by Hrag Vartanian
No city takes the art of business as seriously as New York. Between power lunches, an economy bigger than most nations, and more international headquarters than anywhere else in the world, it's got it all. Maybe it was the Dutch merchants who imported their shrewd brand of capitalism that attracted wave after wave of immigrants who stayed to forge the marketplace by stimulating the brightest minds to compete in the city's sophisticated adrenaline loaded business atmosphere.
The first wave of Armenian business people to arrive were the rug merchants of Fifth Avenue. Today, still referred to as the Carpet District, it is adjacent to the Armenian Gramercy Park neighborhood.
Armenian American historian, Vartan Malcom, estimated that a vast majority of America's oriental carpets in the early years of the 20th century traveled through Armenian hands with the elegant stores on Fifth Avenue acting as the palaces of the industry.
James Tufenkian, President of Tufenkian Carpets, is one of a new generation with a different vision. His carpets are sold in Bloomingdale's and other fine department stores. The creations are coveted by interior designers the world over for not only their contemporary flair but for their classical eye for quality.
He explains, "Before, all the wholesaling of oriental carpets was controlled by Armenians. Unfortunately all those families died out or their children moved on to other industries. The Armenian presence in Manhattan has dwindled as everyone moved to other boroughs or the suburbs. The Armenian neighborhoods in the city are more of a memory. Today, only my firm and two other Armenian companies still work in Manhattan's carpet industry."
Tufenkian takes advantage of New York's role as one of the design capitals in the world, something he knows contributes to his success. He's successfully established operations in Nepal, and he used the knowledge from that experience to revive the radiance of Armenia's weaving history even bringing two Tibetans to Armenia from Nepal to share their skills. In the last decade, he has fostered the carpet cottage industry and innovated new Armenian designs for the global market, bringing the pattern full circle, from the old world to the new and back again.
"Working with Armenia is one of the best things I've ever done in my life. My grandparents moved to America a hundred years ago and I feel like I've missed out on the suffering that Armenia has endured. I happen to be in a business that is appropriate to the new nation and I can't turn down that opportunity. I am proud of the success of my carpet business as well as my newer hotel business there," he says.
From beginnings as merchants, small shop owners and later manufacturers, a new generation of Armenians are finding themselves more comfortable integrating into established corporations and becoming part of the city's diverse business elite.
Streamlining Estée Lauder
"I love New York, because it's all the things that are important to me. It's energetic, it has great music, dance and theatre, all the things that are important to me. It is intellectually stimulating and for me it hasn't changed at all," says Jeannette Sarkisian Wagner, Vice Chair of Estée Lauder, in their head office across from the luxurious Plaza Hotel and perched at the corner of Manhattan's Central Park.
Born and raised in Chicago, Wagner arrived in the city almost forty years ago to work as a Senior Editor at the Saturday Evening Post after stints as an editor of the Chicago Daily News and other editorial positions.
By the close of the sixties she moved on to the Hearst Corporation, where she innovated the Bedside Astrologer for Cosmopolitan magazine. The idea quickly transformed their January issue from their lowest to their highest performing issue and has become a staple of the magazine's image that remains a must-read for many women the world over.
Her next move to Estée Lauder came in 1975 when the company's president asked two top female executives who was the most intelligent woman they knew. Wagner's name topped both lists.
Within a few months, she already identified the first problems she saw and accomplished the extraordinary goal of shortening the new product launch timeline.
When she became President and CEO of the International Division, she solved another problem—few women in management positions. She encouraged the recruitment of women into the company's infrastructure, it seemed logical that a company that relied on the female consumer should be familiar with the currents of trends of women's tastes.
When she began in the International Division only two of 20 plus general managers around the world were women, soon there would be seven.
Her duties as President of the International Division included the sales and marketing of some of the most renowned brands in the industry, Aramis, Aveda, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, Clinique, Jane Cosmetics, Tommy, Perscriptives, Origins, Donna Karan Cosmetics, M.A.C. and of course, Estée Lauder. She developed the freestanding stores for both Clinique and Estée Lauder throughout Eastern Europe and headed the push into Asia-Pacific. During her presidency profitability rose 250%, making the International Division the largest sales and profit contributor to the company.
