Success came a step at a time for Nordstrom
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This is the store where Elvis dropped in to have his boots repaired and where one of the owners liked to startle strangers on downtown streets by calling out, "Hi! How are you?"
It learned from its competitors, and prospered. It became famed for sending thank-you cards to customers and for its policy of taking back most anything, no questions asked, even in one case when it was a tire.
For years nobody sold shoes and apparel much better or with more grace than the Nordstroms of Seattle. If they didn't revolutionize retailing, they at least made it nicer.
The Nordstroms left their imprint on the Seattle area in many other ways. They helped bring professional football to Seattle in 1976 by becoming majority owners of the Seahawks. The late Elmer Nordstrom served as president of the board of Swedish Hospital, now the state's largest, which had been founded by the father of his wife, Kitty.
Now the company is marking its 100th anniversary. It can look back on a rich history but also into an uncertain future.
The company's profits are down, and so is its stock. Known for its classic fashion tastes, Nordstrom is trying to win back longtime shoppers it lost during last year's trendy "Reinvent yourself" campaign.
After a brief stint in which nonfamily members ran the company, Nordstroms are back at the helm, with Bruce Nordstrom assuming the chairmanship and one of his sons, Blake Nordstrom, taking over the presidency.
Their offices today are only a couple of blocks from where a century ago a Swedish immigrant short on business sense but long on common sense opened the door to a small storefront in downtown Seattle and anxiously waited for his first customer.
And waited.
'Money is plenty'
When the original Wallin & Nordstrom store opened at Fourth Avenue and Pike Street in 1901, nobody was there for gold-rush buddies John W. Nordstrom and Carl Wallin to greet.
Nordstrom had sailed to America in 1887 at age 16 with $5 in his pocket and hopes of finding his fortune. In 1897, he went to the Klondike, where he met Wallin, a shoe-repairman, and came back to Seattle with $16,000.
In 1901, Seattle was a boomtown of 120,000 people, and lots of stores were opening then. "Money is plenty" said a headline in a 1901 Seattle Chamber of Commerce report.
But in his 1950 autobiography, "The Immigrant in 1887," Nordstrom said his first customer didn't show up until after Wallin left for lunch. The customer asked a nervous Nordstrom for a pair of shoes that caught her eye in the display window. "I had never fitted a pair of shoes or sold anything in my life," he wrote.
Nordstrom couldn't find the style the woman wanted from what they had in stock. He handed her the pair from the window. "I'll never know if it was the right size, but the customer bought them anyway," he wrote.
The first day the store made $12.50 - the equivalent of about three or four pairs of shoes. Business jumped to $47 the next day.
Exactly what day the first Nordstrom store opened is unknown. But that's not unusual for a pioneer retailer. The Bon Marché and Bartell Drug, which both opened in Seattle in 1890, don't know their anniversary dates either.
James Warren, director emeritus of the Museum of History and Industry, said that's probably because those early-day merchants didn't know their stores would become so successful and historic. "And they were probably working pretty hard," Warren said.
By 1923, Wallin & Nordstrom opened a store in the University District and moved to a bigger downtown site on Second Avenue. But by 1929, they had a falling-out - "We did not seem to agree on anything," Nordstrom wrote - and Wallin sold his interest.
Nordstrom's three sons, Elmer, Everett and Lloyd, ran the company for the next four decades. Elmer Nordstrom was the most gregarious, greeting customers at the door by name and calling out to strangers he passed on the sidewalk. To him, everyone was a potential customer.
The Nordstroms brought in "flouroscopes" to X-ray customers' feet and caged monkeys to entertain children. They also kept a shoe-repair department, which brought in rock legend Elvis Presley during the 1962 World's Fair to get his boots fixed.
As the decades rolled on, the company grew, first to Portland and to Northgate in 1950, then to California in 1978 and the East Coast 10 years later. By the end of 2000, it had 122 stores in all regions of the U.S. and annual sales of $5.5 billion.
When its downtown San Francisco store opened in 1988, it reportedly sold at least $140 million worth of merchandise the first year, the most ever by a new store in the U.S. and breaking its own record set the year before at Tyson's Corner near Washington, D.C.
Classy, not 'cheapie shoes'
Henry Eisenhardt, 89, relaxes in his room at the Kline Galland Home near Seattle's Seward Park--wearing a Nordstrom shirt, slacks and slippers--and talking about how he's been hooked on Nordstrom since the Depression, when John W. Nordstrom sold him a pair of loafers for $8.
That was a lot of money back then. But Eisenhardt liked the look and feel of the shoes. Nordstrom wanted to make a sale, so he told the young man he could take three months to pay off the bill.
"They helped me establish my credit," said a grateful-sounding Eisenhardt, a World War II veteran who survived the invasion of Normandy. "There was a spirit of kindness and honesty in the store that was hard to describe."
Eisenhardt recalls seeing three young men dusting, sweeping and cleaning up the store. They were the second-generation Nordstrom brothers--Elmer, Everett and Lloyd--learning the business from the ground up, a tradition that was handed down to the next two generations of Nordstroms.
"They were pretty sharp men," said Emily Wilson, 96, of the two men she called "Papa Nordstrom" and "Mister Valeen."
Wilson lives in the Norse Home on Phinney Ridge along with many other residents of Scandinavian descent, including Martha Sundstrom, 95, another longtime Nordstrom customer.
"I thought (the prices of the shoes) were a little high, but they were classier," Wilson said.
Or as Sundstrom put it, "There were other shoe stores, but they were the cheapie shoes."
