CEO shares uncommon threads with Spokane

When Dorrit Bern was a young girl growing up on Spokane’s North Side, she sometimes spent Sundays at Grayson’s, a women’s clothing store that once occupied the Rookery Block. Her mother, Aileen Marr, managed the store, and while she did paperwork in her office Bern would shuffle the store’s racks of coats, dresses and shoes.

Now, as chairwoman and chief executive officer of Charming Shoppes Inc., Bern shuffles stores, not racks. Her leadership has taken a company “one minute from bankruptcy” to one projecting $3.1 billion in sales for the current fiscal year. She expects to add another $1 billion to that total within the next few years.

Charming Shoppes is the parent company for the Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug and Catherines clothing stores, as well as most of their associated catalog and e-commerce operations. Together, they have captured about 10 percent of the market for plus-size women’s clothing, the second largest share of a segment pursuing the 60 percent of American women size 14 or larger.

“We’re not niche,” Bern says. “We’re the majority of women in America.”

Bern, 56, joined Charming Shoppes in 1995 as president, CEO and vice chairman of the board. She had started her retailing career in 1974 at the Bon Marché, the same chain her mother worked for after leaving Grayson’s. She moved in 1987 to Sears Roebuck & Co., where she became vice president for women’s apparel. Sears had long had a solid position in that business, but the “Come See the Softer Side of Sears” advertising campaign introduced in 1993 brought fresh attention to those operations.

Charming Shoppes, meanwhile, was fading. Its Fashion Bug stores were stale and underperforming. Bern assessed the struggling company, and saw opportunity.

“If you want to get ahead, you’ve got to take a risk,” she says. “I wanted to be a CEO.”

Bern quickly set about repositioning the company, closing 400 of 1,300 stores, changing vendors, updating styles. Within six months, she says, the surviving locations were reporting double-digit increases in sales.

The turnaround was based on two key insights. Bern says that as a busy mother of three sons, she preferred shopping at stores where she could park nearby, preferably in front of the stores, and get in and out quickly. Everyone else was focused on malls. Bern embraced strip centers.

Second, Bern hearkened back to her early years at the Bon, when she had been a buyer of plus-size clothing.

“I thought ‘What if we could own the plus-size market in American?’ ” she recalls.

In 1999, Charming Shoppes began buying up companies selling to larger women. Modern Woman was first, followed by Catherines Stores in 2000 and Lane Bryant in 2001. With those acquisitions, more than three-quarters of Charming Shoppes sales were coming from the plus-size market.

Then Bern shifted her attention to expanding sales channels. Charming Shoppes bought the Web site assets of alight.com and used those as a platform to launch catherines.com in 2002 and lanebryant.com in 2003. That initiative was bolstered in 2005 with the purchase of Crosstown Traders Inc., which also brought that company’s several catalogs into Charming Shoppes.

But the prize catalog operation will not be in Bern’s grasp until October 2007, when the trademark for the Lane Bryant catalog brand reverts to Charming Shoppes. That’s a $300 million business.

Lane Bryant is already the company’s most profitable business, and Bern intends to leverage the brand by increasing store locations from 750 to 1,000. Seventy-five outlet stores are planned. Also, that store’s well-established line of intimate apparel will be broken out into a new chain, Cacique, with locations adjacent to Lane Bryant.

Bern describes the stores as “Victoria’s Secret’s big sister.”

Charming Shoppes has not been all business. Bern was honored this spring with the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce’s 2006 Paradigm Award recognizing her professional and personal accomplishments. The company’s “Keeping Kids Warm” program has distributed 50,000 coats to children in the last decade. In October 2005, 586 of those coats were given to students at Spokane’s Bemiss Elementary.

Bern dedicated the $50,000 award to a new mentoring program being developed with the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Pennsylvania. Charming Shoppes also sponsors a “Voices” program that presents $5,000 awards to women who help hold their communities together.

The company helped fund reconstruction of an orphanage in Sri Lanka that was destroyed by the December 2004 tsunami.

“I value volunteerism,” Bern says, not just because of what it does for the community, but for the way it builds the spirit and teamwork within the organization.

All the professional activity has denied Bern much time for some of the things she learned growing up in Spokane. Golf, for example, was a passionate pursuit from age 5. Bern says she had a golf season pass, and her mother would drop her off at Esmeralda, Downriver or Indian Canyon in the morning. “I would play all day,” often 36 holes, she says. Winters, she skied at Mt. Spokane.

“It was a wonderful town to grow up in,” says Bern, who returns every few years to reunite with her University of Washington roommate and school friends from her days at Finch Elementary, Glover Junior High School and Shadle Park High School, where she graduated in 1968.

Despite her pedigree in retailing, an 11-year-old Dorrit did not foresee a career building a women’s apparel empire. In a 1961 profile in The Spokane Chronicle, her mother was asked about her daughter’s ambitions.

“She wants to become a bacteriologist,” Marr said.

Instead, she caught the fashion bug.