What ever happened to ...
Texas Monthly • March 1999 by
evan smith
Robert Sakowitz
The onetime retail royal is still
minding the store.
In december 1985 the boyish visage of houston’s
reigning retail mogul, Robert Sakowitz, stared out from the
cover of Texas Monthly, his mischievous smile and famous vertical
dimples betraying little of the trouble he and his company
were in. But the headline next to his face referred to his
“fraying empire,” and was it ever apt. For most
of the century the Sakowitz family’s eponymous specialty
stores had served shoppers across Texas, yet a few months
earlier, reeling from the oil bust and buried under a mountain
of debt, Sakowitz, Inc., had filed for federal bankruptcy
protection. Two and a half years later, the eighteen-store
chain was gobbled up by Australian conglomerate L. J. Hooker,
and 2 years after that, Hooker itself went into provisional
liquidation (tantamount to bankruptcy). In the summer of 1990—88
years after Tobias and Simon Sakowitz opened the first Sakowitz
Brothers, on Market Street in Galveston—the last Sakowitz
store closed its doors.
Where is Bobby Sakowitz today? Still in Houston,
and still smiling. A decade after he reluctantly relinquished
control of the business that made him a household name, he
has refashioned himself as a retail power of a different sort.
At 59, Sakowitz is the CEO and president of Hazak Corporation,
a consulting firm whose mission is to help companies big and
small help themselves. (“Hazak” is Hebrew for
“be strong”; the firm’s logo, an H with
two outstretched arms holding up a line, symbolizes a pledge
of support.) Drawing on his many years of experience, he advises
clients like Saks Fifth Avenue and IKEA about everything from
store layouts and merchandise mix to advertising and marketing.
“I’m a business doctor,” he says. “Some
businesses I work with are doing extremely well but are so
preoccupied with the trees that they don’t have time
to see the forest. Others are in some trouble, so we figure
out where they’re headed and look at restructuring.”
Although this kind of advisory role is less
powerful than the one he played for most of his career, he
insists that he likes it. “I’ve always been fascinated
by corporate governance and strategic planning,” he
says. “Those things interest me much more than the day-in-day-out
administrative operations that I’m no longer involved
with, though at Christmas I miss the incredible adrenaline
rush from taking care of customers.” And if the money
isn’t as good as it was during the boom—in their
heyday, the Sakowitz stores logged $145 million in annual
sales—it’s certainly respectable. Large clients
pay him a retainer based on an hourly fee of $250 to $350,
depending on the scope of the work. A start-up, such as Houston’s
FreshBrew Coffee Systems, might give him an equity stake and
a seat on its board.
Work isn’t the only aspect of Sakowitz’s life
that’s different. When he appeared on Texas Monthly’s
cover, he had recently married his second wife, Deer Park
native Laura Harris, and their first child, a daughter, had
just been born. (Sakowitz had a son with his first wife, New
York real estate heiress Pam Zauderer.) Two more daughters
would be born in quick succession, but a fairy-tale family
life was not to be. Last fall, Bobby and Laura divorced, though
they worked out what he describes as “a rather amicable
joint custody” of the girls, who are now fourteen, twelve,
and ten and are enrolled at Houston’s posh Kinkaid School.
Once upon a time, the breakup of Robert Sakowitz’s
marriage would have been fodder for the society pages, but
not today: It barely merited a mention in Maxine Mesinger’s
Houston Chronicle column. That too is just fine, Sakowitz
says. “As the old Texas expression goes, ‘The
gun kicks as hard as it shoots.’ There’s a plus
and minus to being in the fishbowl. The plus is that it helps
your business. The minus is that you’re a public persona
and you’re always subject to scrutiny: You don’t
necessarily have a life of your own. Still, I do get recognized
sometimes, and I appreciate it. I had this call the other
day: ‘You don’t happen to be that Mr. Sakowitz?
I miss your store, the quality.’ It was so nice. I have
really nice memories.”
Texas Monthly biz March 1999
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