The UpTake: Today's discount retailers, such as flash-sales sites, owe a debt to innovators like Alfred Marshall, the founder of Marshalls department store, who proved back in the 1950s that off-price fashion would fly off the shelves.
Retail entrepreneur Alfred Marshall, who founded Marshalls department store in the mid-1950s with the motto “Brand Names for Less,” has died at 94.
Marshall, who died Saturday in Boca Raton, Florida, was a World War II veteran who started out operating a fruit stand before opening a grocery business in Beverly, Massachusetts that also sold wholesale cosmetics and baby goods. He built an addition that became the first Marshalls with financing from two partners back in the mid 1950s, his son Ronald Marshall told the New York Times today.
The concept was to buy from other fashion apparel retailers the items they no longer wanted—out-of-season, irregular and overstocked goods—and sell them at a discount. The idea came amid a postwar boom in the economy and the rise in growth of American suburbs, addressing a revved-up appetite among consumers for fashionable apparel. In the current era of discount players like Gilt Groupe, offering designer goods for less is an entire retail model in itself, but 60-plus years ago, discount designer goods were cutting edge.
According to Wikipedia, the company also did something else innovative in its first store: While Marshalls itself offered apparel and homewares at low prices, additional floor space was "sublet" to separate sellers who offered customers shoes, hardware and sporting goods, although this ownership of those departments was invisible to the shopper. We see this today in the store-within-store concept.
By 1976, there were 36 Marshalls stores in New England and California owned by Marshall and three partners. That year, the foursome sold the business to the Melville Corporation.
But the fashion discount concept was still in its infancy. The very next year, the first T.J. Maxx stores opened in Auburn and Worcester, Massachusetts, based on a similar concept to Marshalls. (Although the parent company, now called TJX Companies, is older than Marshalls, tracing its history back to 1919 when brothers Max and Morris Feldberg founded what was called the New England Trading Company in Boston.)
By the time TJX Companies bought Marshalls in 1995, T.J. Maxx was the largest off-price retailer, and Marshalls, which had 496 stores, was the second largest. But the onetime rival has continued to grow the brand. There were 904 Marshalls stores at the end of 2012.
via fashion - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNFRqC71T4ynbjyojmzEAkxF_Uo1jQ&url=http://upstart.bizjournals.com/entrepreneurs/hot-shots/2014/01/02/marshalls-founder-alfred-marshall-dies.html?page%3Dall
0 意見:
張貼留言