Selfridges: Difference between revisions

Selfridges, AKA Selfridges & Co, is a chain of high end department stores in the United Kingdom. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge. The flagship store in London's Oxford Street is the second largest shop in the UK (after Harrods) and was opened on 15 March 1909.^[1]

More recently, three other stores have been opened; in Trafford, Greater Manchester (1998), in Manchester City Centre's Exchange Square (2002) and in the Bullring, Birmingham (2003). Until 1990, the store belonged to Liverpool's now-defunct Lewis's retail group. Today it belongs to the Weston family.

H. Gordon Selfridge was born in 1858 in Ripon, Wisconsin, and in 1879 joined Field, Leiter and Company (later to become Marshall Field & Company), where he worked for the famous Chicago retailer. He worked his way up through the firm, married into the prominent Buckingham family, and amassed the fortune with which he built his new London store.

Selfridge's innovative marketing led to his success. He tried to make shopping a fun adventure instead of a chore. He put merchandise on display so customers could examine it, put the highly profitable perfume counter front-and-centre on the ground floor, and established policies that made it safe and easy for customers to shop — techniques that have been adopted by modern department stores the world over.

Either Selfridge or Marshall Field is popularly held to have coined the phrase "the customer is always right",^[2] and he did use it regularly in his extensive advertising.

He attracted shoppers with educational and scientific exhibits. He was himself interested in education and science, and believed that the displays would introduce potential new customers to Selfridges, generating both immediate and long-term sales.

In 1909, after the first cross-Channel flight, Louis Blériot's monoplane was exhibited at Selfridges, where it was seen by 12,000 people. The first public demonstration of television was by John Logie Baird from the first floor of Selfridges from 1–27 April 1925.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the roof of the store hosted terraced gardens, cafes, a mini golf course and an all-girl gun club. The roof, with its spectacular views across London, was a popular place for strolling after a shopping trip and was often used for fashion shows. During the Second World War the store was bombed in 1940, 1941 and 1944 causing catastrophic damage. After the devastating bombing of the department store in 1940 owner H.Gordon Selfridge vowed never to open the rooftop gardens again.^[3]

A Milne-Shaw seismograph was set up on the Selfridge store’s third floor in 1932, attached to one of the building's main stanchions, unaffected by traffic or shoppers. It recorded the Belgian earthquake of 11 June 1938 which was also felt in London. At the outbreak of war, the seismograph was moved from its original site near the Post Office to another part of the store. In 1947, the seismograph was given to the British Museum.

The provincial stores were sold to the John Lewis Partnership in the 1940s. The remaining Oxford Street store was acquired in 1951 by the Liverpool-based Lewis's chain of department stores, which was in turn taken over in 1965 by the Sears Group owned by Charles Clore.^[4] Under the Sears group, a branch in Oxford was opened, which remained Selfrdges until 1986, when Sears rebranded it as a Lewis's store. In March 1998 Selfridges had acquired a new logo at use to the present which came in tandem with the opening of the Manchester Trafford Centre store and Selfridges demerger from Sears.

Between 1998 and 2003, the store supplemented its 540,000-square-foot (50,000 m²)^[5] London flagship store with a 150,000-square-foot (14,000 m²) store at the Trafford Centre in Greater Manchester; because of its success a 125,000-square-foot (11,600 m²) store in Exchange Square, Manchester was also opened. A 260,000-square-foot (24,000 m²)^[6] store opened in 2003 in Birmingham's Bull Ring.

In 2003, the chain was acquired by Canada's Galen Weston for £598 million. Weston, a retailing expert who is the owner of department store chains such as Holt Renfrew and Brown Thomas as well as major supermarket chains in Canada, has chosen to invest in renovation of the Oxford Street store, rather than to carry out planned expansion to Leeds, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Bristol, and Glasgow, despite Selfridges owning a site in the latter city.^[7] The Chief Executive is Irish retailer, Paul Kelly. Kelly has worked for the Weston organisation since the mid-eighties.

Selfridge stores are known for architectural excellence and are tourist destinations in their own right. Their London store was designed by Daniel Burnham, who also crafted Marshall Field's main store in his home town of Chicago. The London store was built in phases, the first phase consisting only of the nine-and-a-half bays closest to the Duke Street corner.^[8] A scheme to erect a massive tower above the store was never carried out. Also involved in the design of the store were American architect Francis Swales, who worked on decorative details, and British architects R. Frank Atkinson and Thomas Smith Tait.^[9][10] The distinctive polychrome sculpture above the Oxford Street entrance is the work of British sculptor Gilbert Bayes. Selfridges in London was named world's best department store in 2010.^[11]

The Trafford store is noted for its use of stone and marble and for the exterior which strikingly resembles the London store.^[12] Each of the 5 floors of the Exchange Square store in central Manchester was designed by a different architect, giving each floor a contrasting look and feel. In December 2009 it was announced that the store is to undergo a £40 million renovation to give the store a more iconic look that has come to resemble Selfridges. It has been announced the store will feature art installations using LED lighting that will be projected to the outside of the building at night. The Birmingham store, designed by architects Future Systems, is covered in 15,000 spun aluminium discs on a background of Yves Klein Blue.^[13] Since it opened in 2003, the Birmingham store has been named every year by industry magazine Retail Week as one of the 100 stores to visit in the world.

Selfridges windows have become synonymous also with the brand, and to a certain degree have become as famous as the company and Oxford Street location itself. Selfridges has a history of bold art initiatives when it comes to the window designs. When the building was undergoing restoration, the scaffolding was shrouded with a giant photograph of stars such as Sir Elton John by Sam Taylor-Wood.^[14] The windows consistently attract tourists, designers and fashionistas alike to marvel at the current designs and styling and fashion trends. Since 2002 the windows have been photographed by London photographer Andrew Meredith and published in magazines such as Vogue, Dwell, Icon, Frame Magazine, Creative Review, Hungarian Stylus Magazine, Design Week, Harper's Bazaar, New York Times, WGSN and much more including world wide press, journals, blogs and published books all over the world.

Selfridges has been criticised for continuing to sell foie gras, a food product made from the liver of specially fattened ducks and geese.^[15][16][17] Animal rights and welfare groups, such as PETA, contend that the method of producing foie gras involves the inhumane treatment of animals. But, as of November 2009, with help from Sir Roger Moore, Selfridge has agreed to remove foie gras from their shelves permanently.^[18] The store showed that it was implementing the policy strictly, when it ejected celebrity butcher Jack O'Shea's at Christmas 2012 and terminated his contract in the food hall, after his counter store was found by the Evening Standard to be selling foie gras to customers who knew the codeword "French fillet".^[19]

Selfridges also caused outrage when a window display was revealed, portraying an Alexander McQueen garment being "hung from the gallows", just months after the designer committed suicide by hanging.^[20]

• Honeycombe, Gordon. Selfridges, Seventy-Five Years: The Story of the Store 1909-84 London, 1984

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Selfridges.

• Selfridges website