RETAILING: Plying While Playing

For Houston Department Store Merchant Robert Sakowitz and his wife Pamela, life is as colorful and regulated as the seasons. Each winter they ski at St. Moritz; every spring they go to the Paris fashion shows; and in the summer they are house guests of the Aga Khan at his Riviera pad. They often jet to Manhattan, check into their Park Avenue apartment, visit Pamela’s sister and brother-in-law Peter Duchin, and dine with such friends as Designer Bill Blass, Metropolitan Museum Director Thomas Moving and Revlon Chairman Charles Revson. At home Bob Sakowitz lives high in the saddle. He entertains the prime of Houston society at his colonial-style estate, wheels around in an $18,000 Lamborghini and is perennially listed among the nation’s ten best-dressed men. Having such a life-style naturally tags Sakowitz an international playboy, but he argues that “nine-tenths of my trips and my socializing are work-connected.”

Indeed they are. Sakowitz, at 34, is the merchandising chief and driving force of the seven-link department-store chain in Texas that bears his family’s name. By personally scouting just what fads and new fashions appeal to the style pacesetters, he has been first with many fashions. Sakowitz Inc. introduced Courreges minidresses and boots in the U.S., was very early with Pucci men’s wear and was the first store outside New York City to open an Yves Saint Laurent boutique. As an innovator, Bob Sakowitz contends: “Too many retailers just take what is available and then use the Macy’s-testing theory: sample and reorder. But today a retailer really should do more. He has to take a position on style and fashion, believe in it and explain it to the consumer.” Sakowitz’s position now is that the big seller in women’s clothes for next spring will be “soft sherbet colors, milky colors —like elegant apricot, lime, melon and strawberry.”

Sakowitz has also attracted shoppers by staging European-angled promotions every autumn. Last month, as part of an Italian Renaissance promo, he decorated the main downtown Houston store with $3,000,000 worth of borrowed Renaissance paintings and tapestries. (Once inside the store, shoppers bought plenty of Italian and French dresses that were specially designed for the promotion, as well as bed linens with prints of Leonardo’s inventions and Italian silk ties with the insigne of the House of Borgia.) This week, in Sakowitz’s annual wine auction, the store will sell off rare vintages, including one of the eight remaining Jeroboams of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1929. All this activity has been more than culturally rewarding. In the past ten years, sales of Sakowitz Inc. have risen 150%, to some $60 million, and net profits —which are a family secret—have exceeded the 22% margin that is common for retail chains.

Sakowitz men have been selling in Texas since 1900, when Robert’s grandfather and great uncle opened a clothing store for seamen in Galveston. Robert’s father Bernard, now 65, is president of the company, but he has been giving more and more authority to Robert, the executive vice president. After graduating cum laude from Harvard and working at Macy’s in Manhattan and Galeries Lafayette in Paris, Robert started minding the family store in 1962. At his urging, the business has expanded fast, while remaining one of the few large family retailers that have not sold out to a bigger national chain. Sakowitz Inc. bought the two White & Kirk stores in Amarillo three years ago; it will soon open a store in Scottsdale, Ariz., and is building a $4,000,000 store that will start business next year in downtown Dallas.

The Dallas branch will bring Sakowitz into closer competition with Neiman-Marcus, which is based in Dallas but owned by California’s Broadway-Hale group. The two Texas retailers have been slugging it out in Houston since 1970, when Neiman-Marcus opened a big store right across from a Sakowitz outlet in suburban Post Oak. The stores sell generally the same kind of goods, the main difference being that some prices are higher at Neiman-Marcus, inspiring customers to dub it “Needless Markup.” Most Houstonians remain loyal to the home-town retailers. At Post Oak, the one point where the two compete, Sakowitz’s sales are about 25% higher than those of Neiman-Marcus.