Type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Retail |
Founded | 1907 |
Headquarters | Dallas, Texas, USA |
Products | Clothing, footwear, furniture, jewelry, beauty products, electronics, and housewares. |
Owner(s) | TPG Capital Warburg Pincus |
Website | www.neimanmarcus.com |
Neiman Marcus, formerly Neiman-Marcus, is a luxury specialty retail department store operated by the Neiman Marcus Group in the United States. The company is headquartered in the One Marcus Square building in Downtown Dallas, Texas,[1] and competes with other department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys New York, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale's. The Neiman Marcus Group also owns Bergdorf Goodman specialty retail department stores on Fifth Avenue in New York City and a direct marketing division, Neiman Marcus Direct, which operates catalogue and online operations under the Horchow, Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman names.
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Herbert Marcus, Sr., a former buyer with Dallas' Sanger Brothers department store, had left his previous job to found a new business with his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband, A. L. Neiman, then employees of Sanger Brothers competitor A. Harris and Co.. In 1907 the trio found themselves with $25,000 from the successful sales-promotion firm they had built in Atlanta, Georgia, and two potential investments into which to invest the funds. Opting to reject the unknown "sugary soda pop business," the three entrepreneurs chose instead to return to Dallas to found a retail business rather than take a chance on the fledgling Coca-Cola company.[2] For this reason, early company CEO Stanley Marcus was quoted in 1957 as saying in jest that Neiman Marcus was "founded on bad business judgment."[3] The store, established on September 10, 1907, was lavishly furnished and stocked with clothing of a quality that was not commonly found in Texas. Within a few weeks, the store's initial inventory, mostly acquired on a buying trip to New York made by Carrie, was completely sold out. Oil-rich Texans, welcoming the opportunity to flaunt their wealth in more sophisticated fashion than was previously possible, flocked to the new store. In spite of a nationwide financial panic set off only a few weeks after its opening, Neiman Marcus was instantly successful, and its first several years of operation were quite profitable.[4]
In 1914 a fire destroyed the Neiman Marcus store and all of its merchandise. A temporary store was set up and opened in 17 days.[5] By the end of 1914, Neiman Marcus opened in its new, permanent location at the corner of Main Street and Ervay Street. With the opening of the flagship Neiman Marcus Building, the store increased its product selection to include accessories, lingerie, and children's clothing, as well as expanding the women's apparel department. In its first year at the new building, Neiman Marcus recorded a profit of $40,000 on sales of $700,000, nearly twice the totals reached in its last year at the original location.[4]
In 1927 the store expanded and Neiman Marcus premiered the first weekly retail fashion show in the United States.[6] The store staged a show called "One Hundred Years of Texas Fashions" in 1936 in honor of the centennial of Texas' independence from Mexico. A later profile of the store, "Neiman Marcus of Texas," described the "grandiose and elaborate" gala, noting, "It was on this occasion that one of the most critical among the store's guests, Mrs. Edna Woolman Chase, editor of Vogue, expressing the sentiment of the store's starry-eyed clientele, told the local press:[7]
“ | I dreamed all my life of the perfect store for women. Then I saw Neiman Marcus, and my dream came true. | ” |
—Edna Woolman Chase, editor of Vogue (1936), quoted in Commentary 1957 |
In 1929 the store began offering menswear. During the 1930s and 1940s Neiman Marcus began to include less expensive clothing lines along with its high-end items, in response to the Great Depression and following war years. Between 1942 and 1944, sales at Neiman Marcus grew from $6 million to $11 million.[4] Despite a major fire in 1946, the store continued to profit.
