“This whole yuppie thing is sort of insatiable.”
Keven Wilder, July 1985
Two years later after uttering those words in a Chicago Tribune interview, Chiasso owner Keven Wilder was “watching the tube and seeing that dizzying dive of the stock market, and thinking this is a big change.”
For any retailer, who to some degree had banked on the yuppie’s insatiability, the Crash of ’87 did prove to be a time of reckoning. Like candles slowly blown out one by one after an extravagant dinner party, the lights began going out in chic store after chic store: Ringo Levio, City and countless smaller stores whose names now are little more than overdesigned logos on shopping bags stuffed in the farthest reaches of their former customers’ closets.
But Chiasso (chee-AH-so) survived. Four years after the Crash, Bon Appetite magazine proclaimed of the Chicago-based modern design store: “If you can’t find any gifts here, it’s possible that you know the wrong people.”
In fact, you can almost detect a sense of triumph in the sunny, playroom-like interior of Chiasso’s flagship store in the 700 N. Michigan Ave. mall, which is filled with sleek and often whimsical accessories for home, office and life, in general.
As for Keven Wilder’s personal faith in modern design, it remains unshakeable.
There may still be skeptics who take one look at Chiasso and dismiss its contents as conspicuous consumption relics of the brief Yuppie Era. Wilder, 44, sees items like the extraterrestrial-looking juicer designed by Philippe Starck ($90), and a squeegee that won a design award ($20), as ammunition in what she likes to calls the war against “visual pollution.”
“There’s no reason why you have to have an ugly tape dispenser or a bad-looking telephone,” Wilder says, “because there are well-designed, functional, affordable items out there that are pleasing to the eye.”
Translated figuratively from the Italian, Chiasso means a sensation. Literally, it means an uproar-and, in 1992, the store’s ruckus was no longer confined to Chicago. In essence, the company more than doubled its size in a single year, adding three new stores to the existing two in Chicago.
Coast to coast
Last November, a Chiasso opened in downtown Los Angeles. Six months earlier, the East Coast expansion of Chiasso began with a store in downtown Philadelphia. That store is now second in sales to the flagship store on North Michigan Avenue. (There are also two tiny Chiassos in the Loop, at 303 W. Madison St., and 231 S. LaSalle St.).
And there is the Chiasso catalog, now mailed to 80,000 homes, with customers that range from actor Dudley Moore to Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles.
Overall, sales have increased by more than 10 percent each year since 1985 when Chiasso opened its first store (as a private company-many of the original investors were family members-Chiasso guards its actual numbers.) That kind of expansion could never have come about if Chiasso’s customers were only yuppies or the dress-only-in-black crowd, Wilder says.
In fact, she resists over-categorizing her customer. “They’re people who like the new and the trendy and the fun and the hot,” she says. “That cuts across all lines. It’s not just limited to graphic designers and artists and architects. I don’t think we could survive if that were our only customer base.”
Confident and steady
Certainly it’s a pretty safe bet that no matter how big Chiasso gets, Keven Wilder will never comport herself as a high priestess of modern design.
The extravagant gestures of the doyenne and the gushings of the dilettante aren’t a part of Wilder’s makeup-she’s too quietly confident, too forthright. That steadiness can probably be traced to patrician roots (she’s the great-grandniece of grandee Cyrus McCormick), a Lake Forest upbringing and education at the elite Madeira School in Virginia. She left Smith College after two years (“It was too much like a finishing school,” she says) and transferred to Radcliffe where she graduted cum laude.
Wilder’s personal style is a lot like the merchandise she sells-the clothes with the greatest appeal have clean lines with a soupcon of wit. She likes the simplicity of Chicago designers Hino & Malee and the classicism of Armani-when it’s “heavily discounted,” she’s quick to add.
Her sly sense of humor surfaces when she explains how she met her husband, Nick, while she was at Radcliffe and he at Harvard: “He picked me up in Hilles library, just like in `Love Story’-except I’m still alive.”
A frustrated artist
But perhaps her most obvious eccentricity is her given name. To this day, she says, when people hear the Wilders’ first names, they assume that her husband is the Keven, “and I must be Nikki.”
“I got a draft notice, I was always put in the boys’ section of camp,” she laughs. “My mother claims she was young and didn’t know what she was doing.”
This is the same mother, it should be noted, who recently introduced her daughter and son-in-law to a new passion-Rollerblading.
Wilder had the potential to live a more bohemian life-she describes herself as a “frustrated artist” who took art classes and painted whenever she could. But she knew she wasn’t cut out for life in an atelier. “I think it’s too solitary,” she says, “I’m not that kind of person.”
So when she finished college, she went on to earn a law degree from Boston University Law School and eventually spent 13 years as an executive with cable television in New York and WTTW in Chicago before opening Chiasso.
