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Canadian department store The Bay, corporate sibling of Lord & Taylor has undergone a rebrand, returning to it's full name HUDSON'S BAY...looking at the website it's almost like the dearly departed J.L. Hudson Co has come back to life...font similarity, etc.
There is a location in Windsor, which I'm sure will keep it's old logo signage for years to come. Interesting nonetheless.
www.thebay.com
Yes, easily the oldest extant company in North America. Nice move on their part to rekindle the flames of history.
Very impressive founded in 1670.Quote:
Originally Posted by canuck
The downtown store in Montreal is very impressive./Le magasin dans le centre-ville de Montréal, c'est très impressionant.
Another sort of connection to Hudson's - The Bay owned Zeller's junior dept. stores in Canada. Almost all the leases have been bought by Target. Visited my first Canadian Target store this week. It's very similar to those in the U.S. except of course for the higher Canadian prices.
I've always hoped that Hudson's Bay would consider opening a department store in downtown Detroit as an American flagship store. It would definitely be a destination store.
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Originally Posted by dtowncitylover
Oui, j'aime bien ce magasin, ça me rappelle ma jeunesse!
My dad used to work selling carpets, rugs and fabrics on the road from that store when I was a kid. He also worked for Eaton's downtown, but the Bay store downtown was called Morgan's before it was bought tby Hudson's Bay Co.
And I think before Morgan's it was called Murphy's dept store.
Did you ever visit Ogilvy's dept store downtown? It dates from 1866 and every day at noon, a scotsman walks through the store and plays his bagpipes in full kilty dress. Toronto's Thompson family recently bought it and is going to expand it and build a hotel and condo tower on the same block. It will be part of the british Selfridge's group which they bought out, but folks here are keeping their fingers crossed that the store will remain Ogilvy's for good...
It would be a safe bet that they're suffering from the same pressures that Federated/Macy's is, pressure from lower cost operators like Target, Wal-Mart and the like, and the re-branding of the company is an attempt to reestablish their Canadian roots with their core customers.
I also wonder if to some extent they're suffering from the same problem Macy's did when the re-branded Kauffman's, The Bon Marche, Hudson's/Marshall Fields and other regional department stores, The Bay having taken over and rebranded Simpsons and Woodward's. With the failure of Eaton's, HBC is pretty much the last man standing when it comes to Canadian department store chains, another parallel to Macy's U.S. operations.
The name change is also a relaunch for the company, after a 2012 IPO that brought it back into Canadian ownership after a long period of control by an American private equity firm.
Funny you should mention that because a friend and I tried to go visit Holt Renfew and Ogilvy's but were both closed when we tried.Quote:
Originally Posted by canuck
Quote:
Originally Posted by dtowncitylover
Sorry to hear that.
The Bay has successfully moved upmarket. It sells fewer household items and focuses on upper-mid fashions. Sears is the last bastion of mid-level full-service dept. stores but they are really getting killed by the home improvement stores and on-line electronics stores. If they ever collapse it will kill the mid-level malls like Oakland all over both countries.
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Originally Posted by 401don
Yes, in my suburban mall, the only big deptstore anchors are Sears and The Bay. Ditto in many other malls in Montreal metro. Targets and Walmarts are taking over the old Zellers locations. One Zellers had just expanded ten years ago here but neither Target nor Walmart wanted it, it closed last month and they started demolition this week, next week it will probably be gone since it is easy to put down...
Nordstrom is entering the market next year, bought up some leases from Sears...one of things prompting The Bay to move a little upstream from where they traditionally were. There are definitely parallels with Macys...eating up regional chains like Woodwards, Simpsons, Robinsons, etc over the years...Windsor was in fact originally a Simpsons.