Walter Hoving

Walter Hoving (December 2, 1897 – November 27, 1989) was a Swedish-born American businessman, best known as the sometimes imperious, always self-confident, head of Tiffany & Company from 1955 to 1980.

Mr. Hoving resolutely maintained Tiffany's and his standards, which included no diamond rings for men, no silver plate and no charge accounts for customers found being rude to the salespeople.

His firmness in matters of taste took Tiffany's from $7 million worth of business in 1955 to $100 million for the Fifth Avenue store and its five branches in 1980, when he stepped down as chairman.

Involvement with John F. Kennedy

Hoving is known for two sales to John F. Kennedy. Once in 1960, Hoving met Kennedy, then President-elect, at the store and assisted him in selecting a brooch by Jean Schlumberger with rubies and diamonds for Jacqueline Kennedy. Although its cost was not made known, it is estimated that a similar piece would cost $30,000 today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art chose the brooch to be the sole piece of fine jewelry chosen for display in the blockbuster exhibition "Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years."

Kennedy contacted Hoving again in 1962 after the Cuban missile crisis, and requested 32 Lucite calendar mementos to be presented to close aides who had worked with him during the crisis. Hoving's response varies slightly in different accounts, but the gist of it was, "We don't sell plastic." Tiffany's ended up filling the order, but with the mementos in silver.

An Exception to the Rule

The only exception to the no-silver-plate rule during Mr. Hoving's tenure at Tiffany's - small pins with the message, "Try God" - illuminated another facet of Mr. Hoving's character: his conviction that he was guided by God during his entire career. Hoving was a deeply religious man who has long been actively involved in charitable work. All the proceeds went to the Walter Hoving Home in Garrison, New York. It was a treatment facility for women addicted to drugs.

He was a co founder of the Salvation Army Association of New York, and gave his time to the United Negro College Fund, and the United Service Organizations, USO.

Mr. Hoving took control of a somewhat stodgy Tiffany's in 1955 and, with his fine eye for quality, gave the store its special stamp. Good design meant good business and Tiffany's sales grew to $100 million from $6 million under Mr. Hoving. "Hoving initiated the idea of good quality," said Labarr Hoagland, who retired from Tiffany last March as executive vice president. "Before, you felt you had to have a million dollars to come into the store. But Hoving introduced mass merchandising, not in the ordinary sense, but in the sense of affordable and good quality."

His conviction of the correctness of his taste allowed him to give great freedom to designers, both those who created jewelry, like Jean Schlumberger, Angela Cummings or Elsa Peretti, and those like Gene Moore, who designed Tiffany's eye-catching windows. "Design what you think is beautiful," he told them, "and don't worry about selling it. That's our job."

No item was too small to escape his notice. No cellophane tape, he decreed, was to be used in gift-wrapping boxes with that special Tiffany Blue paper, and there were to be no knots securing the white bows.

A tall and distinguished-looking man, always impeccably tailored, Mr. Hoving was not hesitant about expressing his tastes outside the store. He won the battle against a plan to put a cafe in a corner of Central Park, and he lost the fight against making Fifth Avenue one-way.

keptical of Taxes

A man of conservative political bent, he expressed his opinions in various ways. In one year's annual report, he commented on the taxes paid by the store, saying, "It is our hope, but not our expectation, that these sums will be spent with due diligence and a modicum of wisdom." He used Tiffany advertisements as a soapbox, too. Some of them he wrote as little essays with titles like "Is Profit a Dirty Word?"

He wrote and ran several others all of which ran in The New York Times in the usual Tiffany & Company placement on page three in the upper right hand corner. The Truth About Capitalism

On Education

Is There An American Goal?

Is Inflation the Real Problem?

Full Employment

Who Owns the Free Enterprise System?

Are the Rich A Menace?

The Nitty-Gritty About Socialism

Mr. Hoving had the good sense to acquire that space for Tiffany as he thought that was the place one’s eye would immediately go to when opening the paper. It was marketing ideas like this that made him one of the 20th century’s greatest retail minds.

In another he assailed the First National City Bank for its "loud and vulgar Christmas tree" and urged the bank to practice "good esthetics." In yet another he attacked as unconscionable the hoarding of silver, an unmistakable reference to the Hunt empire's efforts to corner the silver market in 1980.

"Every store must have a point of view," Mr. Hoving said in a 1973 interview. "Generally it doesn't." Tiffany's did. "We don't claim to have the best taste in America," he said. "But we do say it is our taste."

elling 'Esthetic Excitement'

The concept of "esthetic excitement" was supremely important to him, and he was able to make it sell. "Give the customer what Tiffany likes, because what it likes, the public ought to like," was his motto. His skill was in somehow making the public want to like it, and pay for it. Tiffany & Company was a publicly owned company until it was acquired in 1979 by Avon Products, Inc..

Mr. Hoving's resignation the following year was one of a series of management changes stemming from the Avon takeover. Mr. Hoving was unhappy with the direction Avon was taking Tiffany & Company and found that despite the promises of autonomy he received when he sold the company to them.

