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Nathan Ohrbach was born on August, 31, 1885, in Vienna, Austria, one of four children of Isaac J. Ohrbach and Anna Dickman. When Nathan was two, his family emigrated to the United States and took up residence in Brooklyn, in New York City.
Nathan Ohrbach attended elementary school and DeWitt Clinton High School in Brooklyn, New York City.
By age fourteen Nathan Ohrbach was running errands for local merchants; at seventeen he was a traveling salesman; at twenty he was a buyer for local stores. At twenty-six, in 1911, he opened a small specialty shop in Brooklyn called Bon March, Inc. , and later one in Manhattan. The stores specialized in low cost, ready-to-wear merchandise. By 1923, Ohrbach had eighteen years' experience in retailing. With dress manufacturer Max Wiesen as a partner, he opened a store on Fourteenth Street at Union Square in Manhattan with two floors and a basement stocked with dresses and coats - job lots, seconds, irregulars, and manufacturers' overstocks priced low for fast sale. The store was a huge success and eventually occupied six adjoining buildings. By 1928 he bought out his partner at more than ten times his original investment. Ohrbach's expanded to Newark, New Jersey, in 1930, and to Los Angeles in 1948. In 1953 Ohrbach purchased Milliron's in downtown Los Angeles, but the store closed in 1959 due to poor sales volume. After 1960 Ohrbach opened stores in La Mirada, Westbury, Long Island, in the San Fernando Valley, and other suburban areas in New York and California.
Ohrbach's greatest business adventure came on August 26, 1954, when he moved the flagship store uptown from Fourteenth Street to Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan, to the former site of James McCreery and Sons. This meant direct competition with Macy's, Gimbels, Lord and Taylor, B. Altman and Company, and Arnold Constable, all in the immediate vicinity. Sales in the Herald Square area rose sharply with the advent of the new Ohrbach's. Aware that his son was not interested in a career in retailing, Ohrbach sold a large block of stock in the Ohrbach Corporation in 1962 to the Dutch-American Investing Company, an affiliate of C. and A. Brenninkmeyer Company, a European Mercantile Empire. In 1963 Ohrbach resigned as president and treasurer of the chain, retaining the chairmanship of Ohrbach's Inc. until 1965, when total sales were at $94 million. After 1965 he retained a seat on the board of directors and became a consultant to the company.
Ohrbach wrote a textbook entitled Getting Ahead in Retailing, which was published by McGraw Hill in 1935. His philosophy was expressed in the slogan "a business in millions, a profit in pennies. " He was intensely personal in his approach, and for many years even greeted shoppers as they entered his store. As a pioneer of low-overhead, high-volume selling he was a precursor of the discount store movement. Services were cut to the bare essentials: there was a minimum sales force, and the store offered no alterations, no deliveries, no credit. Ohrbach expressed this approach as "less billing, more cooing. " There were no special sales periods and no price advertising. Ohrbach believed in high fashion at low cost for bargain-conscious women. Over the years, more and more quality fashion items and lines were added to his inventory, thus attracting women lured by expensively styled clothes at moderate prices. His stores began to offer authentic copies of Paris couture originals. Buyers were sent abroad to Paris, Rome, and Milan to purchase originals on the understanding that they would be copied. The designer dresses were sent to the Garment District on Seventh Avenue to be reproduced and were made available in Ohrbachs within weeks. This strategy won Ohrbach the veneration of his customers.
Ohrbach died in New York City, where he had been active in community affairs, especially with the Greater New York Councils of the Boy Scouts of America, the Federation of Jewish Charities, and the American Jewish Committee.
Quotations: Ohrbach stated, "I was happy to think that I could give a woman a garment which cost me $1, 000 for $25 and in many cases for less than that. My main point when I started out was that I was trying to reach a class of people who were intelligent and not necessarily rich. "
Nathan Ohrbach was a member of the Greater New York Councils of the Boy Scouts of America, the Federation of Jewish Charities, and the American Jewish Committee.
In 1907 Ohrbach married Mathilda Kane, a sister of a business acquaintance. They had one child.
