Bloomingdale’s Crafted Its Image by Being Innovative

With glitzy goods and slick display techniques, Bloomingdale’s has labored mightily to convince the world that it is something more than a department store. It has largely succeeded.

The 117-year-old company became the first to use large plate-glass display windows to show off its products when it was still the Bloomingdale’s East Side Bazaar. It was the first to hit on the idea of marketing its own name by getting shoppers to carry it on shopping bags. Bloomie’s was first, too, to invite fashion designers to open their own large sections within a department store’s walls.

Its peculiar importance to upper-middle-class New York life is memorialized in such movies as “Moscow on the Hudson,” “An Unmarried Woman” and Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”

“Bloomingdale’s has all the things that make a retailer great, with the best assortment of life style merchandise,” said Ann C. Hunt, partner in the New York office of the Korn/Ferry International executive recruiting firm, and a former Bloomingdale’s assistant buyer. “It has never been a ‘me, too’ store.”

The store’s admirers refer to its elegant displays in phrases such as “retailing as theater.”

Since 1960, Bloomingdale’s may have been best known for its custom of heavily promoting the merchandise and cultural artifacts of one country or region. It began that year with a display of Italian country products.

Among those that have followed were exhibits on India (1978), China (1980). Next week, Bloomingdale’s opens a French promotion with $95 million in French goods. Last spring, the flagship store at 59th St. and Third Ave in Manhattan celebrated California with a huge mural on the side of the building, and decoration of the second floor to look like Wilshire Boulevard. The store earns more than $700 a square foot a year, which may be a record in the U.S. retailing industry.

Joseph Scheines, a retail consultant in New York, remembers visiting the flagship store several decades ago when the neighborhood was among the drabbest in the city, and Bloomingdale’s held sales in its basement.

“They’ve really turned it around,” said Scheines, who added that the store seems to establish part of its cachet simply by overcharging. He said one Bloomingdale’s employee bragged a few years ago that the store had “the biggest markup of menswear of anyone in the city.”