For the past three years, she has been Vice Chairman of the corporation's board but her influence is not limited there, as she continues to be thirsty for new challenges.
She is serving her third Presidential appointment to the Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations in the U.S. Chair of Group III of the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue, a WTO group that contributed to the American agenda for the Fourth Ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar. She also serves on the Boards of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Annette Green Museum at The Fragrance Foundation, Aveda Limited, U.K., Tricon Global Restaurants, The Economic Club of New York, Harvard Business School and she is a founding member of Harvard Business School's Network of Women Alumnae.
She has no doubt that her business sense comes from her father. She still keeps an old photo of his grocery store with its meticulously arranged shelves close by on her desk.
"Everything I learned about business I learned in my father's grocery store. I learned about service beyond excellence, I learned the customer always came first. My father did "Gift with Purchase" before Estée Lauder even thought of it. If you were a great customer you got a gift at Christmas, if you bought more than $5 worth of groceries you got free delivery, which when I turned 12 was my job. My father had direct mail which were handbills he had printed and I dropped off at neighborhood homes," she recalls.
Her parents were crucial to her education both in and out of school, she insists, "For an immigrant's daughter to end up making more than a $1 million a year in one generation is an awesome thing. The credit goes to my parents and it all came out of education."
She continues, "My father taught me that the consumer is the most important person, anything that makes that relationship stronger and better is crucial."
Devoting a Lifetime to the Female Consumer
Carole Black would agree with the centrality of the consumer, she is President and CEO of Lifetime Entertainment Services which is a 50/50 joint venture of the Hearst Corporation and The Walt Disney Company. Her knowledge of women's issues, good business, and the legacy of her mother's Armenian heritage have all contributed to building Lifetime's leadership in media that adapts to women.
"Because of my grandparents, and their [Armenian] background and everything they went through in their own lives, I've always been empathetic to other people and that's enormously helpful in the media industry," Black said about the diversity that enriched her life.
"I learned to have great tolerance of other people's differences after witnessing prejudice against my grandfather because he spoke with an accent and was a little darker. That's very important because if you want a brand or anything else to grow, you have to be very inclusive and understand other people's points of view. My Armenian heritage also taught me that everyone underneath is basically the same. Women the world over care about the same things—there's a continuity."
Black's family were pioneers in their own right as one of the first Armenians to settle in Cincinnati and crucial in establishing the city's AGBU chapter in 1927.
"Everyone knew we were half-Armenian and we were assimilated I'd say. We went to AGBU picnics and parties that the other children went to. In those days everyone helped people come over, so there were close relationships with lots of people. The AGBU was very active in making sure that the Armenian community there was doing well," she says.
She pursued higher education with the goal of being an English professor but she decided otherwise. After initial starts in brand management she took a hiatus to raise her son and did consulting out of her home.
She believes her commitment to working came from the strong female role models in her family, "I grew up in a household where my grandmother worked and my mother worked in the family business so I always thought that would be part of my life. When my son started school, I was the only mother from his grade that actually worked. By the time he was in the sixth grade in 1980, over 60% of the moms were either working or going back to school—it was a shift in the whole society and I was a little ahead."
When her son reached 11, she returned to office life and worked at an ad agency afterward and when her boss moved onto Disney he asked that she follow.
As Senior Vice President of Marketing and Television at The Walt Disney Corporation, people took notice of her work conceptualizing and launching The Disney Afternoon (the children's programming franchise) and her success at selling the sitcom Home Improvement into syndication.
Soon she received an offer to be the first woman to head a major commercial television station in Los Angeles, NBC4 in L.A.. It was insignificant that she never worked at a television station.
From 1994 until 1998, she pushed NBC4 to new limits. In just two years, she made it the most profitable it had ever been. Part of her success was derived from the attraction of female viewership. That venture was an important breeding ground for what would be the next step in her career.
