Marvin Traub strides through Bloomingdale`s on any pretext, asking questions, making suggestions and checking out merchandise and displays. One memorable foray took him to the roof of the 59th Street flagship store in New York.
”We really should make use of this space,” he said of a narrow, decklike area off the sixth floor. Then, out of the blue, ”I`d like a restaurant up here.”
It can`t be done, said the puffing executives accompanying the indefatigable Traub, who has headed Bloomingdale`s for the last 10 years. They pointed out that the space was so long and narrow that any restuarant would have to look like the inside of an airplane or a train.
”I`ll take a train,” said Traub. ”Make me a train.”
So they made him a train. Not just any train, but ”Le Train Bleu,” an authentic recreation of a luxury French dining car-complete with brass overhead racks for storing packages-that traveled between Paris and the Cote d`Azur during the heyday of the Orient Express.
An elegant mecca for the chic and the trendy, the rooftop eatery`s nouvelle French and American menu has also won plaudits from New York`s most prestigious food and wine groups.
It`s all part of what even the most jaded shoppers call ”Bloomingdale`s magic,” part of a worldwide reputation for turning seemingly ludicrous ideas into hot fashions. And part of what Marvin Traub and his executives hope will dazzle Chicagoans when its newest store opens here at 900 North Michigan Ave. in late September.
”The idea was always to do special things that no other store had,”
said Joseph Cecil, who owns Mallard`s men`s clothing stores with another Bloomingdale`s alumnus, George P. ”Phil” Kelly. ”It was always, `Let`s wow `em.”`
Marvin Traub, chairman and chief executive officer, is the epitome of that philosophy, say associates, former Bloomingdale executives, friends and rivals.
”Marvin Traub is Bloomingdale`s, he`s its driving force,” said Kalman Ruttenstein, senior vice president of fashion direction at Bloomingdale`s.
”Bloomingdale`s is Marvin`s life. It`s an integral part of his identity.”
Chicago`s retailers clearly are worried by Traub and his store, the newest entrant into city`s brawling upscale retail scene on the Magnificent Mile. They`re particularly nervous that the Chicago store is designed to be a Midwest flagship, the trendsetter for Bloomingdale`s multi-store push into this area.
”Assuming that they do $50 million to $60 million in the first year, it won`t all be plus business,” said Philip Miller, chairman of Marshall Field & Co. ”Some of that business has to come from other retailers in the city.” Miller is hoping that the business will come from his rivals, but industry observers say Field`s will be hardest hit by Bloomingdale`s entry. Other North Michigan Avenue retailers, particularly those almost across from Bloomingdale`s in Water Tower Place, also will be hurt, as will Carson Pirie Scott & Co. on State Street, they say.
”In the first year, a lot of Bloomingdale`s business is going to come out of Marshall Field`s and Carson Pirie Scott`s hides-maybe 10 to 15 percent of their sales,” said Howard Davidowitz, who heads his own national retail consulting firm.
”But after the first year, Marshall Field will begin to recover,” he said. In the end, Chicago will be left with two high-end department stores, Field`s and Bloomies.”
Retail consultant James A. Posner is more pessimistic, estimating that as much as three-fourths of Bloomingdale`s will come from existing Chicago retailers. ”The balance of power will be severely tested,” he said.
”It`s going to be rough for everybody involved,” said Kurt Barnhard, publisher of ”Barnhard`s Retail Marketing Report,” an industry newsletter.
”The real impact will come in the first three or four months, but after that people will begin drifting back (where they shopped before).”
But Barnhard warns that the market share Bloomingdale`s captures ”will cause some very, very painful gashes” in other retailer`s shares.
The point isn`t lost on Miller. Because of Bloomingdale`s opening, Miller says Field`s is planning ”very conservatively” for the last six months of the year, projecting a maximum sales increase of 5 percent at its Water Tower Place store.
”Had it not been for Bloomingdale`s, we would`ve planned for much bigger sales increases because Water Tower has always been a real moneymaker for us,” said Miller, who pushed through a $10 million renovation of the store to coincide with Bloomingdale`s opening. ”But after the first of the year, we`ll be back to normal.”
The battle does have its comic side, however, in the Battle of the Benefits. On September 23, Bloomingdale`s will introduce its store to Chicago society with a ”Year of the Dragon” benefit for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Not to be outdone, Field`s will debut its renovated Water Tower Place Store two weeks before-with a benefit for the city`s other musical blueblood, the Lyric Opera.
To make sure that Bloomingdale`s comes up the winner, Traub, who is described by associates as ”extraordinarily detail-oriented,” packed 50 key executives into a chartered bus and led them on a shop-Chicago blitzkreig last November.
Groups of executives spent the day comparison-shopping North Michigan Avenue, State Street and the Old Orchard Shopping Center in Skokie where Bloomingdale`s will open its next store. Once back on the bus, they made verbal reports to Traub on their findings, headed to the Drake Hotel to hear four prominent Chicagoans-including Mallards` owners Kelly and Cecil-discuss the local market. . .and then returned to New York.
One surviving Bloomingdale`s associate laughingly described the one-day marathon as ”vintage Marvin.”
A typical New York day begins at 5:30 a.m. in a sleek, memorabilia-packed apartment at 58th Street and Sutton Place, just blocks from Bloomingdale`s East Side flagship. He shares the apartment with his wife, Lee, to whom he`s been married for 38 years.
