By Chris Freund, 11 February 2022
1915 photo of Harry Edison, Mark Edison, Sarah Halle Edison, Irving Edison, Rose Edison, Sam Edison, and Simon Edison
Edison Brothers Company was born on 28 Oct 1922, when the five Edison brothers, Sam (34), Harry (32), Mark (27), Irving (23) and Simon (21) joined forces to form a partnership and opened their first Chandler's Boot Shop in Atlanta. They found a location in a premium shopping district, at 55 Whitehall St., on the corner of Whitehall and Alabama streets, which they leased from United Cigar Stores of America for $7,200 per year (equivalent to $116,000 in 2021), a very high rent at the time.
Žagarė in the late 1800s
The Edison family were Jewish immigrants from Žagarė, a small town in Šiauliai district of Lithuania, near the border with Latvia. They had emigrated to the United States in 1892. The pre-history of Edison Brothers is nicely covered in the Winter 1973 Issue of the Georgia Historical Quarterly.
Before opening Chandler's, they had all been in the shoe retail industry independently, as their father, Abraham Edison, had become a wholesale shoe broker later in his life and had introduced his sons to the industry and his contacts. Mark Edison had started his career at G. R. Kinney Company, before moving on to set up his own store. Their individual shoe store locations before Chandler's tended to be in lower rent locations on second floors or on side-streets rather than the primary shopping streets. Opening Chandler's was a gamble. They wanted to share the risk, because it was the first store that any of them had opened in a high rent location. Given the high risk of this venture, they didn't want to use their family name for the store, so they settled on Chandler's after flipping through the phone book.
Chandler's offered the same quality and design of premium brands but at more affordable fixed prices, initially $6 per pair. The attractive product offering, combined with the strong location, brought with it lots of traffic, and Chandler's was an immediate success. In their first full year in 1923, the shop sold 65,000 pairs of shoes, generating $282,000 of revenues, making the $7,200 annual rent insignificant at just 2.6% of revenues.
Given the success of Chandler's, it was clear this partnership had the potential to grow. So they decided to stick together and open more stores. Harry would be responsible for finance and real estate. Irving would handle human resources and advertising. Mark and Simon headed up shoe merchandising. While Sam was in charge of accessory merchandising.
In 1924, they opened a more mid-market shoe store in Atlanta, called Baker's. Baker's was originally an outlet for selling slower moving Chandler's shoes, and also a new line of more affordable shoes. Baker's was also an instant success.
In 1925, they expanded Chandler's to New Orleans, which was also very successful, with women lining up outside the store on the opening day. They also expanded Chandler’s to Memphis and Birmingham that year.
The 2nd Chandlers, which was located at 811 Canal St. in New Orleans, opened in 1925.
From the beginning, the concept behind Chandler's and Baker's was to provide the most popular fashions with high quality standards at moderate fixed prices. In other words, they were copying the most popular styles and making them available at more affordable prices. The affordability resulted in much higher volumes. And they did this while providing a high level of service at the stores.
By 1926 they had opened stores in Memphis, Birmingham, Nashville, and Louisville. All were instant hits. Sales would reach $1 million that year. The Edisons decided to incorporate a company in order to raise more money for future expansion. The partnership was dissolved, and Edison Brothers Stores, Inc., a Georgia corporation with capital of $150,000, was established.
By 1928, they were operating 12 Chandler's and 5 Baker's stores, with sales of $3 million. These 17 stores were in highly accessible and visible street locations in the primary shopping districts, as shopping malls hadn't yet emerged. As a matter of policy they would invest in paying for the best locations, rather than advertising, to bring in traffic. This policy changed by the 1950s as they used some advertising to promote their in-house product brands, for example QualiCraft shoes.
The opening of Chandler's in Houston in 1927. A young Clark Gable was one of the sales people.
New York Curb Exchange, 1930s
In early 1929, Edison Brother Stores Inc went public on the New York Curb Exchange, an OTC market for companies that didn't meet the listing criteria of the NYSE (in 1953, the Curb Exchange would become the American Stock Exchange). Edison Brothers raised $950,000 in their IPO. This was shortly before the stock market crashed in October 1929. Using the proceeds from their public offering, they quickly doubled the number of stores to 34 by opening 14 more Baker's stores and 3 more Chandler's stores, and moved their headquarters to St. Louis. to be closer to the shoe manufacturers based there.
During the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the emphasis was on the more mid-market Baker's brand given the reduced spending power of the population. In 1930 they also expanded Baker's to the West Coast for the first time, but called it Leed's, as there was already another footwear retailer using the Baker's name.
In 1931 in the midst of the Great Depression, they launched and began to scale up a low-end chain called Burt's. By the mid-1930s, they had a presence in the mass premium, mass, and lower mass segments of the market, each under different brands. In 1932, the standard pricing was $3.95 at Chandlers, $2.95 at Baker's, and $1.95 at Burts.
Edison Brothers didn't stop growing during the Great Depression and continued to expand at a rate of around 12 stores per year. Over the 5 year period starting 1929, revenues grew by 4 times. By 1933, sales reached $10 million. By 1934, they had 85 stores in 27 cities.
In 1937, they added air conditioning to 70 of their 121 stores.
10 years after first being listed on the New York Curb Exchange, they moved the company's listing to the New York Stock Exchange in 1939. It traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol: EBS. As a NYSE listed company, Edison’s shares were eligible for margin lending, and therefore traded at a higher price and with greater liquidity.