In 1999, when she was named CEO and President of Lifetime, she found something that allowed her to focus her attention on the things she loved, "I think my advocation has always been wanting to reach out to women and girls about self-esteem and achieving what they want to accomplish. It's something my grandparents built into me—not to have limitations unless you put them on yourself, Lifetime is all about that. I knew the brand was strong because I was already watching it and I thought it was a sleeping giant, like Disney before their new management."
Distributed to 83 million homes, Lifetime also encompasses the Lifetime Movie Network, Lifetime Real Women and Lifetime Online and has forced the rising professional to live a bi-coastal existence shuttling between Los Angeles and New York.
"One of the unique things we do is public advocacy for women and girls, it is a very strong part of the Lifetime brand. Women know we all care about them beyond them being a viewer," she says.
The marriage of her personal desire to make a social impact along with her knack for brand development have given her a clear idea of her viewers and how the network must respond to the needs of today's women. "The difficulty women have is that they are stretched to the max. They have very little free time. Most work outside the home, as well as inside the home. Women are often caretakers not only for their own families but their extended families, such as their own parents. They have very little time so they're careful about the media they watch," she says from experience.
With a viewer base that consists of 75% women, Lifetime is on the crest of the hottest demographic, as women remain the major purchasers of goods and services for the home. She has worked hard to hone her demographic target to the 18 to 34 market in order to attract advertisers, "I think I've always had a vision of where a product or company can go. I have a vision and don't keep switching it around. I always say, do what you love and have a passion for it and I've always done that. I'm a risk-taker. People always ask how you can leave all that security and take a risk? I believe if you're not growing, you're dying."
For Black, who Ladies Home Journal magazine named one of "America's 100 Most Important Women," Crain's New York business magazine anointed her as one of "New York's 100 Most Influential Women in Business," and The Hollywood Reporter swooned that she was one of the "Top Women in Entertainment," it's irrefutable that bigger and better are always on the horizon.
At home, in both of her adopted cities, her life she says constitutes the best of both worlds.
Ogilvy & Mather Can Sell Anything: Tro or False?
This duality is also part of Tro Piliguian's success. He is Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather North America. With billings of $5 billion, 3,000 employees and awards from every sector of the industry including U.S. Agency of the Year for 2000 by Adweek magazine, Piliguian's success is derived from the solid sense of place he enjoys from his work in New York and weekend home in Montreal.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Piliguian moved with his family to Montreal at a young age. After high school, he was inspired by his interest in photography to take a summer job at English-language TV network CFCF in Montreal as a stagehand. He fell in love with the TV aspect and decided to put university on hold.
Sixteen years later he inaugurated his own production company, Champlain Productions, which grew to be the second largest in Canada. He met up with two creative individuals he knew he could work with (a writer and an art director) and in 1981, they began The Academy ad agency driven by Piliguian's business know-how. While the period was economically difficult for the city, Academy depended on the recession-proof pharmaceutical industry that continued to boom and establish their name across the nation.
Six years later, as international agencies made entrées into the Canadian market, bigger global groups came knocking on Academy's door, Piliguian says, "Out of nowhere came BBDO, Ogilvy and all these multinational companies who wanted to buy us. When Ogilvy came, I turned to my partners and said, 'I don't know what we did but we did something right because Ogilvy is calling us.'"
After a year of consideration, Academy-Ogilvy was born and a savvy Piliguian retained a majority holdings. The company knew talent when they saw it and offered him the Chairmanship of Ogilvy's Canadian operations.
Ogilvy's Canadian headquarters were in Toronto, but Piliguian could not stand leaving his beloved Montreal and chose a strenuous commute every few days. It was a pattern he would repeat for the three years he headed the $300 million operation.
The present CEO and Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Shelley Lazarus, convinced him to jump into a bigger fish bowl.
