Memories From Mickey

• On Steve Jobs and why he wanted Drexler on the Apple board: “I loved Steve. He was the most seductive human being. When he wanted something, he got it. I kept saying I don’t want to join the Apple board, essentially I found most boards boring. It was a stupid decision on my part, Steve wasn’t boring. After a year, he said, ‘ If you join my board, I will join your board’ and I said ‘ you have a deal.’ He had an agenda. He actually wanted to do what the Gap was doing in terms of creating his own stores — to be a retailer. Steve wanted to learn how to build stores. He said he couldn’t deal with Apple being poorly presented in stores around America. He wanted to have articulation of his brand. That’s what we did at the Gap. That’s what I try to do for a living. We built an Apple store. It looked pretty similar to the [ Apple] stores today — timeless design.”

• On the learnings from Ann Taylor: “I was 35 years old, a president in training. No one bothered me ever. I just followed my instinct. I learned if you don’t control your own product, you are screwed. I don’t want to be in a business where I don’t rule my product. We created Ann Taylor Studio to design all of our goods. The advantage of being young and not knowing anything is that you will try something. Over the next three or four years, the company rocketed. That was the beginning of me not wanting to get up in the mornings and be dependent on someone else owning my goods at a lower price.”

• On getting fired from Gap: “At Gap, we had a really bad two years. When I got there, it was $ 400 million making $ 12 million a year. When I left it was $ 14 billion making a $ 1 billion a year. Steve Jobs called me the night before and said I was getting fired. I was devastated. I was hurt. I was not feeling good. My family wasn’t feeling good, but it happened. Just when I left, the company turned around. I knew it was going to turn around [ because of the changes he made]. In the fashion business, you are guaranteed to hit a wall, you always hit a wall. Sometimes you can’t recover. It’s too big or it’s time to get out.”