BREAK AWAY : True Retailing Believers
Talk about company loyalty. Nordstrom’s first East Coast store, in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va., is open and has about 600 sales clerks. Of those, 250 came from Nordstrom stores in the West and paid their own moving expenses to transfer.
The 200,000-square-foot store also seems to have won over shoppers since its standing start in early March. According to projections in the trade publication Women’s Wear Daily, annual sales are expected to reach $100 million, soaring above the company’s own planned sales of $35 million.
Co-chairman Jim Nordstrom told the publication that the good showing has encouraged the Seattle-based chain to accelerate its opening of East Coast stores. And, he added wistfully, he wishes Nordstrom had built a bigger store in McLean.
For Temporary Sailors
Do you J’attoo?
Cher does, and so does Michael J. Fox and Elton John. For the uninitiated, J’attoos are waterproof, press-on, temporary tattoos shaped like necklaces, wristwatches and other jewelry.
These fashion tattoos are made by J’attoos, a 2-year-old Los Angeles company. Besides adorning celebrities, some J’attoos are also sold to corporations, which buy them for promotional giveaways. Miller Brewing Co. recently bought thousands of specially designed tattoos and gave them to college students in Florida for spring break.
If you want to J’attoo, you’ve got to do it at a flea market; the tattoos aren’t sold in stores. J’attoo founder Jeffie Pike once sold them in trendy Bloomingdale’s but decided to radically downscale after losing money. “I had to pay models to wear the J’attoos so people would understand what they were,” she says. “I couldn’t make money doing that.”
Lights! Camera! Onions!
Marilyn Lewis is going from hamburgers to Hollywood.
Earlier this month, she and her husband, Harry, finished selling Hamburger Hamlet, the Sherman Oaks restaurant chain they founded in 1950. Now she’s formed her own production company, Marilyn Lewis Entertainment Enterprises in Beverly Hills.
So far, she says, she’s produced videocassettes on golf and cooking. She adds that she is taking out an option on a script, but won’t say much more.
The Lewises are no strangers to Hollywood. She designed dresses for the “That Girl” television series in the 1960s, and Harry played a gunman in the film “Key Largo.” The Lewises also are chummy with a number of Hollywood executives, including producer Howard Koch, whom they once honored by naming a pepper steak after him at Kate Mantilini, a Beverly Hills restaurant they still own.
Demoted by the Dollar
Remember how California, if it were a country, would be the sixth-largest economy in the world? Well, forget it.
It’s now No. 8, thanks to the declining U.S. dollar.
The California Commission for Economic Development based its new ranking on some updated economic data from UCLA and the CIA. Jack O’Connell, international trade and investment adviser at the commission, explained that the No. 6 ranking was based on 1985 gross national product and exchange rates.
“While the California economy has been growing at a healthy pace in the years since 1985, the value of the dollar has declined tremendously,” he said. “As a result of the very substantial devaluation of the dollar since 1985, the relative ranking of California among the world economies has diminished.”
And which countries moved up? The United Kingdom and Italy. The commission’s list now reads like this: United States, Soviet Union, Japan, West Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy and, yes, California.