He arrived in New York City, fearless of the mission ahead. Reporters approached him in a frenzy, curious to see what the maverick would do differently now that he was in the Big Apple. With his characteristic humor he answered, "Why should I be doing anything differently, it got me here, didn't it?"
While most New Yorkers escape to the Hamptons or other locales for their weekend getaways, Piliguian maintains his home in Montreal to which he returns every weekend, "I feel it's very Armenian to have a home where my friends and family can come and gather every weekend."
A firm believer in Ogilvy & Mather's philosophy, its 360 branding concept and interest in touching the consumer at every point possible, Piliguian knows his commitment to the agency has been fruitful, "It's been the team we've been able to build. It's the people. We're immensely diverse—we do all the kids' cereal business for Kraft, we do American Express and IBM on a global basis, and Goldman Sachs in the financial field—look at the diversity. When you look at our list it really is the Who's Who of brands in this business."
In an industry that reads the public's needs, emotions and interests, Piliguian knows after September 11th the city and by extension the world has changed all the rules of the game for awhile, "We won Coca-Cola recently but the jubilation that usually accompanies the accomplishment, like champagne celebrations in the courtyard, isn't there now. Clients are also being cautious, instead of slashing their ad budgets they are deciding to carve them, there's a mood of re-evaluation in the air."
The attack had an eerie near-miss quality for the executive who was in London during the disaster. When he first arrived in New York four years ago he wanted to transform the work environment by moving the offices to a new location. CEO Shelley Lazarus resisted the move, "She didn't want to go so I decided against it." The new offices would have been the 99th, 100th and 101st floors of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. With a sigh of relief shared by all New Yorkers with other 'could have been me' experiences, Piliguian looks around their current offices with a new level of comfort he has only recently rediscovered.
Trading it all in for New York
Day trader Kirk Kazazian knows the lingering feeling of loss the World Trade Center represents to the whole city. His Murray Hill apartment reminds him daily of the event, "Before September 11th it had a better view," he laments, "I used to wake up and see the Twin Towers outside my window."
Like the rest of the city, he's back on track to the ordinary grind of daily life, but Kazazian's isn't all that ordinary. Three years ago, he was voted one of the top 10 Day Traders in the city after making over $5.3 million that year, which included a high of $1.2 million during November alone.
One of the new breed of electronic traders, he has published on the topic and is a master of a field known for being as cutthroat and stressful as any—not bad considering he's 26.
"I got into day trading during 1996 and at the time the volume really shot up, I think it quadrupled. The markets were going crazy and it was a good time to be a trader. Since I was so young I could adapt easily," he says about his start in the industry after completing his studies at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School of Business.
He has maintained a levelheaded attitude towards his work, he views this as an asset, "It is for some people but I don't take it stressfully at all, I enjoy it. I focus and time goes by. I can sit there for five hours trading and not realize the time flew by. I don't even consider it work. It's a game with high stakes. You have to be able to separate the money aspect from it, it's really a by-product of it—if you can do that then you'll be a successful day trader."
That separation has been one he's strictly adhered to, "I don't have a personal portfolio. Trading is a job for me, so I have to keep my personal money separate, I do have some stocks for the long term but for the most part I like to keep it safe, like buying real estate because I'm involved in such a high risk area."
About New York City he is equally passionate and finds it hard to articulate the sense of belonging he feels in a city within which he has been able to taste the highs of achievement, "I don't think I can work anywhere else."
Like any industry, new generations build on the successes of the past and envision a future that welcomes others with their own voice. When Jeannette Sarkisian Wagner was growing up she learned the lesson through a story she heard from her family dating back to the time of the Genocide.
"When my father was captured by a Turkish officer and taken as a servant into his home, the officer's mother asked my father about his background. Later the mother insisted her son release my father. She said she was once a servant in my father's home and my grandmother gave the old woman the gold to buy her son a place in the army," Wagner recounts about the life lesson she can never forget.
She has obviously absorbed its underlying truth that captures the intensity of that relationship between one generation and another, between one culture and others, and pins down the reality of business today, "You don't give back, you pay it forward."
