Discounter of the Year: gutsy Antonini presents strong case for K mart - Joseph E. Antonini; chairman, president and CEO

Discount Store News, August 22, 1988 by David Longo

Discounter of the Year: Gutsy Antonini Presents STrong Case for K mart

TROY, Mich.--To the small circle of people who know him well, it would come as no surprise that Joe Antonini's first ambition was to be a lawyer.

His down-to-earth grittiness would have held him in good stead with any jury. His intelligence and analytical mind would steer him through myriad legal mine fields. His powers of persuasion would have swayed even the most obstinate judge.

Antonini, who is being honored this month as Discounter of the Year during DSN's annual SPARC (Supplier Performance Awards by Retail Category) banquet in Chicago, exhibited those qualities time and again during his rapid rise to the No. 1 executive post at K mart, the nation's largest discount retailer.

His achievements, last year alone, were prodigious. Under his direction, K mart earned $692 million on sales of $25.6 billion, both all-time highs. A new home fashions spokeswoman was unveiled to add pizzazz to K mart's Kitchen Korner program. Antonini created a separate marketing department to keep the company's merchandising programs consumer-driven. He greatly accelerated K mart's efforts at improving its technological efficiency to reduce operating costs. He reorganized K mart's merchandise buying responsibilities and continued a store-wide upscaling program designed to create "power" departments.

And, he announced a move into retailing's hottest new concept, hypermarkets, through a joint venture with Bruno's, the Alabama-based supermarket chain.

But, perhaps more than anyone else, Antonini represents the changing of the guard in the discount industry.

Few of the original founders of the roughly quarter-century-old discount store industry remain. "Antonini is part of the new breed," said Richard Hersh, president of the International Mass Retail Association, the industry trade group. "He represents the new type of retailer, willing to take the risks that the original entrepreneurs did earlier but may not have been taking later in their careers."

Antonini began his retail career during his high school years working in a local department store called Morrison's which operated a handful of stores in West Virginia.

"At an early age, I found I liked selling merchandise. I liked seeing merchandise sell and I liked seeing the customers happy and satisfied," said Antonini, 47, in an interview with DSN last month.

"As far as other career choices, my private ambition was law, but when I weighed all the options I felt it best to get started in a career at an early age, which I had the opportunity to do in retailing," said the son of Italian immigrants who today says the most satisfying part of his current job is still visiting stores because "that's where you really learn what's happening.

"I like being in the trenches with the people who really run the company. I spend one week per month in the stores--I wish I could spend more."

Barbara Loren, president of Loren-Synder Marketing, a Birmingham, Mich., consulting firm, and a member of Antonini's so-called, "Kitchen Cabinet," describes the charismatic chairman as a "methodical risk-taker."

"He's someone who has vision," said Loren, who with Mike Wellman, K mart's marketing vp, Marjorie Alfus, counsel for K mart Apparel Corp., and J. Patrick Kelly, K mart professor of marketing at Wayne State University, comprise an ad hoc committee that meets with Antonini regularly to identify areas of opportunity both within and outside the company.

Because of his ethnic heritage and geographic base of operations near Detroit, Antonini has sometimes been referred to as the "Iococca of retailing." Both have been honored nationally and locally as Men of the Year by Italian-American community organizations. They share an ability to make believers out of the people around them, an unwavering belief in the quality of their product and the guts to go out on a limb to accomplish their goals.

However, Iacocca gained his fame by turning around a failing organization, while Antonini inherited a successful, albeit somewhat unimaginative, one. And, "Antonini is more of a team builder," said Loren, who has worked closely with the executive since 1985 and was instrumental in spearheading the introduction of cookbook author Martha Stewart as spokeswoman for K mart's home fashions department.

Loren remembers calling Antonini from an airport at 6:45 a.M. one morning and asking him for a decision on a project they were working on. "He said, 'Barb, you're the professional. You make the call.'"

Alfus, the legal expert on the Kitchen Cabinet, has known Antonini since the day he arrived at K mart Apparel headquarters in New Jersey in 1983. "He is very willing to listen to intelligent, objective, dispassionate reasoning," said Alfus. "He'll listen to everybody, but the key is his ability to understand what he's heard."

Asked his reaction to the Iacocca comparison, Antonini replied, "I'm flattered, but everybody has to be their own person.

"We're alike in that we're both proud Italians. But I follow my own management style. I have a strong executive group and feel it's important to keep them involved. My greatest fear is that this group begins to tell me what I want to here."