One of The Largest Department Store On Earth

The Inspiring Story of R. H. Macy

Rowland Hussey Macy, Sr. (August 30, 1822 – March 29, 1877) was an American businessman who founded the department store chain R.H. Macy and Company.Macy was the fourth of six youngsters born to a Quaker family on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. At the age of fifteen, he worked on the ship, the Emily Morgan, and had a red star tattooed on his hand that became a part of the store's brand.He married Louisa Houghton (1820–1888) in 1844, and had 2 kids.

When Rowland Hussey Macy was 15, he started running overboard a whaling ship. Macy, born in 1822, had fully grown on Nantucket Island, Mass.—once the house of more millionaires than anywhere else in the United States, gratefulness to the whaling industry—and observed his father flock on two earlier expeditions.

But young Macy was a little more aspiring than his father. He gained about $550 on that first voyage, a discouraging paycheck for such difficult work. So at 19, he started running as a printer’s improved in Boston. He had study about Benjamin Franklin’s success and decided to model his own occupation after the legendary statesman.

Unfortunately, printing didn't fit Macy as well as it did Franklin, so, with the backing of one of his brothers, Macy uncovered his first dry goods store in 1843. Over the next 10 years, Macy failed at four retail ventures.

He had change position to California in search of gold and also dabbled in real estate speculation, so despite of his retail failures, he gone back home to Massachusetts with $4,000 and a treasure of new life competency. He uncovered the first Macy’s store in Haverhill, Mass., in 1851.

Instantly, he put to use what he had trained from his failed stores and instituted revolutionary launch in retail management. Macy offered lower prices for cash shopping in an period when most shoppers used credit, and he offered fixed prices rather than benefits to contract, which was the ideal.

While the Haverhill store ultimately failed, the 36-year-old Macy had no purpose of sacrifice. He moved to New York City in 1858, and launch R.H. Macy Dry Goods on the turning of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street. The red star he had tattooed onto his hand for the time of  his blooming whaling days would become the glaring symbol of his new venture.

once more building on lessons learned from earlier stores, Macy purchased and sold goods only if he could do so with ready cash. Even as his business grew and wholesalers given him credit, he rejected it, determining to work simply on a cash basis.

In its first year, while a downturn become visible the country, Macy’s did $90,000 in sales. As the business grew, Macy gained the leases of 11 surrounding buildings, generating the idea of what we know today as the department store, selling everything from clothing and jewelry to toys and housewares. In 1874, Macy leased the basement of his building to L. Straus & Sons. Lazarus Straus and his sons, Isidor and Nathan, sold china, glassware and silver (and later took ownership of the Macy’s chain when it passed from the Macy family in 1895). The china department soon became the store’s most popular. Macy submitted new products to the public as well, including tea bags, Idaho baked potatoes and colored bath towels. He also launch accepting mail orders.

Despite a recession, these were blossom years for Macy, who became a idol of advertising and publicity. He raised marketing strategies that would one day become element of the retail industry. He was the first, for example, to have a store Santa Claus during the day off, and he originated themed store exhibits and lighted window displays to draw customers in from the road.

Because his store was far from the borders of the central shopping district, Macy knew he had to be innovative to attract customers, so he used his printing industry experience to launch some unique newspaper advertising campaigns. The ads strengthen keywords again and again, used bold headlines and quoted exact prices of store items, something none of his opponent had ever done. He advertised in five city newspapers. Macy also offered his savior a money-back guarantee, and the store continued to only accept cash well into the 1950s.

Macy’s innovations didn’t end with business strategy. He was also the first to hire a woman administrative in retail sales, promoting Margaret Getchell to store superintendent in 1866. Having grown up on Nantucket, where women ran family businesses and households in the missing of husbands, fathers and brothers who were on whaling expeditions, Macy believed that women were just as skilled as men. His Quaker upbringing also promoted the idea of psychic and knowledgeable balance of the sexes.

Getchell, a remote correlative of Macy’s, was a fellow Nantucketer, and she not only had a good head for business but helped Macy understand what his main customers—women—wanted. Four years after Getchell became store supervisor, Macy’s income topped $1 million.

Macy died in Paris in 1877 of Bright’s disease. An obituary in The New York Times admired his edification.“His energy and enterprise in business and the strict attention he gave to every detail of it gained for him a host of staunch friends,” the obituary noted. “In fact from comparatively nothing, he became one of the best known and most successful merchants of the day.”

That year, Macy’s famous department store employed 400. The Straus brothers at last became proprietary of the store after Macy’s death.

In 1902, the flagship store on Herald Square was built and, after a 1942 spread, it became known as “the largest store on earth.” Today, there are nearly 900 department store branches located within Guam, the United States, and Puerto Rico. What indicate impossible to R.H Macy finally became possible.

          

Collected from YouTube