Herbert Marcus, Sr., died in 1950, and Carrie Neiman died two years later, leaving Stanley Marcus in charge of the company's operations.[4]
The 1950s saw the addition of a $1.6 million store on Preston Road, a 63,000 square foot plant with decor "inspired by the art and culture of Southwestern Indians" and "colors ... copied from Indian weaving, pottery, and sand paintings"; the themed decor included Kachina figures on colored-glass murals and an Alexander Calder mobile named "Mariposa,"[8] the Spanish word for butterfly. Art likewise was used as inspiration for Stanley Marcus' seasonal campaigns to solicit new colors in fabrics, as he did the year that he borrowed 20 Paul Gauguin paintings — many of which had never been publicly exhibited — from collectors around the world and had the vivid colors translated into dyes for wool, silk, and leather. Area teachers cited the Gauguin exhibits as spurring a dramatic increase in art study.[9]
In the 1950s and '60s Gittings operated a portrait studio in Neiman Marcus. Clients included Lyndon Johnson, Howard Hughes, and the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family.
The company continued its extravagant marketing efforts (including the launch of His and Her gifts in the famous Christmas Book) with the inauguration of Fortnight in 1957. The Fortnight was an annual presentation of fashions and culture from a particular country, held in late October and early November of each year, and was one of the most anticipated events in Dallas. It brought fashion, dignitaries, celebrities, exotic food and extravagant celebrations to the downtown store for 29 years.[4][10]
Neiman Marcus opened its first store outside the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex in downtown Houston in 1957. The freestanding store was later replaced with a new anchor store located in the Houston Galleria in 1970. In 1965 the Preston Center store was closed and a new store, more than twice as big, was opened at NorthPark Center. Another branch in Fort Worth was also opened. By 1967 the four Neiman Marcus stores in operation were generating annual sales of $58.5 million, and the company's profit for that year was in excess of $2 million.[4] In 1968 the company merged with Broadway-Hale Stores, Inc., which enabled Neiman Marcus to expand at a much faster pace than would have been possible as an independent entity. In 1971, the first Neiman Marcus outside Texas opened in Bal Harbour, Florida. In subsequent years stores opened in over 30 cities across the United States, including Chicago, Atlanta, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, St. Louis, Boston, and Las Vegas.
In 1988 the company's name was officially changed from Neiman-Marcus to Neiman Marcus and the current logo was adopted.
In the late 1990s, the company started a small boutique called the "Galleries of Neiman Marcus" which sold jewelry, gifts, and home accessories. The concept struggled and ultimately all three locations, Seattle, Cleveland, and Phoenix, were shuttered. Some believe the locations were wrong and Neiman Marcus officials have hinted the concept might be resurrected. In 1999, neimanmarcus.com, and the store's online gift registry, debuted under the control of Neiman Marcus Group's Neiman Marcus Direct division.
Stanley Marcus died on January 22, 2002. He had served as president and chairman of the board for the company. Marcus had been the architect behind the fashion shows, New York advertising for a strictly regional chain, in-store art exhibits, and the Christmas catalog with its outlandish His-and-Hers gifts, including vicuña coats, a pair of airplanes, "Noah's Ark" (including pairs of animals), camels, and live tigers.[3][5][11]
Over the last 20 years, ownership of Neiman Marcus has passed through several hands. In June 1987, the company was spun off from its retail parent, Carter Hawley Hale Stores, and became a publicly listed company. General Cinema, later to become Harcourt General, still had a roughly 60% controlling interest until 1999, when Neiman Marcus was fully spun off from its parent company. On May 2, 2005, Neiman Marcus Group was the subject of a leveraged buyout (LBO), selling itself to two private equity firms, Texas Pacific Group and Warburg Pincus.[12]
The "Neiman-Marcus Collection," comprising early account books, advertising and Christmas Catalog layouts, files on charity activities, past awards and presentations, and a collection of Stanley Marcus's personal memorabilia, among many other items, is located in the Texas & Dallas History & Archives Division, 7th Floor, Main Library, Dallas Public Library, where it may be consulted by researchers.
Lloyd E. Lenard (1922–2008) wrote a master's degree thesis on the impact of Neiman Marcus on the American Southwest while he was a student at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Neiman Marcus hired Lenard to its management training program, but he soon returned to his native Louisiana, where he worked, first in advertising, and then insurance.
