Social Studies: Mel and Jan Goldsmith

Mel and Jan Goldsmith have been real estate agents in Sarasota for 17 years, but, before that, they were globetrotting partners in the fashion industry. We sat down with the two in their home on Longboat Key to talk about their lives in the city, working for Calvin Klein and traveling the world for the sake of fashion.

Mel
My mother’s and father’s families were in the retail fashion industry. They owned stores, so I grew up in the business and I always loved fashion — I always knew that was what I wanted to do. While I was in college, at the University of Memphis, I started working for Federated Department Stores, starting in fashion merchandising. I became a buyer for about three years and then ended up going with one of the vendors I was buying from, Faded Glory Jeans. They were the first ones to do pre-washed fashion denim with embroidery and studs and leather trim.

After also working for Levi Strauss and Brittania Jeans, I moved to New York in 1982 to work for Calvin Klein, specifically for his partner, Carl Rosen, who owned the denim division. I was the vice president of men’s and young men’s jeans. On my first day of work, I met Jan.

Jan
I grew up in New York, about 35 minutes out of the city in Long Island. My father was in the piece good fashion industry. I was always interested in fashion. Ever since I was a young girl, I loved to shop and loved clothes.

I worked with Kathy Harwick, and Tom Ford was her assistant at that time — that was very exciting. She used to do fashion shows on CNN Saturday mornings. You would see other well-known designers, and they would show their different collections. That was probably my most exciting job.

We met in 1982, but we didn’t date for many years, until about seven years later, when we met once again in a restaurant. We worked in the Garment Center, and it was the thing to go out to all the newest, trendiest restaurants, and that’s how we met. There was a hot restaurant opening on the Upper West Side called Sfuzzi’s, and we ran into each other and said we should get together sometime — and we’ve been together ever since.

It was like “Sex and the City” — you get dressed up and go to the hottest new restaurants. The restaurants wanted a certain age, a certain dress and a certain circle. We had access to all the wonderful clothes, and our friends were the same, because we were all in the industry. 

We lived in Manhattan and we worked in the Garment Center. It was an interesting life, living in New York and spending our summers in the Hamptons. I had to travel a lot, so we would go to Aspen during the holidays, and a lot of our traveling was searching for fashion. In the summer and fall we would go to Europe and we would do a two-week trip and go to London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Düsseldorf and Cologne. We would go to all the clothing shows, shop the retail stores, go to clubs and literally buy clothes off of people — if it was something we wanted to make samples of, we’d meet them the next day at their hotel or wherever and give them lots of money for that piece we wanted. We would spend weekends in Vegas, Dallas, Miami — there was lots of traveling.

We ended up moving to Sarasota in 1997. Mel’s mother had passed away in May of that year, and his father was 87. He wanted to get out of the Garment Center. I was getting ready to turn 50, and I knew it was the time to make a change. I had been traveling for more than 30 years. I was always on the plane, and it was time to consider making a change, and that was really what promoted it. I always knew that real estate was my next career. I had always enjoyed property and so on, and being in the sales business, it was natural.

We leased our condo in Manhattan to the Polish Embassy for four years and moved here — we thought we’d give it four years to make sure we had made the right decision. My parents moved down here from Memphis, Tenn., in 1968 when I was a freshman in college. I spent my summers, spring breaks, all the holidays down here.

We decided to do real estate as a team. We went to real estate school together, started it within two weeks of moving here and went to night school. Michael Saunders, herself, interviewed us, and we’ve been with Michael Saunders & Co. for more than 16 years.

When we’re not selling real estate, we like to go boating. I’ve been a boater, a fisherman and have been into water sports my whole life. Seeing homes from the water is such a different way to view the home than from the street. We sell a lot of waterfront property, so we’ll take our clients out on the boat — it’s a whole different perspective from the water.

We love to go to the theater. We go to all the plays here at Florida Studio Theatre, Asolo, Van Wezel, and we still go to New York and sometimes up to Tampa for theater. We love Broadway. Entertainment, music, fashion, dining out — we still love and do all of the same things we did back then.

We really do love living here in Sarasota. It’s funny; I’ve lived in what some could say are the best cities in the United States: New York, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, and I’ve traveled enough to know that this is a very special place. For it’s size, the culture and the beauty, it offers a lot. It’s a good place to live.