Nygard’s Golden Jubilee Review
It’s not an everyday occurrence to discover an individual who has pulled himself up by his bootstraps to achieve phenomenal success with a business that’s still breaking barriers, still achieving firsts, and still innovating fifty years later. What does it take? How did he achieve it all? And how can we achieve similar successes?
That’s what we’ll explore in this tri-weekly series. We’ll break down fashion mogul Peter Nygard’s achievements and look at how his accomplishments can serve as practical applications to others in business and life.
Who Gives Away Millions Of Dollars?
Who gives away millions of dollars of their wealth? Very few individuals. However, one of the few is fashion mogul Peter Nygard.
Yes, he has given more than 20 million dollars to the eradication of cancer and to celebrating the lives of cancer survivors, but he has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to causes in his second home country, The Bahamas.
In a Peter Nygard 50th Anniversary television interview with JCN’s CEO, Wendall Jones, on JCN in Nassau, Bahamas, Nygard was asked a series of questions about his success and his generosity.
Jones said to him, “You spent a considerable amount of money sponsoring various teams for several of the Olympic Games. You sponsored Boxing, Volleyball and all the rest of it. Why did you do it? Why did you think you had to do it?”
Nygard responded, “Because I could. Because I wanted to. Because it was a measurement of my success. My measurement of my success was not about how much money I made. My measurement was about how I spent that money, how I used that money.
“I have to tell the story of what brought that on. I was poor. I don’t know if there is anybody on this island who lived as poorly as I did. There was no running water, no electricity, no indoor toilets. And where we lived [in Canada] was 40 degrees below zero, so it was a little tougher. At nights we would stay in a small tin shack.
“I remember how hungry I was. I remember the priest, God bless his soul, who used to come in every second day to teach us English. I remember the words and the things he taught us, but it my mind I always wondered where the food was. When he held up a celery, my mouth would water. My mouth watered over celery.
“I don’t know how many people’s mouths would water for celery and a piece of carrot, but that is how hungry I was. When I could say the word celery three times correctly, I got a chance to eat it. I would grab it and eat like a hungry dog. That was hunger.
“My best friend was a Chinese boy. The reason he was my best friend is because his dad had a Chinese restaurant, and he had these chickens hanging in the window. The closer I could get to food, the better I liked him—the better a friend he became. He took me in the back room, and I remember there was a toaster.
“One day he put two slices of white bread in it. I can remember the smell of it as it toasted. Up pops the toast. He takes one of them and butters it. He eats it in front of me, and I am watching every mouthful. I am waiting for mine. He takes the second one, butters it, and eats that one as well. He ate what I thought was my toast.
“I learned one key lesson from that. If I ever had that second piece of toast, I’m going to share it. I have been sharing my second piece of toast ever since. I have been sharing Nygard Cay. I have been sharing my medical stuff.
“I never want anyone to go through that horrendous feeling of someone being so greedy for themselves and leaving somebody else stranded when they could help them.”
As it relates to his tremendous giving to sports programs in The Bahamas, Nygard said, “My ambition was to be a track and field athlete when I was growing up. I am so close to the world of athletics, and then I saw this tremendous skill level here; the genes that we have here per capita is perhaps one of the best in the world.
“It just gave me such a thrill to live vicariously through these athletes—the Golden Girls, the Golden Knights, Volleyball players and Boxers—it didn’t matter which athletes came; I was their supporter.
In The Bahamas, Nygard has sponsored regattas, a Boxing hopeful in achieving his Olympics dream, the Golden Girls and other Bahamas Olympic teams over the years. He gave $10,000 to an Andros youth camp.
Nygard’s countless giving is too numerous to mention: examples include thousands of dollars given to our special needs school, to golfing, to sailing programs, to boxing, to volleyball development, to community programs and to Junkanoo. He’s also generously given to aid specific individuals with medical challenges likeBahamian icon Winston Gus Cooper, Carlos Mackey, and others.
Peter Nygard always has and continues to give away millions of dollars of his wealth.