He walked out of the store on December 31, 1979 on his way to NBC Television studios at Rockefeller Center for an interview. He stated to his grandson John, who also worked at Tiffany that he would never again go through those revolving doors and he never did. He started his own consulting firm that specialized in retail design and management and started work on his memoirs that were never published. He also focused his efforts on his philanthropic activities and relaxed in his home in Newport, Rhode Island playing golf every day.

He would often write the David Mitchell then chairmen of Avon seeking to buy back Tiffany & Company but his offers were never seriously entertained. As always he was never shy about making his opinions known about the present management of the store whom he thought were nice people but “boobs”. He sparred openly with Mitchell writing letters to the editor after almost every interview the Avon chairmen gave mentioning Tiffany in an unfavorable light. He often commented on his regrets on selling the store to Avon. He felt that they had reneged on many of the promises they had made to him prior to the sale of Tiffany.

He always sealed all his deals with a handshake which he saw as the ultimate signature of intent and trust. When he sold the air rights to Tiffany & Company to Donald Trump in 1979, he shook his hand sealing the deal. The young Trump was astonished at this old school approach but went on to build his famous Fifth Avenue building right next door to Tiffany based on that handshake. He mentioned this episode fondly remembering Hoving in his first book.

After Hoving resigned Henry B. Platt, a great-great-grandson of founder Charles Tiffany took over the helm for a brief period but was fired five months later by Mitchell for being incompetent though this was never discussed openly. Platt stated he was retiring after 34 years at Tiffany but anyone close to the situation knew this was just not the case. Platt also had the very bad habit of claiming credit for many of the milestones that Hoving had actually initiated like putting together the award winning design team of, Angela Cummings, Elsa Peretti and Paloma Picasso. There was never a time that Platt had the luxury of doing anything unless it was approved by “Mr. Hoving”.

In an interview for the New York Times, Angela Cummings who has since left Tiffany stated: “At Tiffany's I met Walter Hoving," she recalled, "and he looked at the little portfolio I had and said, 'You want to work for us, go ahead and try.' It was like a threat, but at the time I didn't even know who he was.”

Five years after it was bought by Avon Products Inc., Tiffany & Company was put up for sale by Avon. Reports had circulated for more than a year that Avon, the world's largest cosmetic company, was giving up on its efforts to run Tiffany. Despite a series of management, accounting and marketing changes, Avon has been unable to bring the stores in line with its corporate financial goals. Hoving, said at the time, "They bought it for prestige reasons and that's not a good reason, If Avon can get $150 million for it, they ought to grab it."

In 1984, Tiffany & Company was bought by private investors, and in 1987 it again became publicly owned. Its stock is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

An Immigrant from Stockholm

Mr. Hoving was born in Stockholm on Dec. 2, 1897, the son of a surgeon and an opera singer. He was brought to the United States with his parents in 1903 and attended the Barnard School and De Witt Clinton High School in New York City. He received a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1920. At Brown, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.

In 1924, after working at various jobs, Mr. Hoving found his field: merchandising. He went to work for R. H. Macy & Company in the training program and was an immediate success. By the age of 30, he was a vice president. He also underwent his own training program to polish his knowledge of the arts. For four years, he took courses at the Metropolitan Museum in subjects like painting, textile design, old silver and furniture.

When he went to Montgomery Ward & Company as vice president in charge of sales in 1932, he set up a bureau of design to overhaul Ward's catalogue. He left the mail-order house in 1936 to go to Lord & Taylor, where he was president until 1946.

A Design Test for Hiring

Mr. Hoving continued to stress the great importance of design, reportedly asking job-seekers to choose between well and badly designed objects and hiring them or rejecting them on the basis of their taste.

In 1946 he founded the Hoving Corporation, whose properties came to include Bonwit Teller, the department store, until he sold it in 1960.

In 1955 he bought control of Tiffany's, which at the time seemed to many to be on the brink of going out of business. He started his regime by getting rid of everything in the store that did not meet his standards, holding a giant sale - the first in the store's history -of everything from silver matchbook covers at $6.75 to a diamond and emerald brooch marked down to $29,700.

Under his guidance, the faltering store reacquired its cachet and a new popularity - Tiffany's salesclerks were under orders to treat everyone, even the most obvious browser, as a potential customer - until by Christmas 1980, its aisles were jammed with shoppers.

Author of 'Table Manners'

The author of two best-selling books, "Your Career in Business" and "Tiffany's Table Manners for Teen-agers", which was written after seeing his then young grandson John Hoving’s atrocious table manners. The book is a perennial favorite and has sold millions of copies over the years.

His 1924 marriage to Mary Osgood Field ended in divorce in 1936, He married his second wife, Pauline Vandervoort Rogers, in 1937. She died in 1976.

He died at the age of 91 in Newport, Rhode Island. He was survived at the time by his third wife, the former singer and actress Jane Pickens Langley, whom he married in 1977. She died on February 23, 1992 in Newport as well.

Mr. Hoving is survived by a son and a daughter by his first marriage, Thomas Hoving – the author of many best selling books and the former editor of Connoisseur magazine and a former New York City Parks Commissioner and a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art - and Petrea Hoving Durand, both of Manhattan, and four grandchildren, John Hoving, Samuel Osgood Hoving, Thomas Durand [http://thomasdurand.com/] and Petrea Hoving.