Harry Gordon Selfridge - Mr. Selfridges Romance of Commerce: An Abridged Version of the Classic Text on Business and Life

AVON, MASSACHUSETTS

Both to contemporaries and to us at the distance of nearly a century, Harry Gordon Selfridge seems bigger than reality. In the course of a life that began and ended in genteel poverty, he rose to become one of the most famous men in Europe. He transformed the department store, changed advertising forever, and embarked on a series of glittering love affairs with some of the great beauties of his age. When we enter a department store today and find ourselves facing the perfume and makeup counters on the first floor, we are seeing the work of Harry Selfridge. When we stop to admire striking widow displays that draw crowds during the holiday season, we are paying tribute to the genius of Harry Selfridge.

Selfridge might almost have inspired the young-man-born-into-poverty-and-makes-good novels of Horatio Alger. Fighting his way up the economic and social ladder, he started delivering newspapers when he was ten years old in order to supplement the family income. Before he was twenty-one, he was working for the famed Chicago store owner Marshall Field. There he coined the classic advertising line Only _____ shopping days until Christmas and possibly originated the phrase (much hated by sales clerks) The customer is always right. He also found time to marry the beautiful Chicago heiress and property developer Rose Buckingham.

It was a time of rapid change. In 1893, the Chicago Worlds Fair drew millions of visitors to the citys south side, where they rode the worlds first Ferris wheel and strolled among the buildings of the White City built along the Midway (the inspiration for L. Frank Baums Emerald City of Oz). Walking among the people, Selfridge noted what it took to entertain and excite a large crowdthoughts that would later bear rich fruit.

Fashion, like everything else, was in flux. The large, stiff dresses of the later Victorian period were giving way to softer, more practical clothing. Princess Alexandra, the Prince of Waless wife, made popular the two-piece. By the turn of the century, the bustle had largely disappeared; women wore high-necked blouses, swept their hair up, and took advantage of the new freedom their clothing allowed them. Among those who did so was the dancer Isadora Duncan, who became a friend (some said lover) of Harry Selfridge.

All these new fashions were on display at Marshall Fields, but Selfridge wanted morehe wanted his own store, where he could put into practice his theories about advertising and display.

In 1906, while on a trip to London, he determined to expand into the Old World. He left Fields and on March 15, 1909, opened Selfridges at the west end of Oxford Street. The opening was somewhat less than ideal: it rained heavily, and inside the store the crush of visitors overtaxed the bathrooms and drinking fountains, causing a water shortage (the manager of the hairdressing salon, so the story goes, ran to the restaurant and grabbed siphons of soda water to rinse out shampoos from his customers hair). Nonetheless, the store was an immediate hit, with more than a million visitors during its first week.

In retrospect it isnt hard to see why. Selfridges was, simply, a different kind of department store. Massive amounts of space were given over to services, including a library, a restaurant, the aforementioned hair salon, and a smoking room. Selfridge believed that you got people into the store and then kept them there. Later, Selfridges was marked by massive displayseverything from a monoplane used in the first cross-Channel flightto a seismograph. The first public demonstration of television was made in 1925 in Selfridges.

Selfridge himself, flushed with commercial success, continued to expand his repertoire of lovers, including the dancer Anna Pavlova, the writer Elinor Glyn (whose sister was a leading fashion designer of the day), the designer Syrie Maugham (married to writer W. Somerset Maugham), andspectacularlythe French chanteuse Gaby Deslys, whose former lovers had included Prince Wilhelm of Germany, King Manuel of Portugal, and Frank Gould, son of the American robber baron Jay Gould. She posed for society photographs wearing enormous hats, which were then in fashion and sold at Selfridges.

There is no question that these affairs caused tensions in his marriage with Rosalie, with whom, by this time, he had three daughters and a son. However, she suffered in silence, and Harry was genuinely attached to her, making it all the more tragic when she died unexpectedly in 1918. Her death left her husband distraught, and he plunged into work as a palliative. He planned expansions of the store and one as well for his home in Highcliffe Castle near the Isle of Wight. Perhaps fortunately for the surrounding countryside, the latter was never built.

His string of love affairs continued. In Jenny and Rosie Dolly, he found two young women who shared his growing addiction to gambling. This obsession with poker became increasingly problematic after 1929, when the world moved into an economic depression and Selfridges, in common with many businesses, suffered a sharp downturn in sales.

Selfridge had always been free with his spending. Although he and his family were only renters at Highcliffe, he spent more than $3.5 million in todays money renovating and modernizing the castle to suit his tastes. As Britain shuddered through the 1930s, he found his money growing tighter. Even then, though, he was full of new ideas for the store; in 1939 he opened the first television department, convinced the new technology was the future.

However, many within the stores hierarchyincluding Selfridges son, Gordon Jr., who sat on the boardwere convinced that the time had come for the aging magnate to make way for younger blood. On October 18, 1939, Selfridge was confronted at a board meeting by a rebellious staff. They pointed out that he owed the store more than 118,000 as well as a quarter-million pounds in back taxes. The situation was no longer tenable, and Selfridge was presented with a letter of resignation for him to sign.

In forced retirement, he slipped gradually into obscurity, dying in 1947. But the store he built, the store that embodied all his hopes, dreams, and innovation, remains. Today, as busy shoppers file along its counters and contemplate their purchases, they are looking at the living legacy of an entrepreneurial genius: Harry Gordon Selfridge.

WE ARE ALL MERCHANTS, AND ALL RACES OF MEN HAVE BEEN MERCHANTS IN SOME FORM OR ANOTHER.

Commerce, that mother of riches and power, which is always ready to give a share of them to the merchant who comes to her with determination, with sound principles, with judgment and courage.

TO THE TRUE MERCHANT OBSTACLES EXIST ONLY TO BE OVERCOME.

The victories of the modern playing field fade into insignificance before the indomitable pluck and the staying power necessary for ventures where the risk was a mans entire capital, and often his life as well, and the reward, not a silver cup or shield, but a fortune perhaps doubled, and the reputation of an explorer.