Word: stores
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Even as Baker examines every aspect of the store, he's careful not to destroy what many people love about it. (He says he receives hundreds of e-mails from Lord & Taylor shoppers along the lines of "Please don't mess with my store!") His sensitivity has won over supporters. "He is a great partner," says Elfers. "If I had sat down and written an ending for Lord & Taylor, I don't think I could have written a better one." Die-hard fans can only hope she's right...
Like most things of consequence?summit meetings, megamergers, the creation of the latest I-technology?true power shopping takes place in hushed quarters behind closed doors and outside the purview of the average eye. And so on a recent Thursday at the Neiman Marcus store in downtown Dallas, what might have come across as a pristine but lightly traveled main floor was in fact a bustling $4 billion juggernaut in action, the unseen hum of luxury being served up like nowhere else...
...worries, for instance, that cases of Cartier estate jewelry and other gems appeared underperused. Some big-spending customers never even enter the store, opting instead to shop by phone with their sales associate, who will call to tip them off on, say, the arrival of the extremely rare red-diamond necklace that would crown their collection. Or the associate might call about the $150,000 Buccellati diamond and 18-karat yellow-gold cuff, which would just match the piece they bought last spring. Across the way in handbags, the season's Chanel bags didn't even make...
...Chanel, conversational in Marni, and Thakoon curious. "And, obviously, you have to have a certain amount of affluence to afford the kinds of things we have to offer," says the Texas-born Katz, who began her career as a buyer at Foley's in Houston and whose second favorite store, she admits, is Target. "I've been a longtime aficionado. I was an early adopter. That's part of who I am too." Sure enough, Katz comes off as the nicest whiz at business school or the smartest, chicest mom at the bake sale. She is chatty about the trials...
...reaching higher to bring their customers all things unattainable, Hall points to the one commodity everyone finds out of reach. "Time," says Hall, who in the '80s built out of nearly nothing what became the store's thriving leisure department. To that end, she has overseen a technology overhaul that will provide sales associates with daily alerts about the lives of their customers, whose numbers rank in archived thousands. Anniversary coming up? The associate knows to call the husband and what gifts to suggest for his wife. Thanks to this kind of signature service, Neiman's associates become, to many...