Growth mode
Now Lundgren had to make sure the company saved some money. It went from 11 operating divisions down to seven, taking out $1 billion of operating expense.
It sold Lord & Taylor for $1.2 billion, which May Co. owned, but was not consistent with what it was trying to do. David’s Bridal business was sold for $800 million. It closed or sold 80 department stores that overlapped and sold the credit card business to Citi Group for about $5 billion.
“That was a very big deal — this now was paying for the acquisition in a very significant way,” Lundgren says. “We were quickly getting our balance sheet in order as we were moving forward with these changes.”
Part of those changes was spending a year researching whether they could change the store names to the Macy’s brand.
“What would that feel like?” he says. “If you asked somebody, ‘Would you like to change the name from your favorite store called Lazarus or not?’ They’re going to say, ‘No, don’t touch my store.’ But if you just do it and you treat the store right and treat the people right and put in the right merchandise, people will generally respond to that, and that’s what happened.”
When it came time to make the national announcement that the department stores would take on the Macy’s name, Lundgren went to Chicago to announce it.
“In one day, we changed 400 department stores to the Macy’s brand,” he says. “We went from 250 stores in 2004 to 800 in a two-year time frame. We finally were a national organization and could advertise on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the first time in 2006.”
With Macy’s becoming a national brand, Federated decided it needed to align with its new direction. In 2007, Federated Department Stores became Macy’s Inc.
“Eight hundred of our 836 stores were called Macy’s and 36 were called Bloomingdale’s,” Lundgren says. “Calling the company Macy’s Inc. made more sense when people were thinking about who to invest in.”
