Word: bryants
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Chances were only one in twenty that Peggy was having a baby, but Manhattan's Lane Bryant store is so famed for its maternity clothes that a visit there almost automatically lands a woman in Winchell's column. Actually, Lane Bryant, Inc., which has 22 other retail shops and a big mail-order plant to boot, does 95% of its $41 million annual business in non-maternity wear. Its chief stock-in-trade is the legitimate offspring of its maternity wear: clothes for fat women...
Beginning this week, the proportion of maternity clothes to total sales will probably be lessened even further. Reason, Lane Bryant moved its big Manhattan store from 39th Street to a smartly remodeled building on smart Fifth Avenue (at 40th Street), and opened new departments to sell jewelry, cosmetics, nursery furniture, baby carriages, clothes for misses and girls...
...story quarters Lane Bryant has given over the entire fourth floor to the customers it calls "expectants." They reach it in elevators equipped with "germicidal lamps." Another unique feature: a lounge for expectant fathers, complete with soft chairs, books, magazines, a radio and a wall full of "Blessed-Event" cartoons...
...this seemed "just like a miracle" to the simple, modest person who founded the business 47 years ago. Most customers do not know that 1) the founder is a woman and 2) her name is actually Lane Bryant...
...Lane Bryant started out as Lena Himmelstein. She came to the U.S. from Lithuania in 1895, at 16. After four years of struggling along as a seamstress, she married a Russian jewelry salesman named David Bryant. Within a year, the couple had a son, but a few months later Bryant died. The young widow pawned her diamond earrings, bought a sewing machine, started making lingerie at home. By 1907 she was prospering sufficiently to borrow $300 to start a separate shop, and open a bank account. At the bank, she accidentally signed her name "Lane" instead of "Lena...