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A part of Fashion
History in america |
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“Women’s’ shoes are
like vegetables,” Philip Wexner used to say, “they may
be ruined by the time they come in.” |
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Mr. Wexner,
who co-founded The Wexner Companies, Inc., parent of the Joseph stores,
was talking about fashion. As his son and current company president
Alfred Wexner explains, “When you buy in Milan in early March
for delivery in August and September, you’re predicting what
the customer is going to want six months down the road. That’s
the risk we’ve been dealing with for the last eighty years and
will be dealing with for the next eighty because that’s what
the fashion business is.” |
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Today’s Joseph stores
in Memphis and Houston are among the top four or five retail operations
in the U.S., outside of the Neiman Marcus group and Saks, in sales
of designer shoes and handbags, as well as jewelry, apparel and cosmetics.
Their success stems directly from two great retail traditions: The
company established by the brothers Philip and Henry Wexner when they
leased their first shoe department in 1930 at Levy’s in downtown
Memphis; and Joseph, a Chicago fashion institution dating to the early
1940’s. The two companies were built on the same approach to
fashion and quality but differed in the way they did business. |
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The Wexner Companies developed as a leased
department operator. “In those days, most specialty stores didn’t
know how to run their shoe departments,” says Alfred Wexner. “They
were afraid of them, and they didn’t want to make the capital
investment. So they found specialists to run them instead. My father
and uncle were shoe business pros, so Levy’s brought them in.” |
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Thus began one of the country’s
most successful leased shoe operations. By the early 1940’s,
Levy’s shoe department was doing over a million dollars annually,
translating to approximately 70,000 pairs of shoes sold at an average
price of $15 per. In today’s dollars, that would have amounted
to $14,000,000 in retail shoe sales |
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“My father was an incredible salesman,”
says Wexner. “Customers knew him and loved him. And he had an
uncanny ability to recognize fashion in advance.” |
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In 1939, the brothers Wexner entered
the Houston market by leasing the shoe department at The Fashion,
a specialty store attracting the city’s most stylish women.
Henry Wexner built up the shoe business there, but when The Fashion
was bought out by Neiman Marcus, which ran its own shoe departments,
the Wexners leased the shoe operation at another upscale women’s’
specialty store, The Smart Shop. By the mid-forties they had expanded
to Fort Worth as well. |
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Henry Wexner died prematurely in 1948.
At that point, Philip Wexner decided it was time to bring the next
generation of his family into the business. Henry Wexner Jr. took
over the Texas operations. In Memphis, twenty-one year-old Alfred
Wexner came on board in 1949 and was joined by his brother-in-law
Hugh Jacobson a year later. |
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For the next few years, Philip Wexner
stayed involved, but the young men learned fast and Philip went into
semi-retirement in 1955. Alfred and Hugh were running the business
by the time they were twenty-five. Two decades later, they were operating
the nation’s largest leased shoe department operation in better
specialty stores.
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By the late fifties, stores all over
the country began approaching The Wexner Companies to take over their
shoe departments, and the business gradually expanded. Then the New
Orleans based Gus Mayer stores brought in the Wexners to operate the
shoe departments in its high-end specialty stores all over the country.
“That one deal was an enormous expansion,” says Wexner.
“Then we went into stores in other cities all over the country
– Buffalo, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Baton Rouge,
Atlanta, Birmingham, Tulsa, Nashville, Scottsdale, La Jolla, Louisville,
Jackson, MS, Lexington, KY, Beaumont, TX. By the late seventies we
were in thirty-five stores, from New York to Southern California,
Oregon to Florida.” |
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In the meantime, Alfred Wexner served
for two years as president of the National Shoe Retailers Association
and was selected in 1979 as National Shoe Retailer of the Year. |
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“And then, at the peak of all
that expansion, we looked around one day and realized that everything
we had was dependent on other businesses,” Wexner says. “And
we also saw those businesses changing. The mid-sized specialty stores
were losing out to the big department store chains. Our expertise
is in high fashion, not mass marketing. So we decided to change
with the times.”
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In 1980, The Wexner Companies bought
one of the finest shoe, accessory and jewelry operations in the country
– the Chicago-based Joseph. And the company began to shift away
from its leased department business model. |
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“We became a different animal,”
says Wexner. “Even though we were always in the top grade fashion
business, it was synonymous with shoes. When we bought Joseph we broadened
our scope and became a small specialty store. We became strong in
jewelry, handbags and apparel.” |
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When the recession of the early nineties
hit large older cities like Chicago especially hard, The Wexner Companies
again altered course, refocusing their expansion plans southward.
The Joseph Store in Memphis doubled its square footage and put in
a high-end cosmetics department. And the company gave up its Houston
leased operation and opened a new Joseph store there in 1993. |
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Since then, Joseph has become the foundation
of the Wexner Companies and undergone major growth in luxury designer
shoes, handbags, jewelry, apparel and cosmetics. As Alfred Wexner
says, “The consumer used to be content with high-end goods,
but not necessarily luxury branded products. Now it’s very much
name-oriented.” Joseph added the Gucci line in 1996 and Prada
in 1998. Today the store carries the best designer shoe, handbag,
jewelry and apparel collections, among them Christian Louboutin, Brian
Atwood, Valentino, Lanvin, Stuart Weitzman, Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik,
Pedro Garcia, Michael Kors, Miu Miu, Thierry Rabotin, Tory Burch,
Botkier, Nancy Gonzalez, Chloé, Theory, Diane Von Furstenberg,
Zac Posen, Missoni, Marc Jacobs, Donald J Pliner, Cole Haan, John
Hardy, Jemma Wynne, Linda Lee Johnson, Margaret Ellis, Martin Bernstein,
Mizuki, Paul Morelli and Steve Vaubel. The cosmetics lines at Joseph
include Trish McEvoy, Darphin, Bobbi Brown, Laura Mercier, Yves Saint
Laurent, Sisley, Keihl’s, La Mer and many others. |
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In 2007, Joseph launched JosephStores.com,
making available online the store’s designer shoes, handbags
and jewelry. Wexner says, “It’s just the latest in an
eighty-year series of moves to keep up with the times. Women today
are mothers – and they are also lawyers and doctors and entrepreneurs
and corporate people. They don’t have the time they used to
have. So we’re accommodating them with online shopping.” |
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“JosephStores.com is just another
Joseph location,” Wexner continues. “We made a very conscious
decision that it would contain the same merchandise that’s in
the stores. We are not mass marketers - we are an intimate, highly
focused specialty store. That means service, it means that we don’t
just buy everything with a designer name on it, and that we’re
selective within the lines we do buy. We pick and choose. That’s
part of what our customers rely on us for – online and in the
stores. |
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“And it’s
the reason our vegetables aren’t ruined by the time they come
in.”
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SHIPPING AT $200 & UP
