The King of Cookware

Williams-Sonoma Founder, Turning 90, Put Pots and Pans On a Pedestal

Nearly 50 years ago, a former department store window dresser and gourmet home cook took an old hardware store in a rural California town and turned it into a groundbreaking store that changed the way Americans shop for kitchenware.

Chuck Williams, who turns 90 on Sunday, is credited with introducing American consumers to restaurant-quality European cookware and small appliances and displaying them in a glamorous setting.

Without Williams, cooks might not have learned quite so soon to make pesto in a food processor or to make perfectly smooth icing in a stand mixer or to dress a salad with a dash of balsamic vinegar.

"Like Julia Child," says Nancy Pollard, owner of La Cuisine cookware store in Alexandria, Williams "changed the way we cook and dine and buy pots and pans. He offered Americans a very different selection of merchandise, like real carbon steel knives and little molds for pastry, presented in a way that was visually seductive."

As Williams tells it, it was on a two-week vacation trip to Paris in 1953 that he got the idea for an upscale kitchenware store.

"I couldn't get over seeing so many great things for cooking, the heavy pots and pans, white porcelain ovenware, country earthenware, great tools and professional knives," Williams said in a recent telephone interview from his office in San Francisco. Even today, co-workers say he is the first one in the office in the morning and the last to leave at night. "Here, it was different. For the home cook, there were thin pans in not a lot of sizes and tools were on the cheap side. In those days, people bought kitchenwares in hardware and department stores."

So Williams said to himself, "I'll have a small shop."

In 1956, he combined his surname with the name of the rural town where he bought the hardware store and called the new venture Williams-Sonoma. He carefully filled the shelves with such things as copper sauté pans, huge stockpots, high-quality vegetable peelers, Sabatier knives and French kitchen towels. "I bought things I liked myself and built up a customer base that liked what I like," says Williams, a big fan of French cooking as well as entertaining friends.

What he didn't like and refused to stock were trendy gadgets. "It has to be a working tool, never a gadget like a mold that makes square eggs. Now, that is a stupid gadget," he says.

From his years of work in department stores, he knew the importance of positioning merchandise.

"Take a grocery store, for example," says Williams. "Things are lined up and close together." In a kitchenware store, however, "if the merchandise is not displayed well for customers, they are not going to buy it. They won't see it. The handle of the saucepan has to be turned toward the customer. Everything has to have a little space around it. You only have a fraction of a second to get their eye, then they move on."

It was not long before friends convinced Williams that San Francisco would be a better location for such a store, and he moved the business there in 1958. After 10 years of annual buying trips to France, he broadened his search for functional items with good design by going to England, Italy and Germany. In 1971, at the suggestion of a customer, he produced his first store catalogue.