Harbingers of Wholesale

How Larry Gaynor’s knack for selling products people didn’t know they needed created a $71-million wholesale beauty supply and service business in Farmington Hills that spans the globe

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By the time Teresa met Larry, she no longer wanted to be a nun. Or a nurse.

He was like nothing she’d seen before. Rangy but animated, intense — there was always a subtext of paternal conflict — angular, with long features and fingers. He was both purposefully — and sometimes unintentionally — comic.

He ran an upscale retail store whose core products were health and beauty aids, but it was something more — the kind of place that, in quainter times, might’ve been called a notions emporium. Browse the aisles — this was particularly encouraged — and past the tony Lancôme and Clinique cosmetics displays, there, in total non sequitur, were shampoos and soaps and hair sprays.

But shoppers also found the game Trivial Pursuit before it appeared on store shelves everywhere, and the Itty Bitty Book Light, which they didn’t know they needed until they saw it, and the potato-faced Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, and Furskins — giant teddy bears dressed in yokel duds that became one of the boffo toys of the 1980s — and Courrèges of Paris sunglasses, long before there was an apparent market for $300 shades. There was also a large baby department selling everything from teething rings to pricey, trendy Italian-made Aprica strollers.

And if you entered the namesake store of the Gaynor family three years after it opened in 1982, there was also a sideshow of sorts that amused both customers and employees, including Teresa, hired at age 19 as cosmetics manager.

Because manicurists came into Gaynor’s looking for supplies but didn’t find gallon jugs of polish remover and other staples of the trade, Larry installed a countertop wholesale operation to fill the need. He called it Nailco, and found himself increasingly busy, stooped over to pack orders behind the counter and popping up “like a puppet” to serve customers.

For a stand-alone store, Gaynor’s did good business — $4 million in annual sales. It was a success when it opened and a success when it closed, leaving devoted customers unrequited in their desire for things they didn’t know they wanted.

The little countertop operation had become a monster, with wholesale customers asking for more and more, as Larry and Teresa continued to add to inventory. The counter was expanded, and there was more growth.

Today, Nailco is TNG Worldwide, claiming $71 million in sales for 2008 and selling mostly through a fat catalog filled with the tools of the beauty biz — at wholesale prices for professionals only. Through a canny combination of goods and services, it’s been positioned as a one-stop “shop” for the means to plan, open, operate, and stock a salon, spa, tanning shop, or a combination thereof.

How it came to be is a study in entrepreneurial instinct. Larry Gaynor has an eye for trend-spotting, a willingness to fail, and the instincts of a thief. But he only steals from the best.

Lips and bolts

Lipstick marked the breaking point for Larry’s father. As the owner of a Detroit hardware store with homes in both Southfield and Florida, he relied on his son to run the family business during frequent trips south. Having worked since he was 10, Larry knew the business well, but had his own way of doing things.

In Dad’s view, a hardware store sold just what the name implied — tools, nuts and bolts, screws and nails, repair widgets, pipe, paint, wire, and fuses — the stuff men and some women love to browse and often buy on impulse, coming in for an extension cord and leaving with a power saw because there it is, waiting for a good home.

Located at Davison and Linwood, the store was next-door to a Laundromat, and Larry saw no reason that someone who came in asking for detergent or other clothes-washing supplies should leave empty-handed. “I used to take the station wagon, go to the wholesaler, load it up with Tide, and bring it back,” he says. “It was a huge seller. From there, I added toilet paper, paper towels, Kleenex, and those types of items.”

The next break with 1970s hardware store orthodoxy came in a spray can. “Eventually I added hair-care products,” Larry says. “It was all black customers, and they’re very conscientious of their personal grooming. The Afro was really big, so we started buying direct from the manufacturer and became the largest single location in the state for [Afrocentric] hair-care products. There were sheens, shines, sprays. And it became a huge part of the business. We did all that, and we began selling greeting cards, candy — we sold tens of thousands of candy bars.

“My dad and I always had this contentious kind of relationship. And I guess when I added lipstick to the mix, it really sent him over the edge. The two of us in one location was never great. I quit many times.” After graduating from Southfield High School and earning an accounting degree from Michigan State University, Larry planned to leave the family business and work for an accounting firm. But crunching numbers didn’t offer a lot of stimulation. He stuck with the hardware store until 1982, when the familial rancor led him to “split off” and open Gaynor’s with his parents’ backing. There, Larry could — and did — add anything he wanted to the mix.

“I was always fascinated with F&M,” he says of the now defunct but once wildly popular metro Detroit discounter that foreswore the usual trappings of retail for warehouse-size stores selling health and beauty products and a lot more. “That was before Costco, before Wal-Mart — getting things that people wanted that were hard to get, that you couldn’t get at Kroger’s or the drugstore.”

Rather than try to pass off imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, Larry says frankly, “I steal other people’s ideas. I tell everyone all the ideas are up there, and if you think about it, you just grab them down, and those who grab the most are the most successful. So I’m always grabbing someone else’s idea.”

The ideas come from magazines and trade shows, whatever the trade. At the hardware store, he’d learned the lessons of impulse-buying, and kept the blinders off when looking for merchandise that made sense at Gaynor’s. That’s how toys and shower radios and gag gifts and baby strollers came to be found in his upscale health and beauty store. But the key to making it work was spotting trends before or during their peak.

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