Richard Thalheimer, Founder of Sharper Image, Talks for the First Time About His Ouster

As the scion of an Arkansas retailing family, Thalheimer got an early start in sales, helping peddle toys at Christmas in his family's Little Rock department store. By the time he finished high school, relatives say his ambition was well charted: to start his own company and make a name for himself as an entrepreneur. "Richard could sell anyone anything; it's in his genes," says his sister, Joan Nafe, a Little Rock veterinarian.

Although Thalheimer worked briefly as a contract litigator after graduating from Hastings, practicing law was never in the cards. He nurtured his tiny business — as he had done throughout law school — waiting to seize the right opportunity.

Opportunity knocked in the summer of 1977 with the Realtime Watch, billed as the first affordable, waterproof, and shock-resistant chronograph that could be reliably used by joggers. Thalheimer discovered it at a Las Vegas trade show and locked in an exclusive sales arrangement with Seiko, its creator. To sell it, he took out an ad in Runner's World magazine featuring friend and legendary San Francisco runner Walt Stack, and the orders poured in. Thalheimer sold thousands of the watches at $69 apiece, earning a cool $1.5 million.

Living in a one-bedroom apartment at Octavia and Broadway, which had a dirt basement that served as his first "warehouse," Thalheimer used the profits to open an office and troll for other products that could be marketed for a mostly upscale clientele. He scored again with the first cordless home telephone, long before cell phones. In 1979, he unveiled the first Sharper Image mail-order catalog, which went on to be ranked alongside Sears and L.L. Bean as one of the best catalog concepts ever. Two years later, the first Sharper Image store opened near Jackson and Battery streets in what is now a deli.

Tapping into a market of conspicuous consumers willing to shell out $117 for a neon phone or $200 for an electronic stethoscope (marketed as able to monitor conversations through walls), Thalheimer was off and running. With the catalog and a proliferating number of stores, The Sharper Image was a phenomenon. And Thalheimer became a retailing celebrity.

He popped up on TV talk shows, including Oprah, The Today Show, and Good Morning America. ABC's 20/20 devoted a segment to him. His name and likeness were plastered all over the ubiquitous catalog, on in-store displays, merchandise boxes, and, later, on the company's Web site. For years, until shortly before his ouster, he was the star of countless company TV infomercials.

"Richard couldn't go anywhere without people recognizing him as the Sharper Image guy, and I'm sure they still do," says Reed Trencher, the Mill Valley public-relations guru largely responsible for the company's (and Thalheimer's) early media success.

Trencher says he met the Sharper Image founder in 1981 at a time when Thalheimer couldn't get any media attention. "The Chronicle and Examiner didn't want anything to do with him," Trencher says. He built a mystique around the impeccably dressed, fastidiously groomed gadget man, whose gentle enthusiasm seemed perfectly suited to the frilly items he hawked.

Others selling similar products might have come across as hucksters, Trencher says, but not Thalheimer: "He came off as the man bringing the newest toys from the North Pole, except that the kids were adults and every day was Christmas."

For someone whose persona was honed to convince a mass audience of customers that they knew him, Thalheimer is intensely guarded about his personal life. He and his wife, Christina, met on a blind date at the San Francisco Ballet in 2000 (he's a longtime ballet board member). Married in 2003, the couple has a young daughter. (Christina declined to discuss the couple's private life for this article.) Thalheimer has two daughters, ages 20 and 18, from a previous marriage.

"Richard has always been a loner," says Joan Nafe, who recalls her brother as more interested in being the "brainy kid" on the debate team rather than being part of the "follow the football crowd" while attending public high school in Little Rock.

Thalheimer is the product of an upper-middle-class family with deep roots in Arkansas' capital city. His German Jewish immigrant great-grandparents started a livery business after settling there in 1850. His father's side of the family developed an in-state department store chain that was sold to become part of nationwide retailer Dillard's at about the time Thalheimer left for Yale.

His father, Alan Thalheimer, hoped that Richard might return home to work in the family business, a small chain of ready-to-wear women's clothing stores. "Richard has a lot of ambition; he wanted to do his own thing," says the elder Thalheimer, who kept his son busy at summer jobs as a teenager, including driving a delivery truck and working on a paving crew.