from the news. . .

Lord & Taylor
The rose has been a symbol of Lord & Taylor since the 1940s. The department store, working to revitalize its image, started a contest in early 2008 to create a version of the rose more attuned to the times. Each year the winning image will be part of Lord & Taylor’s advertising and branding campaigns.

Revitalizing Lord & Taylor’s image with shoppers was Jane Elfers’ job and goal when she became company CEO in 2000. Over the next eight years Elfers’ Lord & Taylor bloomed like its symbolic rose. It became a destination for shoppers looking for clothing from the hottest designers, just like the store was under Elfers’ only female predecessor, Dorothy Shaver.

Shaver became Lord & Taylor president in 1945, but had spent twenty years devising creative and unusual ways to attract shoppers’ attention. In 1928 Shaver hosted a sensational showing of modern French decorative art the store. By 1931 when she became vice president in charge of advertising, publicity, and fashion promotion, she saw a way to differentiate Lord & Taylor from its competition. Instead of following the fashion dictates of Paris, Shaver championed the fresh designs of Americans like Claire McCardell, Anne Fogerty, Pauline Trigere, Lilly Dache and Clare Potter. After becoming president, Shaver selected as the symbol of Lord & Taylor a long-stemmed red rose, signifying beauty and quality. The rose was reproduced on boxes, wrapping paper, bags—in many of the same places Lord & Taylor’s newly revived rose logo can be found today.

Successfully returning Lord & Taylor to the forefront of fashion merchandising was not enough to save Jane Elfers’ job. She was replaced in October 2008, a victim of the deep recession in the US economy. Dorothy Shaver’s fourteen year stewardship also ended prematurely but illness was the cause. Shaver died of a stroke in 1959.

Newsday
When, in 2008, Rupert Murdock of the New York Post made an unsolicited offer to Sam Zell of Tribune Company for Tribune’s Newsday newspaper, two other suitors quickly showed up to woo. Mortimer Zuckerman’s New York Daily News tried to win Newsday for itself by offering a package more attractive than Murdock’s. But it was Cablevision Systems Corporation’s $650 million dollar deal that won the trip to the altar.

Newsday, New York Daily News, and New York Post are connected historically through one fascinating woman. Alicia Patterson founded Newsday, was the daughter of the founder of  New York Daily News, and counted among her friends and colleagues publisher Dorothy Schiff, owner from 1939 to 1976 of New York Post.

Post Cereals
In our modern economy most brands are like ingredients in a corporate test kitchen. If they don’t add enough zing to the recipe, they are disposed of and the corporate cooks try others.

In August 2008 Kraft Foods sold Post cereals—Grape-Nuts, Post Toasties, Raisin Bran, Alpha-Bits and others—to Ralcorp. Ralcorp was once Ralston Purina which made Chex cereals but sold Chex to General Mills in the 1990s. Post cereals became associated with Kraft in 1989 with the merger of General Foods with Kraft. But Post brands are much older, going back to 1895 when C.W. Post concocted Postum, a healthy grain-based beverage, as an alternative to coffee and tea (Kraft ceased production of Postum in 2007).

Postum's success led Post to create Grape-Nuts cereal, then Post Toasties corn flakes. His products and his innovative advertising eventually made his business very successful. But in the early days of his enterprise, his only child—like children of small business owners everywhere—pitched in to pack boxes. As the business grew this child regularly visited factories and learned how raw materials were purchased and transformed into products. When Post died in 1914 his well-tutored heir, Marjorie Merriweather Post, became the company’s largest stockholder but opted to have her husband in her seat at meetings of the board of directors.

Under the chairmanship of Marjorie’s second husband, E. F. Hutton, The Postum Company acquired Jell-O, Log Cabin syrup, Maxwell House coffee, Baker's chocolate, and Birds Eye frozen foods, and renamed itself General Foods Corporation. Marjorie finally sat at the table with other company directors after she divorced Hutton in 1935. She served as a director for twenty-two years. Brands that were part of her company are now dispersed among numerous companies who are each trying to find the right recipe to satisfy stockholders and consumers.

The Tribune Company
A little more than twenty years after becoming a publicly traded enterprise, the Tribune Company returned to private ownership under new leader, Chicago businessman Sam Zell. The company's holdings include the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other media properties. 

For its first 136 years Tribune Company was privately held, controlled by the Medill-McCormick-Patterson dynasty, much the way the Bancroft Family controlled Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal, until the sale to Rupert Murdock’s News Corp. Starting in the 1870s the success of Tribune Company’s newspapers, initially the flagship Chicago Tribune and later including the New York Daily News, provided the foundation of the private fortunes of the Medill-McCormick-Patterson family and the other stockholding families.

Eleanor 'Cissy' Medill Patterson, deleted from the Tribune’s line of succession by her gender, found an alternate way to write herself into the newspaper business. She worked for the competition then bought herself the newspaper that became the Washington Times-Herald.
Read about Cissy Patterson

Interestingly, a few years after Cissy's death, the Washington Times-Herald gave young Jacqueline Bouvier her first job. She became the 'Inquiring Camera Girl,' interviewing and photographing numerous people for her column, including her future husband, John F. Kennedy.

Brownberry Ovens
Some time ago Catherine Clark’s name disappeared from logo of her Brownberry Ovens’ bread. The word Ovens disappeared, too. Finally Brownberry disappeared, replaced by Arnold, the maker of the bread since 1984. Maybe I was the only one to notice.

I was not the only one who noticed in early 2007 that the current owner of the Brownberry brand changed the bread. George Weston Bakeries was deluged with complaints. The company listened to its customers. Catherine Clark’s original whole wheat bread recipe went back on store shelves.  
Read about Catherine Clark

Happy 100th Birthday, Neiman Marcus
The famous Dallas department store began surprising and delighting customers on September 10, 1907.  The merchandise available in 1907 was all selected by Carrie Marcus Neiman, co-founder with Al Neiman, her husband, and Herbert Marcus, her brother.
Visit the Neiman Marcus website celebration