When Twiggy made her 1967 U.S.
tour, she deigned to put in a personal appearance at only one department store. The same store was one of the first in the U.S. to introduce men's Carnaby Street fashions. It has also brought in Simon & Garfunkel, Dionne Warwick, and Spanky and Our Gang to entertain shoppers. Among art fanciers, it is known and respected for its Gallery 12, which sells Tom Wesselmann nudes as well as $8,000 Marisol wood sculptures. The store is Dayton's of Minneapolis, which has exhibited a flair for showmanship that has been emulated by some of the biggest names in U.S. retailing. Still, the showcase downtown store is only one part of the fast-growing Dayton Corp., which by the end of 1968 will include ten other department stores, eleven discount outlets and a chain of 27 bookshops.
Dayton's has been an aggressive outfit since its establishment in 1902 by Minneapolis Banker George Draper Dayton. He lured shoppers with slickly conceived newspaper ads and free food, thought nothing of hiring an airplane to deluge the Minnesota State Fairgrounds with a million blue feathers inscribed with Dayton's name. By the time the store came under control of third-generation family members in 1950 (the elder Dayton died in 1938), it accounted for 16% of all furniture and apparel sales in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. That would have satisfied most merchants, but the
Dayton heirs were far from content.
"We started with the assumption," says Bruce Dayton, 50, George's grandson and the company president since 1965, "that the independent department store was a dying breed of cat. We knew we had to form a growth company or be absorbed." Dayton's thus expanded rapidly into new lines and locations. It opened its first branch in Rochester, Minn., in 1954, two years later put up one of the country's first fully enclosed, air-conditioned shopping centers in a Minneapolis suburb. It soon added another shopping center, is now building two more.
The Whole Pie. Besides adding new stores of its own, Dayton's last year bought up San Francisco's fashionable Shreve & Co. jewelry store, and earlier this year acquired the two Diamond department stores in Phoenix, Ariz., and the four-store Lipman chain in Oregon. Long committed to the "whole pie" theory of retailing, which emphasizes bargain-basement as well as high-fashion merchandise, the company is also expanding its six-year-old chain of Target discount stores, a $100 million-a-year operation that has outlets in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri. The most impressive growth has come in book retailing, notably the cluster of B. Dalton bookshops that Dayton's has opened in the Middle West and West in the past two years. This month the company strengthened this division by acquiring the eight-store Pickwick chain, Southern California's leading bookseller.