Seattle's large Scandinavian population felt a certain sense of ethnic loyalty toward the store, Wilson said. But they also went there because many had long, narrow feet, and Wallin & Nordstrom stocked their sizes, not found in most other shoe stores.
The wide selection became a Nordstrom trademark. By 1959, the company's downtown store carried 100,000 pairs of shoes, the largest collection in the country. Today, the chain has more than 6 million pairs of shoes in stock.
Smart moves
The Nordstroms struggled to sell shoes during the Depression. During World War II they had trouble finding enough to sell as rationing put shoes in short supply.
"The customers would buy almost anything we had," said John Nordstrom, now a board member and a grandson of the founder.
To find more shoes, the Nordstroms traveled by train to such shoe-making capitals as St. Louis and Milwaukee to meet with manufacturers. They took them out to eat and befriended them in an effort to get more shoes. The personal touch worked. The Nordstroms got more shoes, increased their business and came out of the war poised for bigger success.
But it didn't come without taking some chances.
In 1950, they joined The Bon Marché and some other stores in opening Northgate, one of the first suburban shopping malls in the nation. It was considered risky at the time because Northgate was in the woods north of the city limits.
The move paid off, and The Bon and Nordstrom would go on to anchor other major shopping centers in the growing suburbs.
But it was in downtown Seattle where the Nordstroms would learn an important lesson and make one of their smartest moves.
One of their downtown neighbors was Frederick & Nelson, the city's grandest department store. It had a liberal return policy in which customers didn't need receipts or tags, and Nordstrom was influenced by that - not the other way around, said Robert Spector, co-author with Patrick McCarthy of "The Nordstrom Way."
Seattle has a tradition of great customer service, Spector said, adding that Eddie Bauer, which was founded in Seattle in 1920, had a similar return policy.
But that wasn't the case in the early days of Nordstrom. In fact, recalled Bruce Nordstrom in a 100th-anniversary video made for employees, "I can remember in my lifetime when we used to argue with customers."
There was the day in 1962, for example, when Jack McMillan, then the buyer in the women's shoe department, was chased around the downtown store by a handbag-swinging customer upset at what she perceived as slow service.
"To tell you the truth, I was a little short with her," McMillan, now a member of the board of directors, said recently. "I was busy."
More often, though, the company's image was burnished by the service of its sales staff, such as the time in mid-1970s when a salesman in Fairbanks took back a $25 automobile tire, even though Nordstrom didn't sell tires. Nordstrom had just expanded into a building that had been a tire store, said John Nordstrom, who was there that day. The customer seemed a bit confused but sincere, so the Nordstrom salesman gave him his $25 back and thanked him for coming in and invited him back to shop, John Nordstrom said.
By 1959, the company could boast it was the largest independent shoe store in America. But its future lay ahead, in fact just down the street from the store at Fifth Avenue and Pike Street.
That's where Seattleites Ivan and Dorothy Cabot Best operated their Best's Apparel store.
Dorothy Best, born in Boston, was a descendant of the Cabots who arrived in America on the Mayflower. She was considered one of the top fashion experts outside New York City.
She also could be frugal, reusing tissue paper for packaging, after first ironing out the wrinkles, recalled Herman Stegman, 90, of Seattle, a former Best's furrier.
When Dorothy Best died in 1958, the store started going downhill. Her husband would occasionally approach the Nordstroms to see whether they were interested in buying it. In 1963 they did, although many thought that because the Nordstroms knew shoes, but not apparel, they might be making a big mistake.
It turned out to be a brilliant move.
With its reputation for customer service and now a wide selection in clothing to go with its footwear, Nordstrom Best stores began expanding throughout the Northwest. In 1971, when the company went public and began trading on the Nasdaq, it used Nordstrom alone as its name. Before it bought Best's, it went by Nordstrom's.
In 1978, it made its first move outside the Northwest by opening a store at the new South Coast Plaza in Orange County, Calif. Many retailing experts thought it was a mistake, Bruce Nordstrom recalled, saying that the folksy, friendly Nordstrom way of selling wouldn't work in sophisticated Southern California.
Nordstrom dived in anyway, building a massive store and holding a big ribbon-cutting event. Hardly any shoppers showed up, though, and some of those who did were looking for appliances, confusing Nordstrom with Norge.
Nordstrom hasn't held a ribbon-cutting event since, but the South Coast Plaza store has become one of the chain's top stores.
A scuffed image
Through the 1980s, the company's fortunes soared. Its stock split five times, and Nordstrom began spreading across the national landscape. They designed architecturally striking buildings with piano players stationed near the escalators.
But as its profile grew, the company also ran into controversy. In the early 1990s, it was accused of racial discrimination by a group of local African-American leaders, a claim Nordstrom strongly denied. In 1993 it settled a class-action lawsuit over employees' claims that they were forced to work off the clock. Nordstrom denied any wrongdoing but paid out more than $22 million in settlement and legal expenses rather than going to trial.
In 1998, the state auditor investigated the city of Seattle's agreement to pay $73 million for an underground parking garage built as part of a deal to guarantee Nordstrom's move across the street into the old Frederick & Nelson building. The department store had gone out of business in 1992 at age 101, triggering the closing of other downtown stores. The auditor found no wrongdoing, and city officials said the deal was important to revitalize a dying downtown.
"I think we were instrumental in saving downtown Seattle," Bruce Nordstrom said. "To me, that's the biggest thing we did."
Downtown has roared back since then.
But now Nordstrom is struggling.
Bill Kossen can be reached at 206-464-2331 or at bkossen@seattletimes.com.