Unlike many of its department-store contemporaries, Neiman Marcus is still in operation today under the original name and is still headquartered in the city where it began. The Neiman Marcus Group comprises the Specialty Retail stores division — which includes Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman — Cusp (a contemporary boutique format) and the Direct Marketing division, Neiman Marcus Direct. These retailers offer upscale assortments of apparel, accessories, jewelry, beauty and decorative home products. The company operates 40 Neiman Marcus stores across the United States and two Bergdorf Goodman stores, in Manhattan. Neiman Marcus' largest market is the South Florida MSA, where they operate five stores. The company also operates 20 Last Call clearance centers and three Horchow Finale Furniture Outlets. These store operations total more than five million square feet (500,000 m²) gross. Competitors in the luxury retail segment include Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Barneys New York, Lord and Taylor and Dillard's.
Neiman Marcus Direct conducts both print catalog and online operations under the Neiman Marcus, Horchow and Bergdorf Goodman brand names. Under the Neiman Marcus brand, Neiman Marcus Direct primarily offers women's apparel, accessories and home furnishings. Horchow offers upscale home furnishings, linens, decorative accessories and tabletop items. They have also launched a new blog [(www.insite.neimanmarcus.com)] outlining the latest news in the fashion world and beyond.
Until recently, The Neiman Marcus Group owned majority interest in Kate Spade LLC, a manufacturer of handbags and accessories. In October 2006, the company purchased all minority interest for approximately $59.4 million, and in November 2006 sold 100% ownership to Liz Claiborne, Inc. for approximately $121.5 million. Another recent divestiture was a majority interest in Gurwitch Products LLC, which manufactures Laura Mercier cosmetics, to Alticor Inc., for approximately $40.8 million.[13]
In the fall of 2004, Neiman Marcus launched a new store within a store called The Showroom of Neiman Marcus. This department sells furniture and home collections previously only available through the Neiman Marcus catalogues The Horchow Collection and NM by Mail. The eight Neiman Marcus stores that house the collection are located in Plano-Dallas MSA (Willow Bend), San Francisco (Union Square), Scottsdale (Fashion Square), Boston (Back Bay), Chicago (Michigan Avenue), Oak Brook (Oakbrook Center), Miami (Bal Harbour Shops) and Minneapolis (Nicollet Mall).
Horchow, a furniture brand owned by Neiman Marcus, is sold in a limited number of Neiman Marcus locations. There are also Horchow Finale Stores, with two locations. Though Horchow items are also found in Neiman Marcus Last Call stores, the Horchow Finale stores focus on furniture & home items. The two remaining Horchow Finale Stores are in the Dallas, Texas area. The original Horchow Finale location closed in 2009 to make way for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. The Inwood Village location of Horchow Finale became a showcase Neiman Marcus Last Call in March 2010.
Neiman Marcus Last Call Clearance Center is Neiman Marcus' outlet store. They are located throughout the United States at a number of outlet centers, with many found in outlet centers operated by The Mills Corporation and Chelsea Premium Outlets. They range from 20,000 - 45,000 square feet (4,200 m2) of selling space and sell women's, men's and children's apparel, shoes, jewelry, handbags, furniture, luggage, gifts and home accessories that were previously sold in Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman stores, on NeimanMarcus.com, and in the Horchow catalog at discounts of 30% to 65% off original Neiman Marcus and catalog prices.
Neiman Marcus credit card holders receive an additional 5% discount off their entire purchase at Last Call Clearance Centers when they use their Neiman Marcus credit card (other credit cards including American Express, MasterCard, and Visa are also accepted). Currently, there are 24 Last Call Clearance Centers in the US. The newest location opened at Gurnee Mills in Gurnee, Illinois in May 2009.
