked abundant stacks of shining glasses and displays that invited customers to feel a bowl’s weight or run their fingers across a blanket. The merchandise needed to be encountered.
His theater analogy followed naturally. A store supplied the stage, its products the script, its employees the actors and its customers the audience. Lighting, music and arrangement helped the performance. The comparison gives selling a social purpose: someone has to make the object’s usefulness apparent to the person considering it.
“I’m a store person.”
Gordon Segal, 2014
He liked employing people who had worked in restaurants or onstage. Teachers also appealed to him because they could explain things; three senior executives had come from teaching. It is an unusually revealing hiring preference. Knowing the stock matters, but so does recognizing a puzzled face and finding a way to help.
The price belonged in this experience too. Speaking to business students in 2009, he treated design as something that had to reach people within their budgets. A display, an advertisement and a package should express a connected idea. A beautiful object that a customer could afford gave the sales conversation somewhere useful to go.
A bowl can lead to a sofa
A housewares shop has an obvious boundary: sooner or later the customer has enough plates. Furniture offered a larger part of the home, along with larger decisions. In 1970, Crate & Barrel acquired The Upper Story, a Massachusetts retailer. Looking back in 2024, Segal picked buying a furniture business without prior experience in the category as an unconventional move.
The appeal is easy to follow. People who trusted a retailer’s judgment about the table might also trust its judgment about the room around it. Yet a sofa asks more of a buyer than a drinking glass. It occupies more space, costs more to move and stays in a customer’s life longer. The early acquisition opened a door; building out the furniture business required further work.
Expansion also depended on getting the store’s point of view beyond the store. Catalogs did that work. In written testimony submitted to a joint congressional hearing in 2010, Segal described them as central to establishing the brand and reaching customers outside its physical footprint.
He was concerned about postage. Between 1997 and 2008, he reported catalog postal costs rising faster than inflation; postage had come to represent roughly half the cost of a catalog. Here was the retailer of inviting rooms discussing the economics of the mail. The connection was direct. An arrangement of products can only persuade the customer who actually sees it.
Segal’s stated estimate at the time, rather than a current cost breakdown.
Coming back without taking the chair
The ownership changed in stages. Germany’s Otto Group bought a majority stake in 1998, and Segal retired as chief executive in 2008. A company that had begun with two founders working the floor now had to sustain its character through different owners and leaders. The familiar name over the door could remain while the decisions behind it changed hands.
In 2014, Segal returned to advise interim chief executive Adrian Mitchell and help find a permanent leader. He was careful about the job description. He was advising rather than taking over daily operations, and he said he was unpaid. His explanation was affectionate: “I’m doing this out of love for the company.”
That year, he and Carole were recognized as Entrepreneurial Champions by Chicago’s 1871 technology hub. The award and the advisory work made an interesting pair. One celebrated the founders’ earlier decisions; the other required attention to a business that still had decisions ahead of it. A company survives its origin story by continuing to employ people and satisfy customers.
His later investment work has a physical setting of its own. Prairie Management Group, the family investment firm he founded, planted an actual Midwestern prairie when designing its offices in 2008. The firm connects that landscape with its interest in durability and long-term value. Even an investment office, apparently, can benefit from a considered view out of the window.
A different kind of showroom
Northwestern remained part of the couple’s life. Their support helped establish the Segal Design Institute in 2007, bringing design teaching and research together across disciplines. Its students work through problems, make proposals and consider the people who will use what they create. For a retailer preoccupied with the meeting between an object and its owner, the connection is understandable.
In 2014, Gordon and Carole committed approximately $10 million through a planned gift to the university. The support covered several areas, including scholarships, arts and sciences, music, the library and design. Northwestern named its visitors center for them. A place where prospective students form an early impression of the university acquired the names of two people who had met there.
He was still participating in the university’s building life in May 2025, joining a groundbreaking for a new Kellogg education facility. In July, he appeared in a video conversation about Crate & Barrel’s beginnings, growth and leadership transitions. These later appearances keep returning to familiar interests: places, people and the culture that determines what happens between them.
A 2024 reflection added a wrinkle to his reputation for patient expansion. Asked what he would tell his younger self, Segal wished he had possessed more confidence to grow faster. The same quiz asked which everyday item he would redesign. His answer was glassware.
After decades of furniture, ownership changes, investments and university buildings, there was still a drinking glass worth reconsidering. It is a fitting place to leave him: looking again at something ordinary, with the suspicion that its next version might be more useful. The crates were unpacked long ago. The looking continues.