Tiffany's Splits

When 25-year-old Charles Lewis Tiffany opened his store on Manhattan's lower Broadway in the 1837 depression, he quickly learned that a store can be too exclusive for its own good. In his first three days, his door was darkened so rarely by customers that receipts totaled only $4.98. Business has been picking up ever since. Tiffany's began unobtrusively to court foot-slogging shoppers as well as the carriage trade; this week its chaste ad in the New York Times offered gold brooches for $34 as well as a diamond pin at $6,650. In its store at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street are private buying rooms, where rich clients can inspect $200,000 necklaces at their leisure. But a housewife can walk in off the avenue and buy a $3 teaspoon or a 50-c- ashtray.

This combination of carriage and foot trade has made Tiffany's rich, and its stock a sapphire-blue chip. Tiffany's shareholders are a far more exclusive group than its clientele; outside the families of the founder and of the longtime partners, there are only about 200 stockholders, who now own close to 50% of the 12,000 seldom-traded shares. Last week Tiffany's got ready to let more of the public in. At their annual meeting, stockholders voted to split the stock (currently quoted in over-the-counter trading at $600 to $650) 16 for 1. Tiffany's shares, which paid $35 in dividends last year, were split once before (in 1920) at 5 to 1; in the last 20 years they have sold as high as $3,200, never lower than about $200. The new split will bring them down to around $40, enabling present holders, when faced with inheritance or income-tax problems, to sell them more readily.

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