Fashion: Boyds Meets Girl
Their approach may have made women feel about as comfortable as Winona Ryder now does at Saks, but it’s worked well for Boyds for the past 67 years. This being a family business, exact figures aren’t available, but consider staying power alone. The enterprise that was a big-and-tall store in the ’50s has survived everything from a city-mandated move from 12th and Market, to the men’s casual craze (“It was like the worst curse word I ever heard,” recalls Gerald Gushner, 75, son of one of the original owners), to the demise of city specialty stores like Nan Duskin and Bonwit Teller, to the rise of the concentrated designer mecca that is King of Prussia. And now, holding the line on its once-depressed stretch of Chestnut Street has put Boyds right smack in the middle of the latest Center City renaissance. There’s the Midtown Continental at the corner, the soon-to-be-renovated Boyd Theater one block west, luxury condos and the Comcast tower all rising within sight. The Pennsylvania Art Conservatory and Smith Brothers are planning to move in, and a major expansion of Di Bruno Bros. is planned one block east.
And because some of the foot traffic the men of Boyds can see coming outside their limestone windows goes click click click down their marble floors, radical change is under way. Owner Kent Gushner, 45, is the grandson of one of the store’s founders, Alexander Gushner. As Kent tells it, the new strategy all came about with the following realization: “To sell more men’s clothes, you have to sell more women’s clothes.” His brother-in-law and fellow owner, Ralph Yaffe, 49, explains: “What we’re doing is bringing more people into the store. If you come in, for example, and want to buy a dress for yourself, [you’ll say] ‘Oh, while I’m here, let me pick up some sport shirts for my husband.’” A burning love of women’s fashion? Not quite. But while the men of Boyds can only express it in a roundabout way, they know opportunity when they see it — just like Grandpa Alexander did when he watched the Curtis Publishing staff go by his Market Street cigar shop and realized he could sell them shirts and ties along with the snuff.
Of course, catering to the ladies means going far, far beyond the token women’s boutique Boyds added in 1993. And it means more than tripling the floor space for women’s designers. More than making the jewelry boutique the first thing you see when you enter the doors, or adding a slipcovered settee where a dark mahogany case once stood. For the new generation of owners, who took over the store in 2004, it means putting in jeopardy what the prior two generations of the family created: a specialty gentlemen’s store where men can be men and boys can pretend they are, too. Where ashtrays and drinks arrive for the best customers without their having to ask. Where the owners are referred to as Mr. Ralph Yaffe and Mr. Jeff Glass and Mr. Kent Gushner on the intercom that endlessly summons them from office to floor to storeroom to reception. Where doing one thing well, and without much outside interference, has always been the name of the game.
