Swinging Dayton's

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.

Dayton's has fully computerized its B. Dalton operation to keep track of fastand slow-moving titles, meanwhile taking pains to make the chain seem like a group of friendly neighborhood booksellers. Most B. Dalton ads use the first person to proclaim "I am having a sale," or "I see a growing interest in the occult." Mixing mechanization with the personal touch is a Dayton's hallmark that has paid off for the company as a whole. Last year Dayton's had sales of $265,507,000 and profits of $9,587,000, a gain of some 17% over the previous year. It expects to increase its sales by $100 million during fiscal 1968.

Exciting Adventure. Although it became publicly held last fall, Dayton's is still largely a family affair, with six Day tons holding down management positions. To keep them straight, employees customarily refer to the company president as "Mr. Bruce," to Edward Dayton, the 28-year-old general manager of the bookstore division, as "Mr. Edward," and so on. What links all of them besides blood ties is the conviction, as Executive Vice President "Mr. Ken" puts it, that "shopping is the great American pastime and should be an exciting adventure."

To help make it so, Dayton's joined with other Minneapolis merchants last fall to develop a downtown shopping mall, graced it with a "mobile-stabile" Alexander Calder sculpture and remodeled its main store so that passersby could look directly into colorful boutiques rather than at mere window-display manikins. For the past two Christmases, it has outfitted the store's 12,000-sq.-ft. auditorium with a $250,000 "Dickens Village," complete with two-story, thatched-roof buildings and animated figures of Scrooge, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. It recently staged an extravaganza for college-age youths, featuring computers that analyzed their handwriting, phrenologists who measured their skulls, fortunetellers who gazed into their futures and rah-rah cheerleaders who simply looked attractive. There were also karate lessons, instructions on how to pack a suitcase and the sounds of 15 rock bands. The affair drew 12,000 young people, one of whom made off with the door prize of a live horse.

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