Lord & Taylor closes its flagship Fifth Avenue store as the HBC-owned company faced a number of recent financial struggles that led to it closing.
The department store’s flagship store, located in New York City, was known for its animated holiday windows and its upper-middle class customer base. However, a series of financial struggles led to clothes that were once selling for as much as $100 to be made available to customers for $5.99 a pop in a blowout sale.
The 11-story building was sold to the WeWork space-leasing company for more than $850 million. There are 45 other Lord & Taylor stores that remain open, all of which are smaller and most of which you can find across various parts of the East Coast. Plus, you can buy Lord & Taylor merchandise online through the Walmart website.
The closure of Lord & Taylor’s flagship store is an extension of the move away from consumers visiting traditional brick and mortar locations and opting to buy items online. Even in the apparel business, e-commerce stores have started to roll out augmented reality applications that allow consumers to try out items virtually, simulating the experience of trying something out in a store’s dressing room.
Lord & Taylor has been around since 1826 when it opened on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, making it one of the nation’s fits big department stores. Two English-born cousins named Samuel Lord and George Washington Taylor would run the store.