She does continue to paint in her spare time, and some of her work decorates the two-story DePaul-area loft (a former peppermint factory) that she shares with Nick, who is six years her senior. “We don’t have kids,” she says, “we just have stores. My mother had five children, and I have five stores.”
Going to the top
Nick, a native of the Boston area, has also had a lifelong interest in design, “even (in) the minute details of graphics.” From Chiasso’s beginning, he says, the couple shared the conviction that design for Chiasso had to represent more than the sum of its merchandise-it had to be “the broad spectrum of design.”
They’ve commissioned top talent for every aspect of design connected with the store, garnering prestigious awards and citations for their store interior (including Best in Retail Design by Interior Design magazine in 1986), the Chiasso logo, the catalog and even the shopping bags. (They’ve also gone to the top in hiring management, staffing their stores with veterans from the Gap, Crate & Barrel and the Limited.)
Wilder’s passion for good design may be Chiasso’s driving force, but it has never blinded her to the realities of the bottom line. Her finely honed instincts are entrepreneurial as well as aesthetic, and Chiasso’s success is largely a result of her knowing simultaneously when to change the game plan, and where to hold the line.
As soon as the Crash hit, she got on the phone with vendors and began pushing them “to find less expensive ways of doing things” without sacrificing design quality.
It worked: anyone who remembers Chiasso in its first incarnation on Chestnut Street will also remember that its merchandise carried a lot more high-end price tags. Today, most of Chiasso products are under $100, and there’s been an emphasis on adding moderately priced children’s toys to the stores’ inventories.
Lowering prices did mean that some manufacturers fell by the wayside-like Swid Powell, the company that was all the rage in the late ’80s with its artist- and architect-designed tableware. “Their prices kept going up, and we found that we couldn’t sell a lot of their product. So we don’t carry very much of that anymore,” says Nick, a real estate developer who Keven describes as “sort of our design consultant.”
Changing faces
Another strategic decision was made when Chiasso moved from its original location at 13 E. Chestnut St. in September 1990. It had a much-hailed space designed by Chicago architects Florian/Wierzbowski. But the Chestnut Galleria shopping complex, says Nick, “didn’t really catch on.” They considered the North Pier, but decided its clientele was more interested in entertainment than consumption and opted for a spot on the 5th floor of the Chicago Place mall.
Cindy Coleman’s design for the new store was a departure of another sort. The original Chiasso, located at basement level, was dark, intimate and almost contemplative, like a living room on the cutting-edge.
The Chicago Place store, inspired by the work of Alexander Calder, is open, airy and comfortably cluttered. Wilder does not say so explicitly, but it’s clear that the new store was intended to broadcast approachability-a cheery beacon for tourists and other impulse-shoppers.
But both Keven and Nick say that accessibility has always been a hallmark of the Chiasso concept-perhaps because they themselves aren’t swept away by the hype or posturing that often surrounds modern design. “A lot of it has to do with our temperaments,” Keven says. “We both are trained business people . . . and hopefully you don’t go too far afield.”
Nick contends that too many retailers of modern design “take it all too seriously” and the result is an image of pieces that are “very difficult to live with, hard and cold.”
“In the movies frequently,” says Nick, “you’ll see the bad guy lives in a very modern, stark apartment, and the good guy is all looking very homey. One of the things we don’t want to do is make modern design look intimidating and cold.”
Focus on fun
From the beginning, the Chiasso concept was to be fun and irreverent, Keven Wilder says, but with two seasoned business people in charge, there was little giddiness in planning. Business plans were drawn up, focus groups consulted.
Even the store’s name was tested. “We wanted to do either an Italian name or a Japanese name,” recalls Wilder, “but when we tested the Japanese names, they sounded like restaurants.”
Now, with the Chiasso name on both coasts as well as in Chicago, Wilder says she’s spending 1993, “assimilating, tightening procedures and getting our act together.”
“We were very fortunate in 1992,” she says, “we’ve had some good opportunities to grow. But it was fairly chaotic to more than double your size in one year.”
Grass-roots growth
Meanwhile, Nick is overseeing the development of a line of Chiasso’s own products. The first was a watch with Chicago landmarks on its face instead of numerals, a joint project with the Landmark Preservation Council. Through his real estate work, Nick has also hooked up with Chicago metalworking firms who are now producing mirrors, candlesticks and other items deigned by young Chicago artists for the store. He hopes that eventually as much as 10 percent of what Chiasso sells will be “products that we design and work on.”
Next year, Chiasso will most likely continue its expansion in Southern California and the East Coast. One store in one city, Wilder says, was never part of the picture.
But the Midwest will always be the anchor for Chiasso, corporately and even aesthetically. “The Midwest keeps you on your feet,” says Wilder. “They’re a group of practical, pragmatic people-and quite demanding.”
