100 Years of Nordstrom From small shoe store to upscale retailer, company has kept founder's values

The downtown store in 1938, the same year the company incorporated. The downtown store in 1938, the same year the company incorporated. Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close 100 Years of Nordstrom 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Nordstrom is marking 100 years of business in Seattle this year with an understated celebration that in many ways echoes its humble beginnings in a small shop at Fourth Avenue and Pike Street.

Although the exact date that Nordstrom first opened for business in Seattle has been lost in time, the story of the first sale John W. Nordstrom made has been faithfully preserved in family history.

As the account goes, having had no customers the entire morning, Nordstrom's partner left for lunch. As soon as he was gone, a woman happened to stop by the store, attracted by a pair of shoes in the front window.

Unable to find a similar pair in the stock room, and feeling a little nervous, Nordstrom pulled the pair from the front window and wrapped them up for his customer. She paid and left.

Whether the shoes fit her or not, Nordstrom never knew.

The sale was hardly a sign of what was to come. One hundred years and four generations later, Nordstrom, renowned for its customer service, is one of the nation's leading fashion retailers, with 122 stores in the United States and 20 Faconnable boutiques in Europe.

The company is sought after to anchor malls, as a cornerstone of downtown renovation projects or as an added jewel for high-end shopping destinations such as Chicago's Magnificent Mile.

The family remains intensely private, with only rare forays into the public eye. The family owned the Seattle Seahawks professional football franchise for 14 years and is known for its volunteer efforts and donations to Swedish Hospital and Children's Hospital and Medical Center, formerly known as Children's Orthopedic Hospital. After four generations of family involvement, the Nordstrom name evokes a sense of responsibility and success.

Ten decades and millions of pairs of shoes later, Nordstrom has weathered difficult economies, changing fashion trends and an evolving society. Today, Nordstrom faces challenges of running an international company with more than $5.5 billion in annual sales -- all in the face of a sagging retail economy and increased competition.

The current and fourth generation of Nordstroms can trace their determination to overcome such obstacles back to the store's start. Certainly there was nothing unusual about the small shoe store that Nordstrom opened with his partner Carl Wallin, investing hard-earned cash from the Alaskan Gold Rush.

More likely it was Nordstrom himself, a determined, hard-working and unassuming Swedish immigrant, who made the difference -- by passing those traits on to future generations of Nordstroms.

"Let there be no mistake, John W. Nordstrom was no retail expert," his grandson Bruce Nordstrom said recently. "But throughout his life he did what he had to do -- hopefully we all have that in us."

Finding Seattle

John Nordstrom was born in Alvik Neder Lulea, Sweden, in 1871. He left for America at age 16 with two pals and a little more than $100 -- an inheritance from his father -- in his pocket. By his third day in America, after buying a new suit for the journey, food, and boat and train passage, he was down to $5.

Nordstrom found odd jobs with railroad crews, in coal mines, lumber camps and at shipyards.

The work took him across the United States, from New York to Wisconsin, to the redwoods of California and eventually to Washington, where he learned of the Alaskan Gold Rush.

Living conditions for laborers at the turn of the century were grueling.

In his autobiography, "The Immigrant in 1887," John Nordstrom described the harsh life, including sharing a bunk at the logging camp with a teamster who smelled heavily of the sweating horses he tended. Some mornings, Nordstrom wrote, he awoke with his hair frozen to his head or his body covered with bites from lice.

In 1896, nine years after leaving Sweden, he landed in Seattle, working at a Fremont sawmill for $1.50 a day. The work was exhausting, and he was spending more than he made. One day Nordstrom watched helplessly as his partner, snagged on a tree, was pulled down a steep embankment, breaking his back. He died within minutes.

When Nordstrom saw the headline "Gold Found in the Klondike in Alaska" in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he knew he had to go.

Nordstrom wore only a cheap pair of shoes, which were soon worthless in the Alaska rough.

He spent most of his money buying horses, which he and his fellow travelers later butchered and ate.

"We haven't had any fresh meat since Skagway, those horse steaks tasted pretty good," Nordstrom recalled in his book.

Despite his travails, and not much luck, Nordstrom managed to make about $13,000 in Alaska.

"This looked like a lot of money to me, so I decided that I had had enough of Alaska and returned to Seattle," he wrote. Nordstrom was ready to settle down. He attended business college, married Hilda Carlson, bought property on Bellevue Avenue and had two houses built.

At 30, he still wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life.

So when Carl Wallin, a shoemaker Nordstrom had befriended in Alaska, asked him if he would be interested in opening a shoe store, he thought, "Why not?"

Starting on the right foot

Seattle was bustling. The population had nearly doubled from 42,800 in 1890 to 80,671 in 1900. Ten years later, it had nearly tripled, to 237,194.

The Bon Marche was planning a new building, a four-story structure that it boasted would be the largest store north of San Francisco.

Frederick & Nelson was selling home furnishings, ice boxes and baby carriages.

Bartell Drugs was offering Carter's Liver Pills for 49 cents, and ice cream sodas for a nickel.

The Seattle shoe business was competitive in 1901. According to advertisements in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Brown Brothers was selling sturdy shoes for Alaska-bound gold hunters for about $3 a pair. Down the street, Peterson's had fancy dress shoes for about the same price.

