Charles David Tandy was the Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of the Tandy Corporation.
Background
Charles Tandy was born in Brownsville, Texas, in 1918, one of two children of David Lewis Tandy and Carmen McLain. Tandy's father was a partner in a wholesale leather goods business servicing shoe manufacturers. The company was headquartered in Fort Worth.
Education
In Fort Worth Charles was educated. He entered Rice University in 1935 but dropped out to work for his father. He later returned to school, graduating from Texas Christian University in 1940. He attended Harvard Graduate School of Business before entering the United States Navy in 1941.
Career
Stationed in Hawaii during World War II, Tandy was assigned the task of selling war bonds, which occasionally took him to hospitals, where he saw many injured veterans working at crafts projects as a means of rehabilitation. Tandy wrote to his father, recommending that the elder Tandy produce leatherworking kits for such purposes. Discharged in 1947, Charles became a vice-president of his father's firm and expanded the leathercraft line from hospitals to prisons, schools, and summer camps. He and his father bought out the partners of his father's company in 1950 and renamed it the Tandy Leather Company.
A man of few interests outside of business, Tandy was considered affable and loquacious by outsiders, but his professional standards were almost impossibly high; employees that did not meet those standards were seldom fired, however, but reassigned to positions that maximized their abilities. Tandy's requirement for his executives included working Saturday mornings and answering their own telephones, as he himself did.
Having made a success of what was largely a mail-order business, Tandy in 1951 embarked on an ambitious plan to open retail outlets. Realizing that crafts customers, used to "doing it themselves, " were comfortable in a "nuts and bolts" workshop atmosphere, Tandy positioned the stores in low-rent locations. He paid managers small salaries but offered them a healthy percentage of the profits and equity in the store. Thirty-one stores were opened in the first three years, and by 1962, 140 were in operation. The strong incentives for manager effort helped ensure that Tandy's work ethic--"If you can't get your job done in five days, do it in seven"--was followed to the same extent at the retail level as it was at the corporate level.
Tandy purchased his first company, American Handicrafts, in the early 1950's and acquired additional retail stores and an expanded line of crafts kits. He overreached in 1955, however, when as president he sold Tandy Leather to American Hide and Leather Company, which had been in financial distress, but whose executives assured Tandy that the firm was on the upward swing. When Tandy realized that the only way he could save Tandy Leather (a matter of family pride) was to buy the parent company, he did just that, even though it plunged the firm into losses of more than $250, 000. To recover financially, Tandy began looking for other acquisitions and product lines. Another financially troubled company, Radio Shack, a small Boston-based chain of nine consumer electronics stores, approached Tandy, and after some hesitations, he bought the business in 1963 that would become a household name. Once again, however, he was faced with a financial crisis, including almost $1 million in unpaid bills; much of the accounts receivable was uncollectable. Following the pattern he had established with Tandy Leather stores, Tandy brought the total number of Radio Shack outlets to 530 by 1969 and more than 2, 800 by the end of 1973.
In the 1970's, Tandy began approaching American manufacturers about producing privately labeled goods for his stores; he found them unwilling to do so at his price. Tandy Corporation thus began to manufacture many of its own electronics kits, and by the late 1970's, the firm had sixteen factories in North America, one in Japan, and one in Korea. The key to Tandy's phenomenal success in building a billion-dollar company with more than 7, 000 stores worldwide was not only his ability to spot profitable new products, like CB radios and personal microcomputers, but also his ability to turn around losing products, situations, and companies.
Despite his wealth, Tandy consistently worked twelve-and fourteen-hour days, six days a week. This schedule, combined with his chainsmoking of cigars, probably contributed to his first heart attack in 1968, to gallbladder surgery in 1972, and to a heart attack in 1978 that resulted in his death.
Achievements
Membership
As Fort Worth's leading businessman, Tandy served on various civic boards and associations including the Fort Worth Art Association, Fort Worth Community Theater, Trinity Improvement Association, Texas Christian University (trustee), Rockefeller University, and Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, and on the boards of directors of First United Bancorp, Pier 1 Imports, Stafford-Lowdon, Kimbell's, Alcon Labs, and Dillard's.
Connections
On October 25, 1945, Tandy married Gwendolyn Purdy Johnston. She had two children from a previous marriage; they remained married until her death in 1967.
Tandy married Anne Burnett Windfor on June 12, 1969. She was described by Fortune magazine as "a wealthy woman in her own right from a socially prominent, pioneer Texas family [with] one of the most extensive collections of modern art in the country. " Their showcase home was designed by I. M. Pei and could accommodate both large numbers of guests and the formidable art collection.