From 6 to 7 a.m., Traub works out at home with a trainer before walking to his beige-lacquered office on Bloomingdale`s 7th floor, directly behind the bed linens department. The corner office is cluttered with country-promotion posters, a De Chirico painting, Bloomingdale`s memorabilia-a football kicked at the opening of the Philadelphia store leans against a huge piece of Waterford crystal-and his ”One Person Makes a Difference” award from the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Near the door a 3-foot-high Dravidian statue from southern India kneels on a table, its hands outstretched, palms up. In its hands are seven nickels. ”My staff tells me it`s a Bloomingdale`s buyer asking for a raise,”
said Traub, laughing. ”I don`t know who keeps putting the money there.”
Staff meetings frequently are held as soon as Traub arrives at the office around 7:30 a.m.-”a good time to talk,” he says. Opportunities are rare after that, as he interviews a candidate for a job in Chicago, holds an executive committee meeting at 11 a.m., dashes over to a nearby restaurant for a stock clerk`s retirement party, accepts an award at 1:30 p.m. and begins reviewing designs for the Chicago store at 2:30 p.m.
As the workday draws to a close for most people, Traub returns phone calls and prepares to go out with friends to dinner-it can be anything from pizza to a full-blown extravaganza at the ultra-chic Le Cirque restaurant-and the movie ”Big.”
”I`m usually out at night, at least four nights a week-I enjoy the city enormously,” said Traub. ”What I don`t like is sitting still.”
Past and present Bloomingdale`s executives say Traub`s nights are simply an extension of his days, part of his endless search for new ideas, new opinions, new anything that he can bring back to Bloomingdale`s.
If Bloomingdale`s has a problem, says a former top executive, it isn`t that Canadian real estate developer Robert Campeau, who acquired
Bloomingdale`s with parent Federated Department Stores Inc. last April, will downgrade the 16-store chain. Campeau, in fact, recently said he wanted to see 16 to 18 more stores around the country.
”Who`s going to replace Marvin? Who`s going to maintain that intensity and that creativity?” he said. ”That`s the real problem.”
”He eats and sleeps Bloomingdale`s and assumes everyone else does too,” said another former executive. ”But you can never really get mad at him-if you`re doing x, he`s doing x plus one.”
Mallards` Joe Cecil recalls his days as a men`s sportswear buyer at Bloomingdale`s, which he called ”one of the most stimulating and exciting jobs anybody could have.
”In my first year, I was sent on a `round-the-world trip to develop special things that no other retailer had,” said Cecil. ”I stopped first at a fabric fair in West Germany and then went on to Paris, Milan, Florence, Bombay, Hong Kong and San Francisco. They gave me two weeks to do it.”
Traveling with Traub can be even more demanding than trying to keep up with him in New York, say associates. He`s never without a 35 mm. camera, usually a Canon, to record anything that interests him, and he insists that Bloomingdale executives do the same.
Barbara D`Arcy, vice president of merchandise presentation (store design), began traveling with Traub when he was picked to head home furnishings in 1957 and developed Bloomingdale`s first private label programs. She describes the experiences as ”24 hours a day, but exhilirating.”
She remembers one of their first trips to Europe, visiting French and Italian factories and museums to bring back exclusive designs for the store`s first model rooms. Struck by Palladian furniture, Traub would bribe the guards at Italian museums to let them carry pieces into the light of the courtyard.
Sometimes crawling on hands and knees, they would photograph, sketch, measure and check construction details on the furniture so that they could
”knock them off” or reproduce them. Nights were frequently spent in small factories, drawing full-size replicas of the pieces to be reproduced-and then showing craftsmen how to dent, rub and scratch them for an ”antique” look.
Even close friends aren`t exempted-and most, like Leonard Lauder, chief executive of Estee Lauder Inc., love it. Lauder described a two-week African safari last summer ”as sort of like Bloomingdale`s in Africa,” recalling that they had a tiny shop in Nairobi opened at mid-day because Traub was so taken with its huge, unusual jewelry.
Two weeks later, two Bloomingdale`s buyers arrived at the store to select items for an ”Out of Africa” boutique that was included in the stores`
”Hooray for Hollywood” promotion. Less than a month later, the shop was operating on the store`s third floor.
”I don`t like traveling with friends as a rule, but I`d go with the Traubs anywhere, anytime, at the drop of a hat,” he said. ”It`s wonderful traveling with them because they`re so enthusiastic.”
”Traub cares a great deal about people, but he expects them to put Bloomingdale`s before everything,” said a retailer who worked with him for years. ”People may bitch about it, but they stay. It`s a love-hate kind of thing.”
Not everyone stays, however. Said a retailer who now heads his own company: ”It`s a very stimulting atmosphere, but it`s not a city or a store of brotherly love. It`s intensely competitive, almost unbelievably so.”
But for Traub, there wasn`t really any question about what he would do after leaving Harvard Business School in 1949. His mother was the fashion director of Bonwit Teller, his father the executive vice president of Lily of France-and his undergraduate recommendation to Harvard was written by his father`s friend and customer, Stanley Marcus.
He joined Bloomingdale`s in 1950 and was quickly identified as chairman-material by then-chairman James Schoff, who moved him into a new job every year for seven years. In positions from assistant buyer to head of the basement to rug buyer, ”I`d build up big sales increases and then leave before I had to worry about matching them the next year,” recalled Traub.
Along the way, Traub began Bloomingdale`s exclusive private label home business in home furnishings and discovered some of the world`s most prominent fashion names, including Ralph Lauren (then a men`s tie designer), Norma Kamali and Perry Ellis. Designers who had their first shops at Bloomingdale`s include Lauren, Calvin Klein, Ellis, Halston and Yves St. Laurent.
