The sale proved advantageous to the business-over the next eight years, the franchise grew to 47 stores under the name TOYS. He then sold the business to Interstate Stores for $7.5 million and a promise of growing the chain, which Lazarus still headed. Lazarus had a total of four stores by 1966, with $12 million in sales annually. To cap off the decade, Barbie emerged in 1959, becoming the best–selling doll ever.
It was a huge success and not long after, he opened the third store and adopted this as the policy for all future stores. Lazarus decided this was the way to go with his business and, upon opening his second store, employed the self–service discount method. Korvette that offered deep discounts, now allowed by the fair trade laws abolishment, began emerging. In 1957 he changed the name to Toys "R" Us, using the backward "R" he had devised. Lazarus's toy business grew along with it, and he decided the name of his company was too long and the letters, therefore, too small. Potato Head become the first toy advertised nationally on television in 1952, and it sparked a toy selling boom. The 1950s were a good time to be in the toy business. He began to sell toys almost exclusively and renamed his store Children's Supermarket, retaining the backward "R." Career Details After all, furniture, lasting many years, was usually a one–time purchase, whereas toys needed to be replaced much more often. Lazarus realized that toys were the better business. The turning point for the business came when one customer came back to buy another toy after the infant had broken the first one. He called his business Baby Furniture and Toy Supermarket with a backward "R" to give the name a unique quality. Customers then started asking for toys for their babies as well, so Lazarus began to stock toys.
Other servicemen were returning from the war and starting families, and Lazarus planned to supply the growing demands of these new parents. Searching for a career of some kind, Lazarus didn't have to look beyond the very house he was born in and with $5,000 began a business selling baby furniture out of his father's Washington, D.C. He went on to serve as a cryptographer in World War II, and when he returned from the army in 1948 he considered enrolling in college on the G.I. When young Charles asked his father why they didn't sell new bikes, his father told him something he never forgot-that he couldn't compete with the large chain stores that could sell them for much less. House, purchasing broken bikes and repairing them for resale. His father sold used bicycles out of the family's He was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 1990 by the American Toy Institute.Ĭharles Lazarus was born in 1923 in Washington, D.C. Lazarus has two daughters from his first wife, Ruth and Diane. A messy legal suit ensued after Kaplan notified Lazarus of her intention to seek a divorce the day before her death in order to trigger a post–nuptial agreement ordering Lazarus to give her a sum of $20 million that she intended to go, after her death, to her children from a previous marriage. He was widowed from his previous wife of 16 years, Helen Singer–Kaplan, the famous sex therapist who died of cancer in August 1995. Lazarus married wife Joan Regenbogen in 1995. Lazarus's homogenization of the huge warehouse–like stores and unprecedented selection of some 18,000 toys combined with deep discounts from bulk buying took the company from a single toy store begun in his father's basement to an $11 billion business enterprise with more than 1,450 stores worldwide. The company would remain the number one toy retailer for decades. This system kept the company he built from scratch on top of the most important trends in the toy industry. A retail and merchandising genius, he had the foresight to see the potential in specializing in toys alone and to invest in a revolutionary computerized inventory system.
Charles Lazarus is one of the nation's most enterprising and successful entrepreneurs.
0 kommentar(er)
