Stanley Marcus

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Stanley Marcus (April 20, 1905 – January 22, 2002) was an early president (1950–1972) and later chairman of the board (1972–1976) of the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus in Dallas, Texas. The Advertising Hall of Fame notes: "Stanley Marcus was among the most important figures in the history of American retail merchandising and marketing. Through his many innovations, he transformed a local Dallas clothing store into an international brand synonymous with high style, fashion and gracious service."[1]

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[edit] Personal life and early career

Marcus was born the son of Herbert Marcus, Sr., who later became a co-founder of the original Neiman Marcus store with his sister, Carrie Neiman. Stanley was the first of four sons born to Herbert, Sr., and his wife, the former Minnie Lichtenstein; the pregnancy indirectly led to the eventual founding of Neiman-Marcus, as Herbert Sr. did not feel the raise he was offered by Sanger's was sufficient to support a family and thus left the store where he was employed to strike out on his own.[2] Returning from two years spent in Atlanta, Georgia, establishing a successful sales-promotion business, the Marcuses and Neimans used the $25,000 made in the sale of that business to establish their store at the corner of Elm and Murphy.

One of Stanley Marcus's first jobs was with the Saturday Evening Post as a salesman, bringing him into the family's business tradition from a young age. When he began his university, it was at Amherst College, but left due to restrictions that prevented Jews from joining clubs or fraternities.[3] After receiving a B.A. degree from Harvard in 1925, he began his career at the retailer that same year as a simple stockboy organizing inventory, but upon beginning in sales, quickly outstripped other sales staff.[4] He went back to study at Harvard Business School in 1926, going on to earn an M.B.A. degree, and became a member of the historically Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau. He married the former Mary "Billie" Cantrell in 1932; Mrs. Marcus initially worked in the N-M Sports Shop department until she retired in 1936 after the birth of their first child, Jerrie, followed two years later by twins Richard and Wendy.[2]

Marcus was responsible for a number of innovations at the Dallas retailer. He created the annual Neiman-Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in Fashion, beginning in 1938, which led to the Neiman-Marcus Exposition, a fall fashion show held annually from 1938 to 1970, then periodically thereafter.[2] He then introduced weekly fashion shows — the first American haute couture boutique to do so[5] — and made his the first department store to host concurrent art exhibitions not at some off-site museum, but at the store itself.[6]In 1939, he established the annual Christmas Catalogue, which in 1951 offered the first of its extravagant "His & Hers Gifts," starting with a matching pair of vicuña coats, and going on to include matching bathtubs, a pair of Beechcraft airplanes, "Noah's Ark" (including pairs of animals), camels, and live tigers.[6][1][7][4]

For all his professional emphasis on glitz and glamour, he made another, very different mark on the American fashion industry when he was asked to join the War Production Board in Washington, D.C. on December 27, 1941, less than three weeks after the United States entered World War II. Ineligible for military service due to his age, he instead helped the war effort by championing the conservation of scarce resources normally devoted to fashion trends. He encouraged men to wear drooping socks (to save much-needed rubber[3]) and devised regulations for the manufacture of women's and children's clothing that would enable the nation to divert more textile resources to uniforms and other war-related needs:

   
“
 We settled on certain prohibitions, such as lengths, sleeve fullness, patch pockets, ensembles, sweeps of skirts, widths of belts and depth of hems. ... The restrictions we put into effect froze the fashion silhouette. It effectively prevented any change of skirt length downward and it blocked any extreme new sleeve or collar development, which might have encouraged women to discard existing clothes.
   
”

—Stanley Marcus[8]

[edit] Taking the helm

In 1950, with the death of Herbert Marcus, Sr., Stanley Marcus was elected president and CEO of the company, with Carrie Neiman as chairman of the board. Neiman died in 1953.

Marcus began yet another N-M tradition, the "International Fortnight," in 1957 as a way to attract customers in the lull between the fall fashion rush and the Christmas shopping crunch. The idea was inspired by seeing a store in Stockholm, Sweden that was having a France-themed sales promotion, leading Marcus to propose to the French government a sponsorship of an even more elaborate event in his own store. The initial Fortnight included concurrent events of art, symphonic music, and film at other locations around Dallas, with an Air France jet bringing "writers, painters, government officials, models, and industry leaders." (Biderman, p. 60)[2] In the years following, the Fortnight focused on various other countries and added related food service as well as items from the relevant country in every department, ending in 1986 with the Australian Fortnight.

