Walter Loeb, regarded industrywide because the “dean” of retail analysts and consultants, handed away peaceably Wednesday night time at his dwelling on the Higher West Aspect of Manhattan. Loeb was 100.
A funeral service will probably be held Monday on the Central Synagogue, 123 East fifty fifth Road, at 11:30 a.m. It will likely be livestreamed.
An announcement from the household supplied to WWD mentioned: “Walter lived a exceptional life and was an inspiration to so many individuals. He achieved unbelievable profession success regardless of experiencing a lot adversity. However the principle phrase that involves thoughts after we consider him is household — his love for his spouse of 68 years was limitless, and he was the bigger than life patriarch of the whole prolonged household.”
The all the time jovial Loeb made a profession out of calling it proper and often calling it forward of the pack. His blue-chip popularity as a retail analyst started at Johnson Redbook Service and blossomed at Morgan Stanley, the place he labored for 16 years and have become a principal.
After reaching retirement age and leaving Morgan Stanley, he fashioned the Loeb Associates consulting agency. He served on the boards of Hudson’s Bay Co., Moist Seal, Gymboree, ProfitLogic, Motherswork, Investcorp and different firms; booked talking engagements at universities and companies across the nation, and penned a e-newsletter.
“I assume the largest name, very early on, was with Wal-Mart and Sam Walton. I really useful Wal-Mart when it was doing $273 million in annual gross sales within the early Seventies,” Loeb advised WWD in a 2016 interview. “I additionally acknowledged the expansion potential of House Depot very early, within the early Eighties.”
Loeb was additionally among the many only a few that instantly doubted Ron Johnson’s daring re-imagination of JCPenney from 2011 till 2013, which alienated buyers and virtually destroyed the shop. Whereas Amazon was nonetheless in its formative levels, he foresaw the risk it could finally pose to brick-and-mortar retailers.
Nicely into his 80s and 90s, Loeb continued to observe the trade, often blogged on Forbes.com, and attended trade occasions. The Nationwide Retail Federation honored him with a 2016 Influencer Award for impacting the trade for many years.
His secret sauce was a mix of 20 years’ price of precise retail expertise — most analysts don’t have any — and a drive to get to know the retailers themselves, not simply their shops. He was capable of keep an unusually excessive diploma of entry to the captains of the trade. The record included Stanley Marcus, Gordon Segal, David Glass, Bruce and Blake Nordstrom, Lew Frankfort, Burt Tansky, Leonard Lauder, David Farrell, George Meyer, Edward Finkelstein, Terry J. Lundgren and Olaf Koch.
“I’ve typically discovered about their households and I advised them about my household,” Loeb as soon as mentioned. “At one level, I might attain virtually anyone within the trade. I didn’t go to enterprise faculty, however I labored for Macy’s and Could Co. and consequently, I knew and understood the issues of seasonality and I used to be speaking to managements extra as a peer than as an analyst.”
Loeb additionally used knowledge, tried to seek out out what was promoting or not, examined employment figures, and thought of the influence of non-retail sectors on retailing.
On giving funding recommendation, he was guided by what he known as a “three-legged stool.” “First, I needed to know the corporate had a course that may be very clear and visual. Second, that it had underlying alternatives for future progress, and the third goes again to administration — its trustworthiness. I search for firms which have a imaginative and prescient of the longer term. There are only a few firms which have time to formulate a imaginative and prescient as a result of they’re continuously preventing the present financial setting.”
One other key to his success was his character — affable but generally blunt, outspoken but all the time in a civil method. Folks additionally revered that Loeb stayed related to the trade a long time after when others usually selected retirement. He additionally had eager pursuits in theater, music, journey and faith; spoke 5 languages; as soon as wrote classical music critiques for {a magazine} known as Musical Chief, and was a lover of artwork, particularly, Southwestern Native American artwork.
In his sprawling Riverside Drive condo in Manhattan, Loeb had a group of two,000 or so items of Native American art work he and his spouse, Phyllis, gathered from many journeys to the Southwest. It’s a museum-quality assortment of pottery, wooden sculpture, baskets, work, stone carvings of animals, carpet weaves and about 400 kachinas, all evoking regional imagery, sacred traditions and ceremonies and non secular beliefs.
Walter and Phyllis Loeb of their Manhattan condo in 2016.
Joshua Scott
Loeb was born in Germany in 1925 in Darmstadt, and lived principally in Frankfurt rising up. His household escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to Italy. When Italy sided with Germany in World Struggle II, Loeb’s household emigrated once more to Cuba and at last to the U.S.
After graduating from highschool in 1943, Loeb grew to become a citizen and was drafted. He participated within the Normandy invasion, touchdown on Utah Seaside. His task was to unload bombs for an airfield in France, till a German bomb exploded, bursting an eardrum, so Loeb was evacuated to England. He was reassigned to superior communications and requested to translate a German engineering e-book on the Remagen Bridge, which Hitler supposed to destroy. After Loeb translated the e-book, the Allies had been capable of deactivate explosives hid within the bridge, enabling troopers to cross the Rhine River into Germany.
After the conflict, Loeb attended New York College, majoring in advertising and marketing and historical past, and later labored within the promoting division on the former Goldblatts division retailer in Chicago earlier than shifting to Macy’s promoting division in New York. He grew to become a piece supervisor in Macy’s vacation toy division, and later a home-furnishings division supervisor. A hankering for returning to Europe motivated him to work for a common merchandise retailer known as PK Halstadt earlier than returning to the U.S. as a monetary analyst for the Johnson Redbook Service. In 1974, he joined Morgan Stanley as a retail analyst, changing into solely the second Jew employed by the agency.
Retail doorways swung huge open for him.
“When Sam Walton was alive, it was an in depth relationship,” Loeb mentioned. “I bear in mind him driving me again to my resort in Arkansas, when he pulled out a shotgun and began capturing at his canine, yelling, ‘I advised you to remain dwelling.’ He wasn’t making an attempt to hit the canine, however he was capturing.”
Loeb was engrossed by Walton’s “concentric” enlargement technique. “He would [build] a distribution heart and develop shops round it. He had a really particular manner of rising. He had a imaginative and prescient of increasing by way of the U.S., however his imaginative and prescient didn’t embody the world.”
When he turned 100 final January, Loeb celebrated in an enormous manner, with three events at his condo, for household, mates and former colleagues. And in his traditional good spirits he wore a cap that learn on the entrance, “100 by no means regarded so good.”
Loeb is survived by his spouse of practically seven a long time Phyllis; daughter Lisa Handelman; her husband Ken; daughter Karen Lifford and her husband Jack; daughter Martha Loeb, and 6 grandchildren.
EDITORS NOTE: This obituary is essentially primarily based on Walter Loeb’s life story documented in an article showing in WWD in 2016.