Neiman Marcus sold its store credit card business to HSBC in mid-2005; however, Neiman Marcus sued HSBC over fees and interest rates in March 2008.[14] The lawsuit was settled in May 2008.[15] Fifty percent of Neiman's transactions are conducted using their private-label cards because Neiman Marcus accepts only its proprietary store credit cards, American Express cards, cash or check in their stores. (However, between fall 2005 and mid-2006, Neiman Marcus briefly tested the acceptance of Visa and MasterCard at a store in Missouri, as well as in several in-store restaurants in California, and Neiman Marcus has accepted all major credit cards for online purchases since their website opened in 1999.)
According to the April 26, 2007 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Neiman Marcus is testing a co-branded credit card issued by HSBC with some of their top customers. The card, which runs on the American Express network, was expected to have been issued in 2008. The settled lawsuit between Neiman Marcus and HSBC may have delayed the new co-branded card's full launch.
There are 42 Neiman Marcus stores in Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia. The newest opened in Bellevue, Washington, in September 2009.
The two Horchow Finale stores are located in the Dallas – Fort Worth Metroplex in Grapevine, Texas and Plano.
The 26 Last Call stores are in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia.
Since 1939, Neiman Marcus has issued an annual Christmas catalog, which gets much free publicity from the national media for a tradition of unusual and extravagant gifts not sold in its stores. Some have included the 'his and hers' themed item, trips and cars (see below).
In 1952, Stanley Marcus introduced a new tradition of having extravagant and unusual gifts in each year's Christmas catalog, The Christmas Book; the idea was sparked when journalist Edward R. Murrow contacted Marcus to ask if the store would be offering anything unusual that might interest his radio listeners; Marcus invented on the spot an offering of a live Black Angus bull accompanied by a sterling silver barbecue cart, subsequently altering the catalog to include his new idea, priced at $1,925.[16][17][18] At one point, the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog carried the distinction of being the item most stolen from recipients' mailboxes, prompting a Chicago postmaster to suggest the company switch to enclosing the catalogs in plain brown wrappers.[19]
Other Fantasy Gifts:
pre-1965[18]
1964
1965[18]
1970[20]
pre-1972[21]
1972[21]
1974[17]
1975[22]
1978
1979[24]
1986
1998
1999[24]
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2008
2009
The Christmas Book is available at stores for $15. However, the $15 will be credited back to customers with their first purchase from the catalog.
In 1961 Neiman-Marcus in Dallas was one of two stores in the nation — the other being Wanamaker's in Philadelphia — to offer computer-based assistance in selecting Christmas gifts. The process worked by comparing information on the recipient to a computerized list of the 2,200 items available at Neiman-Marcus, then providing a printout of the 10 best suggestions. One person testing the computer filled out the questionnaire as if he were President John F. Kennedy shopping for gifts in excess of $1,000 for his wife, ; the computer suggested a yacht.[25]
During the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, Marilyn Lovell, wife of astronaut Jim Lovell, who was the Command Module Pilot, received, as a Christmas present, a mink coat that was delivered to her by a Neiman Marcus driver in a Rolls-Royce car. The coat was wrapped in royal blue wrapping paper with two Styrofoam balls — one for the Earth and the other for the Moon — and had a card that read, "To Marilyn, from the Man in the Moon."[26]
Neiman Marcus has often offered automobiles in its holiday catalogs. These are usually coordinated with manufacturers as a publicity stunt, though the cars themselves are normally special versions unavailable from other sources and produced in limited numbers.