In 1969, Marcus recommended to the board of directors that the company merge with Broadway-Hale of California in order to have enough capital to expand. Neiman's subsequently became a subsidiary of Carter-Hawley Hale, Inc., and Marcus accepted a position as corporate executive vice president and director of CHH.[9][10] During his time as leader of the store, he had doubled annual profits and nearly tripled annual sales. He retired as Chairman Emeritus in 1975.[11][7]

[edit] Later life

In addition to writing an early column for a Dallas periodical, Marcus was the author of multiple retailing-oriented books, including Minding the Store, Quest for the Best, and His & Hers: The Fantasy World of the Neiman Marcus Catalogue. He was a close friend of other writers, including Jane Trahey, an author and longtime advertising copywriter who at one time worked for Neiman Marcus, and historian David McCullough. A television presenter for the public broadcasting program American Experience, McCullough said he once asked Stanley Marcus — "one of the wisest men I know" — what single problem or aspect of American life, if given a magic wand, he would change, to which Marcus replied, "I'd try to do something about television." When asked why, he explained, "Because," he said, "If you could do something about television, think how far you could go to solve all the other problems."[12]

Marcus was an avid art collector, as well as amassing a collection of masks from around the world. In 2002, the Sotheby's auction house mounted a sale of works from his estate, calling Marcus "an insightful and forward-looking collector and a generous lender whose contributions to exhibitions helped bring notice to the world of Latin American Art during the 40s, 50s and 60s."[13] The auction house also noted that Marcus had begun collecting at age five (influenced by his parents), but had found his interest in good design vastly deepened by a 1925 graduation trip to Europe, where he visited a famed international exhibition of decorative arts and thus was introduced to the earliest works of Art Deco. The Marcus collections included significant works by Mexican artists Rufino Tamayo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Rivera's lesser-known friend and colleague Antonio Ruíz; the American sculptor Alexander Calder, and American painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Marcus was friends with Rivera and Tamayo — playing a major role in bringing one of Tamayo's murals to the Dallas Museum of Art — and one of the first board members of the O'Keeffe museum, which honored him at the time of his death with a paid notice in The New York Times that stated "Stanley's generous support, leadership, enthusiasm, friendship and keen artistic judgment were instrumental in the Museum's inception and success. We shall miss him greatly."[14]

Southern Methodist University hosts a Stanley Marcus collection at its DeGolyer Library in Dallas, including photographs, correspondence, and clippings. The library also houses a collection of more than 5,000 miniature books donated by Marcus.

[edit] Awards and honors

  • Inaugural inductee, Retailing Hall of Fame (2004)
  • Design Patron award, National Design Awards (2001)
  • Inductee, Advertising Hall of Fame (1999)
  • Honoree, Linz Award (1995)
  • Honorary Fellow, American Institute of Architects (1972)
  • French Legion of Honor, presented on March 27, 1949, by Henri Bonnet, French Ambassador to the United States
  • Listed, "The Tallest Texans," Houston Chronicle - profiles of 100 key figures in the state's history[15]
  • Listed, "20th Century Great American Business Leaders," Harvard Business School[16]

[edit] Quotes

Running those poor steers back and forth in the heat is ridiculous…. What they ought to do is put the steers in the convention hall and run the delegates.
—On efforts in Dallas to project a Western image during the Republican National Convention (The New York Times, August 28, 1984}[17]


[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Stanley Marcus, Advertising Hall of Fame
  2. ^ a b c d Rose G. Biderman. They Came to Stay: The Story of the Jews of Dallas 1870-1997. 2002, Eakin Press. (ISBN: 1-57168-648-7)
  3. ^ a b Richard Reeves, "Stanley Marcus Was a Great American" (column), Universal Press Syndicate, January 24, 2002 (retrieved Nov. 6, 2006)
  4. ^ a b "The Man Who Sells Everything", TIME, December 26, 1960
  5. ^ Stanley Marcus Timeline Texas Monthly, March 2002
  6. ^ a b William Schack, "Neiman-Marcus of Texas" (article), Commentary magazine, 24:3, 212-222, September 1957.
  7. ^ a b Historical Timeline, from Neiman Marcus Online
  8. ^ Article by Maria Halkias, The Dallas Morning News, December 25, 2001
  9. ^ Biderman, p. 61
  10. ^ Retail Pioneer Stanley Marcus Passes Away
  11. ^ "Tribute to Mr. Stanley Marcus -- Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson", U.S. House of Representatives, February 5, 2002
  12. ^ "After all we’ve done, think how much more we can do", Current, July 21, 1997
  13. ^ Sotheby's To Offer Property From The Estate Of Stanley Marcus Fall 2002
  14. ^ Marcus, Stanley, The New York Times, January 24, 2002
  15. ^ The Tallest Texans, Houston Chronicle
  16. ^ 20th Century Great American Business Leaders
  17. ^ Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, Compilation © 1988 by James B. Simpson.

[edit] Additional references

[edit] External sites

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