This Fifth-Generation Department Store Is Winning the Luxury Game
Back in the radical, bra-burning 1960s, Caryn Hirshleifer felt like the black sheep of an illustrious retail dynasty. Over dinner, her parents, Paul and Lillian, and her sisters, Shelley and Lori, would talk shop about “Mrs. So-and-So and her Chanel handbag” perusing their department store Hirshleifers. Caryn, a serious-minded intellectual, would think to herself, Oh, my God, I am clearly in the wrong family.
“I always thought that business was mindless, and the fashion business was even more mindless,” the 69-year-old attorney said recently. Although she didn’t plan to enter the family firm, she now proudly co-owns Hirshleifers department store in Manhasset, N.Y. with her two sisters Shelley, 73, and Lori Hirshleifer Sills, 65. Lori’s husband David Sills, Shelley’s kids Andrew and Marci Hirshleifer Penn, Lori and David’s son Rob Sills and Caryn’s daughters Jenn and Amanda Goldman all work there too.
The family has built one of America’s most enduring temples to luxury, within Long Island’s high-end Americana mall (neighbors include Prada and Louis Vuitton). Hirshleifers has annual sales hovering in the $100 million range, a 25,000 square-foot store that includes a substantial Chanel space designed by Peter Marino, as well as brands including The Row, Khaite, Brunello Cucinelli, Loewe, Saint Laurent and Rimowa, a devoted A-list clientele such as Gwyneth Paltrow and an outsize social media presence. The store is globally influential, yet it remains determinedly scrappy and family-run.
We are in the midst of a reckoning in luxury retail. The last decade’s taste-making multibrand stores Barneys New York, Colette and Opening Ceremony are kaput; luxury retailer Matchesfashion is liquidating; Farfetch is struggling; and some legacy department stores are acquisition targets. “Unfortunately, there’s no one left,” said Lori Hirshleifer Sills without a trace of schadenfreude.
However, the dwindling competition presents an opportunity, especially for a nimble, privately owned company. During Covid, Hirshleifers found its customers more eager than ever to shop for luxury both remotely and, once restrictions had lifted, in the store. That, along with the social-media clout acquired by resident fashionistas Lori and Marci, has boosted its business in recent years. Lori and Marci’s Instagram and TikTok pages are delicious odes to maximalist luxury that get millions of likes for their pictures of gold jewelry stacks and rare Chanel bags.
The Hirshleifer family is tightknit and extremely passionate; they’re self-described “workaholics.” Even Caryn, who rolled her eyes at the business decades ago, is now a convert. She joined the company around the time her father Paul, the fearsome patriarch and architect of the current business, was suffering from the thyroid cancer that would end his life in 2004. Once she joined, she had to learn quickly on the job how to support her sisters, Shelley, the oldest, who handles operations, and Lori, the youngest, who’s in charge of buying and brand image. She realized that “business is so creative.”
From Greenpoint to Gucci
When asked about the history of the family business, all the Hirshleifers say: “Ask Caryn.” A history buff who is known to read “Paul Revere’s Ride” on April 18 on the store floor, the middle sister’s office is papered in vintage Hirshleifers advertisements—Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell. In granular detail, she tells the story of an enterprise that began with her great-grandfather, Jacob, who immigrated to Brooklyn from Austria-Hungary in 1897, to escape persecution against the Jews.
A fur merchant by trade, Jacob opened the first Hirshleifers on Manhattan Avenue in the neighborhood now called Greenpoint in 1905. The store initially sold furs, more affordably than in Manhattan and often on installment plan. The evolution of Hirshleifers mirrors the creation of the American ready-to-wear industry. During the World War II, European fashion houses closed down, so homegrown fashion had to fill the gap. Hirshleifers started carrying U.S. brands like Ben Zuckerman, Claire McCardell and Stella Sloat.
