(Editor’s note: The DAILY TRIBUNE Social Set section is pleased and honored to share the eulogy delivered by Bienvenido “Donnie” Tantoco III during the High Mass held at the National Shrine of the Sacred Heart to commemorate the birth centenary of his grandmother, Gliceria “Glecy” Tantoco, foundress of the Rustan’s Department Store.)
A very blessed morning to all of you. Thank you so very much for being here to pray for, to remember, to give our respect and to express our individual and collective gratitude and love for GRT on the occasion of what would have been her 100th birthday.
It’s so beautiful and wonderful to see us like this in a shrine dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as one community, one church and one corporate family celebrating GRT. We are all beneficiaries of her extraordinary life.
I prayed for guidance when Ninay Nedy (Nedy Tantoco) asked me to speak about Lola Glecy during this most special Mass.
And then I realized something that I was not so aware of before. To some extent, we have drifted, I have drifted, from GRT’s founding purpose for Rustan’s. And we can be a lot more aligned with her way and her core values.
The world today is extremely different from what GRT faced. But still, more than ever, I believe we need to connect our work, our character and our values, with roots planted in Rustan’s by GRT. So, the purpose of my talk right now is to help replant seeds of GRT in the soils of our minds, hearts and souls.
We all know GRT spent almost every waking hour of her 70 years working. Her work ethic was supernatural and superhuman. Perhaps that’s why she produced more greatness in one relatively short lifetime than others who lived much longer than her.
A higher purpose
She worked hard not only because she had discipline. She worked hard because she had a purpose. She had a clear North Star and a higher purpose beyond making money, even beyond giving her family the most comfortable life and the best education.
What was her life purpose? Not from what she said, but from the example of what she did. I think her purpose was to consistently elevate the lives of the men and women who worked with her. She did not help her people by giving them handouts or freebies.
She transformed the lives of people by giving them opportunities that at the end of the day were also humongous challenges.
She challenged her people. GRT was very demanding, but if you were humble, open-minded and hungry, she would enter into your world, figure out your strengths and leverage those strengths to that hilt.
She did not work with the smartest and most talented people in the world for the very reason that she felt that they would be unteachable. She focused her coaching, her mentoring and her transforming on the least talented and the most teachable. And she would be the only one in their lives of such people to see the genius in them that everyone else in their life missed.
And she would cultivate that genius in that stretching, squeezing, demanding, inspiring and nurturing GRT women. She had a very special sense of hidden potential, especially amongst those who did not come from the best schools, the best families, or the most ideal environments. She was the champion of the underdog.
She created championship teams out of underdogs. Beyond her employees, she brought this transforming and cultivating of the genius and creativity that exists in everyone, also to her small suppliers, many of whom were partisans. She helped her neighbors by inspiring them to make pastillas to be sold in her store.
The genesis of Our Very Own was how she trained local artisans to produce the final quality that they could be so good that it could be included not only in her store but also in the first and only Filipino fair to be staged in Bloomingdale’s New York.
Her purpose, her legacy are thousands and thousands of men and women who can say that they discovered power, skills, and capabilities they did not know they had. They can say, GRT had a 10x impact on my life. I became 10x as large and as fruitful as I ever thought I could be.
What she showed us was working with purpose, vision, imagination, in an almost entrepreneurial and artisanal way. Working with a purpose that can simply be called greatness benefits many. Greatness that transforms the lives of employees and artisans.
Relationship with our Lord
I think we can plant this GRT seed more deeply and more intentionally in the soils of our hearts, minds and souls. And if we are internally transformational, then we will be externally transformational.
We will collectively regain our title as the most innovative, pioneering and transformative retailer in the country. That’s the first one.
The second is how GRT has this beautiful, close and constantly strong relationship with our Lord. Rustan’s is a legend when it comes to being the only company where the first core value is faith. Faith is a higher core value for us than others like integrity, innovation, excellence, service and teamwork.
Faith trumps all of that. We have retained habits that Lolo and Lola originated, such as dedicating every store, every warehouse, and every office to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mama Mary. The only vacation I ever saw Lola Glecy take, the only rest she allowed herself aside from mahjong, was her pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and Our Lady of Lourdes in France. This was the only holiday she aspired to have. Every other kind of holiday was a distraction from her work and her calling.