Neiman Marcus' international notoriety has led to its inclusion in many popular media. Television sitcoms can quickly convey someone's wealth by making the character a Neiman-Marcus shopper, as was done with Blair Warner of the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life. Similarly, in an episode of A Different World in which the well-to-do Whitley Gilbert must return all her credit cards to her father, she is especially loath to give up her Neiman's card and reminisces wistfully over past N-M purchases.[27] The store was mentioned widely on the show Dharma and Greg as being a source for the upscale mother's clothes; moreover, the family's pair of Rottweilers are named Neiman and Marcus. A character on the TV series Gilmore Girls compares his ordinary measuring tape to that of the haughty matriarch, Emily Gilmore, telling her daughter: "Your mother got hers at Neiman Marcus. It’s platinum with gold leaf — it costs more than my car!"[28]. Hilary Banks in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air also frequented Neiman's. In an episode of Frasier, Niles's wife Maris is said to be en route to Dallas which she regards as her holy land because of it being the site of the first Neiman Marcus. It is also mentioned in the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when Buffy says that Sunnydale is "two hours on the freeway from Neiman Marcus."
The store is mentioned in a number of minor ways in other media. It is said that the shopping scenes from Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" were filmed at a Neiman Marcus store, and the lyrics mention shopping at Neiman-Marcus after discovering her boyfriend/husband cheating on her. The computer game NetHack involves a buried joke in which the player is told, "You hear Neiman and Marcus arguing" while hallucinating on a game level that includes a shop. American parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic released a song entitled "I'll Sue Ya" on his album Straight Outta Lynwood that satirizes America's fame for frivolous lawsuits; in the song, the singer jokes about various lawsuits he has filed, including suing Neiman Marcus because they "put up their Christmas decorations way out of season."
The chain is also mentioned in the Steve Martin and John Candy comedy film "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles". When Martin's character is going over his credit cards, after he and Candy's character have been robbed, he remarks "And, I've got a Neiman-Marcus card in case we want to buy a gift for somebody."
In the song "Emotionless" on rapper Jim Jones' album, Hustler's P.O.M.E. (Product of My Environment) mentions Neiman Marcus in his line: "Neiman Marcus I'm in it, shopping and, $5,000 spent on pants, man."
In the Dennis the Menace cartoon strip, the store appears occasionally under the caricature "Deiman-Harcus."
In a dig at 2008 Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's expensive campaign wardrobe, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee referred to Palin in a pun as "Neiman Marxist" in promoting a web site called DressLikePalin.com, where visitors were shown the approximate price of items in the candidate's wardrobe and comparisons to what health care or work-clothing costs the same money could have paid.[29] The same week, humorist Steve Young posted a satirical fake press-release claiming that Neiman Marcus was in talks to develop a Palinwear clothing line for its stores following the November 4 elections, including various fictitious clothing lines that spoofed the candidate's outdoorsman husband, their unmarried and pregnant daughter, and her assertion that Russia's proximity to her home state of Alaska gave her foreign-relations experience.[30]
The store is featured in an urban legend involving a supposed recipe for its popular chocolate chip cookie.[31] In the legend, a woman and her daughter enjoy a cookie while shopping at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, Texas, and ask for the recipe. The waiter informs her there will be a "two-fifty" charge, which the woman interprets as $2.50. Upon receiving her VISA statement, she is shocked to discover she has been charged $250.00 instead. In revenge, she photocopies the recipe and urges her friends to distribute it for free to everyone they know so that the store will make no further profit on its sale. Because the story typically was passed along as a photocopy, it falls in the legend subcategory of Xeroxlore. Later, with the advent of the Internet, it reemerged as an infamous chain e-mail,
Folklorists have pointed out three chief holes in the story:
Although the story is untrue, Neiman Marcus published a cookie recipe to quell rumors. There is also another cookie recipe that is also published on the company's website that is slightly different than the above. Kevin Garvin wrote the recipe in 1995. It is featured on the company's website for free. It also is in the Neiman Marcus Cookbook (Clarkson Potter, $45) by Mr. Garvin and John Harrisson.
Due to the high prices of much of its merchandise, Neiman Marcus is sometimes called "Needless Markup."[33]
Some animal-rights activists claim Neiman Marcus' fur sales contribute to the unnecessary deaths of millions of animals every year. While the company claims it is humane to farm animals for fur, other groups, such as PETA, cite the fact there are no laws ensuring humane care on US fur farms.[34]