Jacob’s son Herman ran the store until he died in 1960, at which point he passed the business to his son Paul. Paul, a dynamo in an Armani suit and an Hermès tie, was the visionary behind the contemporary Hirshleifers empire. He masterminded Hirshleifers’ ready-to-wear expansion at its Queens store in Forest Hills, carrying designers including Bob Mackie and Arnold Scaasi in its “gown room.” That’s where Paul’s daughters Shelley, Caryn and Lori cut their teeth in the retail business from a young age, wiping the floor with large magnets to recycle pins from alterations, receiving shipments and helping customers.Paul had an old-school mentality about training his daughters, meaning he didn’t really train them at all. Caryn called his approach “prehistoric.” Lori said that during her first week working in the back stockroom of the gown room in her early 20s, her father said, “You’re up.” It was a baptism by fire helping a customer with massive gowns.
Shelley remembers him saying that if a customer came in asking for something in particular, and you fulfilled it, “that’s not selling; that’s just clerking.” He continued, “When someone walks in, you need to keep them here until you’ve gotten all their money out of their pockets, and just leave them enough money for car fare home.”
In the early 1960s, Paul was living on Long Island and commuting to the store in Queens, and drove by the recently opened Americana in Manhasset. He met with the center’s founder, the late real estate pioneer Frank Castagna, and told him, “This place is a gold mine.” He opened Hirshleifers in Manhasset in 1965, keeping the store in Forest Hills too until 1990.
Despite chatter about a possible expansion to places like the Hamptons or Palm Beach, the only Hirshleifers standing today is in Manhasset. Over the years, the “Gold Coast” has evolved from a mostly homogenous bedroom community to a more diverse area including a substantial Asian immigrant population. But if anything, the North Shore of Long Island is even more affluent and luxury-focused than ever.
Making it in 2024: less gowns, more “OOTD” posts
The late Louis Vuitton men’s designer Virgil Abloh sang Hirshleifers’ praises to the fashion blog Coveteur in 2014, saying that its Instagram presence stood out. Since then, the store’s digital footprint has grown exponentially. Lori and her niece Marci, who works on women’s buying and personal shopping, are the family’s social-media stars, with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers and rising TikTok presences, too.
Lori and Marci, who are sometimes mistaken for sisters, have a similarly glamorous sensibility. It’s the opposite of quiet luxury: more gold than silver, more logos than cable knits, more it-shoes than loafers. Their style is about an unabashed joy of shopping, collecting and getting dressed. It’s not all “click to buy” though. They also show off purchases from brands not carried by Hirshleifers, like Goyard and Hermès, as well as vintage finds like Lori’s gold Cartier Snoopy pendant. Lori likes shooting her social-media posts in the Chanel section upstairs for its nice lighting.
The “downstairs” team that toils away in the basement is highly attuned to these posts. Fifth-generation Rob, who works on digital for the store, said that the e-commerce team was always eager to upload whatever Lori and Marci posted on their Instagram. Although Hirshleifers has its own e-commerce site as well as selling with Farfetch, that business only accounts for about 10% of its sales. Many faithful customers get inspired online, and then show up in person to the store, or call Marci and her team directly.
Susan Grossman, a professor of psychology who lives in Woodmere, N.Y., has been shopping at Hirshleifers for over 30 years. A fashion fanatic, she converted a bedroom in her house into a closet to house her significant collection of Chanel, Chrome Hearts and Brunello Cucinelli pieces found over the years at the store. She said that these days, Marci and Lori’s curation was like a store window. “I will constantly ask about items that they’re wearing and [put on] Instagram,” she said.
David, Lori’s husband, who left a career in private equity to join the family business 12 years ago, said the store’s secret weapon is its ability to be responsive. “If we decide all of a sudden we want to do a new space for Moncler, we do a new space for Moncler, and in a period of a day or two we can figure that out.”
That agility is an upside of running a family business. “Family ownership brings a competitive advantage in situations that demand resilience rather than rapid growth,” wrote Josh Baron, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. While he said the oft-repeated rule that most family businesses fail by the third generation is false, a fifth-generation family business is rare in the U.S.
The family is clearly teeing up its fifth generation to lead Hirshleifers into the future. But when I ask Andrew whether he ever sees his 73-year-old mother and her sisters retiring, he laughs and says immediately, “No.”
Write to Rory Satran at [email protected]