Harry Selfridge - the great showman and innovator
As the first Retail masters article illustrates, Harry Selfridge was not the first great department store magnate. However, he is one of the figures that have grown to symbolise the era of great department stores.
Harry Selfridge is to department stores what Sam Walton is to big superstores and Jeff Bezos to online retailing.
Harry Selfridge has become the face of the great department stores probably, because his life has been depicted in a couple of books and subsequently made into a tv series. In 2007 British author Lindy Woodhead published an interesting book Shopping, Seduction & Mr Selfridge. The book is a depiction of the life and legacy of Harry Selfridge. This text is my attempt to summarise the best bits of the book and the huge legacy of Harry Selfridge to the entire industry of retailing.
Harry Selfridge is an interesting person that is remembered more than a century after he opened the eponymous department store carrying his name. By building in ”the dead end of Oxford Street” Harry Selfridge was also actively creating Oxford Street into one of the most important shopping streets in the world.
Harry Selfridge’s career includes many everlasting lessons for anyone interested in retailing.
Learning from the past
Like all great innovators, Harry Selfridge, was keen on learning. He learned from the greats of the past by travelling to Paris, New York and other big cities. He was very intrigued how the Bon Marche had led the way in Paris. He considered the Bon Marche a masterpiece, which turned out to be a great inspiration for his own store.
First and foremost Harry Selfridge learned the tricks of the trade from the great department store magnate Marshall Fields in Chicago where he worked for 25 years. Harry Selfridge grew in the ranks of the store, eventually running the entire store. Besides that he was responsible for the construction of the new building for the store. That gave him confidence that he would have the talent to do build by himself.
Image source: Wikipedia
Another trait mr Selfridge had in common with other successful innovators was the fact that he didn’t imitate or copy directly nor did he invent totally new ideas .
Rather he was inspired about new and interesting innovations and he combined what he had seen into something resembling his own vision. He did introduce some new innovations into retailing, but majority of his ideas were introduced by other innovators before him.
Some of the new things he developed were putting the perfume and cosmetics department right next to the main entrance. This created the signature feel of department stores today. Selfridges also mastered the window dressing part, another classic part of department stores, as well as the use of instore promotions and fashion shows to create excitement and fun in shopping.
Source: Wikimedia
Ad and PR man
Harry Selfridge was also an avid advertiser and a great PR man. He was the first to use full page advertisements, both in Chicago and in London. His contemporaries thought this kind of grandeur advertising to be waste of money. Besides doing big advertising Selfridge also shunned using much product & price promotions. He wanted his advertisements to have a story.
The big and splashy publicity created interested for Selfridge’s and drew people on to see all the new and interesting things on offer. During the launch of his store in London Selfridge launched an advertising campaign the scale of which British retailing scene had not seen before. It featured 38 richly illustrated advertisements on 104 pages in 18 different national newspapers. Everything done in-house!
Selfridge’s advertisement in The Times (Source: Wikimedia)
Harry Selfridge used his nearly infinite pool of creative ideas to create publicity and get the customer coming in through the doors. He believed that once he got the customers in, he would be able to excite them and serve them so that they would be coming back again and again. Besides the massive advertising campaign for the opening of the store on the 15th of March 1909, Harry Selfridge promised to pay every customer the return rail fare back ”from any part of the Kingdom” if they spent at least £5 in the store.
The lavish spending on advertising was a good reason for the press to love mr. Selfridge. He did also understand that one should not argue with the press, as they will eventually define how the narrative will be told: ”Never fight with them, never fall out with them if you can possibly avoid it, they will always have the last word.”
Another example of Harry Selfridge’s knack for advertising and PR was his daily column in the Morning Post. The column was not signed by mr Selfridge, but by Callisthenes and by the ”Selfridges & Co Ltd”. The column covered numerous topics relevant to the society and naturally to the Selfridges department store.
Harry Selfridge had the courage to take a stand even on some difficult political issues of the day.
He was an active supporter of the cause of the Suffragettes. As a forward looking entrepreneur he understood that courageously taking a stand he stood on the side of his most important customers.
The columns were published for two decades up to year 1939. This can be said to being one of the earlier forms of content marketing.
Excitement and fun
“The whole art of merchandising consists of appealing to the imagination. Once the imagination is moved, the hand goes automatically to the purse.”
