Bloomingdale's (or Bloomie's) is a chain of upscale American department stores owned
by Macy's, Inc., which is also the parent company of Macy's. Bloomingdale's
has 36 stores nationwide, with annual sales of $1.9 billion. It is at the price
level similar to Lord & Taylor, Nordstrom and the former Parisian, and slightly
below that of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Barneys New York.
Bloomingdale's
started in 1861 when brothers Joseph and Lyman G. Bloomingdale
started selling hoop-skirts in their Ladies Notions' Shop on Manhattan's Lower
East Side while their father peddled the highly fashionable hoop-skirts along
the Eastern Seaboard. The pair were sons of Benjamin Bloomingdale, a Bavarian-born
salesman who had lived in North Carolina and Kansas, and settled in New
York City.
As the popularity of the hoop-skirt was declining, the brothers
opened their East Side Bazaar in 1872 in a small, ordinary row house on
Third Avenue and 56th Street, selling a variety of garments such as ladies' skirts,
corsets, "gent's furnishings", and European fashions. Their location and merchandise
was a bold statement for their time. At the time the East Side was a
working-class neighborhood with shantytowns, garbage dumps, and stockyards. Most
of their customers and competitors were in the Upper West Side, and at that
time most respectable stores only specialized in one trade. |
