History
The company began in 1924 in Wichita Falls, Texas, when Morris (M.B.) Zale, William Zale, and Ben Lipshy opened the first Zales Jewelers store. The Zale brothers launched a revolutionary marketing strategy with a credit plan of "a penny down and a dollar a week" making jewelry and other merchandise affordable to the average working American. The success of the credit policy, coupled with friendly customer service, led to a period of tremendous expansion for a total of 12 stores in Oklahoma and Texas by 1942. Zales Jewelers moved its headquarters from Wichita Falls to Dallas, TX in 1946. In 1957 Zales Jewelers broadened its reach, opening the first store in a shopping center - a major shift from operating only in downtown locations. The same year, Zales announced the initial public offering of its stock (ZLC) and began trading its public shares on the American Stock Exchange in 1958. In 1998, online shopping is launched at www.zales.com. In 1999 and 2000, Zale expanded with two major acquisitions: Peoples Jewellers of Canada and Piercing Pagoda. In 2007, the Company divested its Bailey Banks and Biddle brand to Finlay.
Read more about this topic: Zale Corporation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)