Issue Story

From the September 2006 issue of MR Magazine

Features

People: Lunch with Wolfgang

Karen Alberg Grossman

Memories from the good old days, when men used to dress....

 

An afternoon at H. Herzfeld with Ira Rothstein, Jon Cline, me and Wolfgang Herzfeld. (Photo by Anthony)

 

Wolfgang Herzfeld remembers when retail legend Stanley Marcus came into his Madison Avenue shop many years ago. Visiting NYC with his wife, the weather was chillier than they had anticipated so Marcus was looking to buy her a cashmere sweater. Herzfeld showed him his best, a two-ply version from the finest mill in England, and explained that since it was designed for a man, the buttons would be the reverse of what she was used to. “You are the first to point that out to me,” said Marcus. “I’ll take it!”

Wolfgang Herzfeld is a charming man with sparkling eyes and an infectious laugh who came to his namesake store in Manhattan via Germany and Ecuador. In Germany, Herzfeld’s great grandfather Hermann, a successful entrepreneur in the coal business, could not accept the fact that his son Alex wanted to be an opera singer. So with pressure from his dad, Alex Herzfeld opened the first Herzfeld store near the opera house in Hanover so he could both manage the store and sing opera. “I don’t know that he was even a very good singer,” confides Wolfgang. “He just loved to be on stage and couldn’t give it up.” Ultimately, Alex’s oldest son Herman, after fighting for Germany in WWI, went into the business and grew it dramatically to 47 employees and a new women’s store. The Holocaust forced the family out of Germany and to Ecuador but ultimately, Herman and his wife Carla opened H. Herzfeld on Madison Avenue; his son Wolfgang followed in his path and ran the business with his parents for 35 years.

And what stories he has! A favorite customer was Greta Garbo. “She would always come in for black or navy turtlenecks,” he remembers. “She was so sweet, and down-to-earth, but very masculine in her style of dress. She carried a man’s umbrella with her initials on the tip.”

Other favorite customers: Richard Rodgers, Rex Harrison, Vladimir Horowitz. “Horowitz once ordered 28 shirts and needed them in 10 days,” remembers Wolfgang. “It was an $8000 order so my shirtmaker dropped what he was doing to get it done in time. Horowitz was, as you probably know, a large man and difficult to fit; he would often joke about his wife cooking too much wonderful pasta!”

H. Herzfeld, recently relocated to 57th Street between Park and Lexington, is still run by family: Wolfgang’s son-in-law Jon Cline and nephew Steven Holz. They still do incredibly well with custom clothing ($2800-$5000 average) and custom dress shirts ($195-$395), fine cotton underwear from Zimmerli, microfiber raincoats and cashmere overcoats. They’ve been selling seven-fold neckties at $185 and 11-fold neckties (Dolcepunta) at $275. Particularly hot this season is a microfiber safari jacket from Valstar, selling out at about $700.

Asked what he’s learned from his father-in-law, Jon doesn’t hesitate. “In addition to the importance of relationships (with customers and with our sales associates), he taught me to respect the merchandise, to always select the highest quality, the highest threadcount, the most stitches per inch, real mother-of-pearl buttons. Fine product has always been his passion and he was always able to communicate that passion to his customers.”

Steven adds another perspective. “Wolfgang was always the personality of the business: customers would come in just to schmooze with him, to talk politics as well as clothing. He’d read The New York Times from cover to cover every single day. Customers had tremendous respect for him; they still come in asking for him.”

I ask Wolfgang what’s different today, why business for independent specialty stores is so much more difficult than it used to be. “It was always difficult,” he corrects me. “As much as I love it, retailing is not an easy way to make a living.”