Business started slowly at Wallin & Nordstrom. Just four pairs of shoes sold that first day, for a total of $12.50. Things picked up by the end of the first summer. Sales on busy Saturdays routinely totaled $100. The partners were each taking home salaries of $75 a month -- about $1,500 a month today.

Despite the competition, Wallin and Nordstrom did a reasonable business, moving several times over the years to bigger locations.

John Nordstrom also started the tradition of bringing his sons down to the store to work at a young age.

Nordstrom saw to it that all three of his sons graduated from the University of Washington. According to some accounts, he opened a second store in the University District just so his three sons could work close to school.

Selling shoes never became a passion for great-grandpa Nordstrom.

By 1928 Wallin and Nordstrom were regularly disagreeing about how to run the business. Nordstrom was ready to leave, but his son Everett was keenly interested in the shoe business.

Wallin sold his part of the business to Nordstrom, who then sold it to two of his sons, Everett and Elmer.

Lloyd Nordstrom, the youngest of his three sons, joined the business late -- in 1933, just as the Depression was in full swing. However, he insisted on paying his fair share for a stake in the business. According to Nordstrom family lore, the brothers hired an accountant to figure up the value of the business.

The accountant pronounced it worthless.

The second generation of Nordstroms attacked the shoe business with a little more gusto than their father. From the beginning they had a simple goal: to sell shoes to everyone in town.

"Although conventional marketing wisdom calls on merchants to 'know your audience,' what did Elmer, Everett and Lloyd know of that?" asked Bruce Nordstrom, Everett's son and current chairman of the board.

But the second generation expanded the selection of sizes, styles, colors and brands. They agreed among themselves that they wouldn't be undersold.

Although the elder Nordstrom never cared much for the shoe store while working there, after retiring he showed up at the shop nearly every day until he was well into his 80s, chatting with salespeople andcustomers.

"At the age of 84 he still enjoys these meetings, which is more than he will say of the shoe trade," Fergus Hoffman, a business editor for the Seattle P-I, wrote in 1955.

Widening horizons

The second generation also agreed to run the company as a team. The tradition of co-presidents was to continue for 72 years.

The business thrived through the Depression and World War II, growing steadily.

Instead of steadfastly refusing to leave downtown like some other apparel businesses, including now defunct Frederick & Nelson, in 1950, Nordstrom opened stores in Portland and at Northgate Mall, the nation's first shopping mall. It was a strategic move, said Jack McMillan, Lloyd Nordstrom's son-in-law, and part of the third generation to run the business.

"We moved to the suburbs with our customers," he said.

In 1959, Nordstrom held a grand opening in its remodeled and expanded downtown store at Fifth Avenue and Pike Street, which the company claimed was the largest shoe store in the country with more than 100,000 pairs of shoes on four floors.

When Nordstrom's downtown store reopened at its new location in 1998, there were 150,000 pairs of shoes in the store. In 2000, the company sold 11 million pairs of shoes nationwide.

With the shoe business humming in the 1960s, the second generation made another key decision. They bought a clothing store.

Best Apparel, once a premier women's fashion store in Seattle, was for sale.

"I think Lloyd wanted to make his mark," Bruce Nordstrom recalled recently. "He got all fired up."

Dorothy Cabot Best, a striking woman with an instinct for women's fashion, had owned the business with her husband for almost 30 years. When she died in 1958, the business began to founder.

"When we approached Mr. Best with our interest in buying his store, he was very receptive, " recalled Elmer Nordstrom in his memoirs.

Skeptics scoffed at the idea that Seattle's shoe kings were going to try to sell women's dresses. The Nordstroms added juniors and sportswear to appeal to younger customers. A complete line of men's suits and sportswear was added in 1966, the year the combined shoe and clothing store was renamed Nordstrom Best.

Jenny Savage, a Seattle resident now in her 80s, still carries herNordstrom Best credit card. She recalls shopping for shoes in Nordstrom when it was still just a shoe store, and seeing "Papa John," as she calls the Nordstrom patriarch, chatting with clerks and customers.

While she remembers an elite shoe seller in Seattle called I. Miller, "if you wanted a practical shoe, a quality shoe, you went to Nordstrom," she said.

In 1964 the Nordstroms built a new Best Apparel at Northgate, next door to the Nordstrom shoe store. It opened in February 1965.

As the art of retailing and marketing became more refined and more competitive, the Nordstroms, like other merchants, tried different techniques to increase sales. Some were sophisticated, such as holding a "men only" fashion show a few weeks before Christmas to help husbands find the right gift for their wives.

Other gimmicks, like keeping caged monkeys in the children's shoe department, still have some Nordstrom family members scratching their heads.

One night in the 1960s particularly sticks with family members who were given the assignment of bringing a monkey from the Bellevue store to the grand opening of the Yakima store.

In the transition from cage to car, the monkey managed to escape. With glee, the large animal careened through the store, swinging from fixture to fixture and dangling delightedly from the drapes.

John Nordstrom, the founder's grandson, who was a young store manager at the time, was called to come help. He was finally able to coax the monkey into a box, and into the trunk of the car.

"They were cute when they were babies, but they got pretty tough when they were older," John Nordstrom said recently, remembering the escapade.

"That was a classic," he chuckled.

Tomorrow: The next three decades.