Events and activities in the store are what nowadays is associated to the great department stores of the past. The great department store leaders surely were very good in creating the theatre of retailing. Unfortunately that seems to be a skill that is fading in the current economic pressures of the retail industry.
The department store magnates of the past, especially Harry Selfridge, understood the value of exciting people and inspiring their imagination.
The times were flush with new and exciting things. Innovations from scientific breakthroughs were arising rapidly as the department stores emerged at a time when societal and technological change were rapid. Inventors were developing all sorts of curious new things. From aeroplanes to cars and the telephone as well as the refrigerator and electricity were all innovations of huge magnitude that sparked public’s imagination.
Besides these a flurry of smaller innovations were also arising during early 1900 hundreds including the camera, product packaging, processed food, recorded music, cinema to name a few. These all influenced the retail industry greatly.
Calais - Dover … & Selfridge’s
One great example of Harry Selfridge’s ability to follow the tastes and interests of the public came in July 1909, when a french Louis Bleriot became the first person to fly over the English channel. Aviation had sparked peoples’ interest after the Wright brothers’ sensational European tour.
Harry Selfridge understood this and jumped on the opportunity. When Bleriot’s plane landed in Dover, there were only three other people at the site. Less than accidentally Harry Selridge happened to be ”just driving around the countryside”. He offered to pay for mr Bleriot for allowing the plane to be put on display at Selfridges for four days.
Harry Selfridge created a huge show out of the plane with advertisements stating ”Calais-Dover-Selfridges”. The four days saw the store staying open until midnight to cater for the public’s craving to see the plane. It was seen by 150 000 people, including members of parliament.
"Calais-Dover-Selfridges" was the quintessential showmanship of Harry Selfridge that epitomises even to this day what great store retailing should be about.
Retailers who follow their time and their customers’ interests can spark curiosity in people. The stores are a great place to showcase these exciting new things and teach customers about them.
Especially on a time with growing online based competitors, the store as a place to tell stories and excite peoples’ imagination, has an enormous potential.
This does not happen through cutting costs. One would hope that the the innovative merchant spirit of the department stores would be revitalised.
Social change and timing keys to successful innovations
As with all great innovations, one of the most critical features is having the right timing. It is not enough to have the right idea, one must also introduce it to the customer, when the customer is ready.
Often innovation is initiated by people who are either young or somehow outsiders to the status quo of the industry. Harry Selfridge was both.
He was born in 1858 at a time when the early department store innovators Boucicaut and Stewart were building their fortunes and fame. When Harry Selfridge began to work for Marshall Fields in 1876, he was only 22 years old.
Being young enough to not have the biases of the previous generations, but old enough to understand the change that was brewing in the industry.
He came to the retail industry, which was on the cusp of a great change. The change was already initiated by the previous generation and Harry Selfridge was part of the generation that took the change to new heights.
When he opened his own store in 1909, he was already 51 years old. He had been working in the retail industry for already 33 years. Certainly not the young college graduate start up entrepreneur that we associate with industry transforming entrepreurship.
Outsider Harry Selfridge was to the retail establishment in London. They had been doing business for quite some time and were very proud of their imperial roots. The Selfridge family seen was as American upstarts. But Harry Selfridge had seen what the new world of department stores would look like and how it would change the industry.
And the tide started to change again…
At the same time as Harry Sefridge changed the retailing landscape in London, there were a couple changes brewing in the UK and in the United States.
Changes that were to challenge the dominance of the great individual department store. These changes were the development of the chain store model. Originally initiated by the great American & Pacific Tea Company, which was the biggest retailer in the world at the time.
The big change for the great department stores in the city centers emerged in the form of Sears & Roebuck, which became the biggest retailer in the world in the 1960s. This was initiated by their strategy in the 1920’s to extend its mail order catalogue business to physical stores located in the nascent concept of the suburban malls.
Unfortunately, Harry Selfridge did not foresee this trend growing and during his later life his fortunes turned and he died as a poor man in 1947. However, he still left retailing a lasting legacy, one which hopefully encourages the future retailers to courageously innovate new services for the customers and one which enriches the lives of the people working there and of those who come in to buy.
Great retailing is about right products, good value for money and good service in terms of helping and exciting customers.
Harry Selfridge’s biggest and most memorable legacy will be that of informing and delighting customers with beautiful and exciting stores.
‘When I die, I want it said of me, “He dignified and ennobled commerce”’. That he certainly did.