When I traveled with her, the first thing she would do upon arrival in the city was to go to a church to pray. I don’t know what she was praying for, but I believe that she was not asking for anything. She was expressing her thanks, receiving guidance and making her work worth offering to our Lord.
Perhaps that’s why Lola worked so much. Work was her love language. Work was her love made visible to our Lord.
Lola’s example makes me examine my relationship with God and my relationship with my work. Am I working out of duty or desire? Am I working true to compliance or real commitment?
Today, on the occasion of Lola’s 100th, I wish to help connect Rustan’s more deeply to faith and our individual and collective relationship with God. It starts in the small daily things, like praying in our meetings, not in a robotic, half-hearted way, but in a genuinely praising, trusting and surrendering way.
Lolo and Lola worked hard, but at the end of the day, all they did was produce the loaves and fish that they offered. The Lord received their offer and did this blessing of multiplication of the fruits of their work.
Insatiable curiosity
Brothers and sisters, let us never be so proud to think that what we have accomplished is something that we can claim as our own.
Like Lolo and Lola, let us always remember to be humble, to be grateful and to know that until the very end of our life, learning and giving never stops. No matter how much we have learned and given, we can still do more learning and more giving, and yes, more serving.
A life of faith, at the end of the day, is a life of service.
Related to learning, the third about Lola was her insatiable curiosity. She was so curious about her customers. She was like a sociologist who understood her customers not only as a demographic, or an average basket in a transaction, but also as human beings with hearts, minds, souls, dreams, struggles, aspirations, loved ones, and underserved physical, mental and emotional needs.
I was with Lola Glecy on a buying trip in Europe, and she saw a bag. She asked me to get her a postcard. On that postcard, she wrote a customer and said, I am here in Florence, and I saw this bag. I thought of you, and I ordered it with you in mind. That bag was sold even before it arrived in Manila. She was also curious about other worlds that have nothing to do with retail, such as art and music.
She was super-inspired by her visit to Milan and the experience of listening to operas and concerts in places like La Scala. Her curiosity made art and music part of her aesthetic development and her retail craft. She and Lolo were the first to put an art gallery and workshop inside a department store. I believe ahead of any department store in the world. And then, to round off the experience of enjoying art, she created a restaurant called La Fontanella.
She looked at the San Honoré and decided to do the unthinkable, the crazy idea of putting San Honoré experience in her store.
She put fashion boutiques along a San Honoré-like power aisle, which she called Designer’s Boulevard. And at the end of this most amazing, high and stylish street, inside the store, she created a place called Place Elegante. To enhance the French experience, she asked her kids to develop Le Bon Appetit, and she also created an apothecary called Le Drame.
Where shopping is a pleasure
And when you put it all together, she realized that what she was offering was an experience. Products and brands are just characters in the experience that she would create and curate. Only now do we say that retail is experience.
For Lola, it was always experience. That’s why in the ‘60s, she said, Rustan’s is where shopping is a pleasure. It is an experience of wholesome pleasure and joy.
How curious are we today? Are we overusing our intellect and underutilizing our imagination? Are we becoming all about numbers and not about vision? Let us connect ourselves to GRT, her purpose, which is greatness that benefits many, especially the underdogs in our midst. She was a woman of great faith, and she surrendered and dedicated everything to our Lord daily. And thirdly, she was a woman whose creative ingenuity and whose pioneering ideas that transformed Filipino retail came from her curiosity.
These are the three seeds and roots that I wish we would all embrace. It’s the GRT way, and it will help us navigate and be fruitful in these most exciting and challenging times.
Lola Glecy’s life teaches us that eternal life does not begin in heaven. It begins with the good deeds we do today, whose impact lasts beyond our lifetime, up to 29 years or more, after we are gone. Let us pursue greatness that benefits many, not by being custodians of the past, but by being brave and purposeful stewards of the future. Happy Birthday in Heaven, Lola Glecy.
Thank you for so many, many infinite blessings. Maraming salamat.