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After a century in Tulsa, Miss Jackson’s department store remains true to the vision of founder Nelle Shields Jackson.
Tulsa has changed much in the last century, but one place in town has remained constant when it comes to quality, good taste and gracious living.
That place, Miss Jackson’s, is one of the city’s most enduring retailers, and this year it celebrates 100 years in business.
For many, this milestone is both welcome and somewhat hard to believe.
“It’s really amazing,” says longtime patron Margery Bird, who has shopped at Miss Jackson’s for decades and fondly recalls store founder Nelle Shields Jackson. “I first started shopping there with my mother and have continued on through the years. It is hard to believe, but I’m glad it’s still here.”
That any retail establishment, much less a local one with only a single store, could last 100 years and thrive well into the 21st century is clearly a tribute to the fact that it is doing something right and has done so for a very long time. Former Miss Jackson’s owner William (Bill) F. Fisher Jr. says the store’s longevity can be boiled down to Jackson herself and her retailing philosophy.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the success of Miss Jackson’s and the fact that it is still here goes back to her and her original principles,” says Fisher, who ran the store from 1965 until he retired to Santa Fe, N.M., in 2001. “It was all her vision and about us staying true to that vision that kept things going.”
The vision begins
Jackson’s vision started in 1907 when she was living near Pittsburgh and commuting by train into the city, where she worked in a department store. A chance encounter with a customer from the obscure oil town of Tulsa planted the idea in her mind to make a major life change.
Already 35 years old, Jackson decided her dreams lay to the west in the newly minted state of Oklahoma. Pittsburgh had become a dreary industrial city, its sky choked with soot from coal-fired steel plants and its streets lined with tenements. Tulsa, she believed, promised blue sky, sunshine and the opportunity to carve out a better life for herself and her mother.
After arriving in the burgeoning boomtown, Jackson worked two years for the Beane-Vandever Dry Goods Co. before summoning up the courage and funds to fulfill her lifelong ambition of opening her own shop. That shop, the original Miss Jackson’s, opened in 1910 and was located on the balcony of a jewelry store. It focused exclusively on lingerie.
That modest business did so well that in a few months, Jackson moved her store to a larger location on South Main Street in downtown Tulsa, where she shared space with one of Tulsa’s other venerable and enduring merchants, Mrs. DeHaven’s Flower Shop.
Jackson’s timing couldn’t have been better nor found a more receptive audience. Just a few years earlier, Tulsa had been an Indian Territory cow town, where cattle herds thundered down muddy streets and raucous cowboys were known to shoot out storefront windows.
All that changed with the discovery of massive quantities of oil in nearby strikes such as the Glenn Pool in 1905. The race to pump the black gold out of the ground was on, and hordes of ambitious wildcatters and wily businessmen flocked to Tulsa. Soon-to-be famous (and extremely wealthy) people such as J. Paul Getty, Waite Phillips, W.G. Skelly, Josh Cosden, Thomas Gilcrease, Harry Sinclair and many others were now regulars in the rapidly expanding city that was growing like gangbusters. Tulsa was quickly shedding its dusty cow-town image and growing into a center of wealth, sophistication and culture. People of means began to crave some of life’s finer things without having to travel to New York, London or Paris to get them.
The (black) golden age of Miss Jackson’s
Into this breach stepped Jackson, believing that her business existed for the sole purpose of “making life more elegant, more enjoyable, and more relaxed for its patrons,” according to “The Story of Nelle Shields Jackson” by Kate Beard Meyers.
To that end, Miss Jackson’s began offering to its well-heeled clientele some of the finest merchandise available in the day, everything from all types of stylish clothing — wedding gowns, dresses, hats, handbags and wraps — to cosmetics, perfumes, china, silver, linens and baby and children’s items.
Orchestrating it all was Jackson herself, who served as the shop’s arbiter of quality and taste, never afraid to seek out the best for her patrons or make suggestions on their behalf.
During this golden period, lasting from the shop’s founding through the 1920s, Miss Jackson’s became the place for Tulsa’s elite to shop and was especially celebrated for its bridal gowns. In fact, Nelle Jackson became renowned as a wedding arranger, choosing gowns for the entire wedding party. It was also during this time that Jackson was hired to design the girls’ uniform for a new private school, Holland Hall.
Whatever items a patron purchased, they were wrapped to exacting and elaborate specifications, a practice that continues to this day.
“Gift wrapping is something that has always been important,” Fisher says. “I was so impressed with the way they did it — I remember 22 hand-looped bows for a gift wrap — their use of fine boxes, tissue and wrapping paper. That was something that was never going to change, and, in fact, that was something that we enhanced over time.”
Margery Bird, whose father, John Mayo, built the Mayo Hotel, recalls that Jackson was a woman dignified in bearing and completely committed to customer satisfaction.
“I shopped at her lovely shop and my mother shopped there before me,” she says. “She (Jackson) was somewhat of a grand dame. She always wore a hat and stood very erect. I don’t think I ever heard anyone call her by her first name, including her longtime patrons.
“She lived on the same floor as my parents at the Mayo and I didn’t see her all that often because she worked long hours. At the time, her shop was at Fifth and Boston in the Philtower Building.”
Oilman Waite Phillips, a friend and patron of Jackson’s, invited her to be the first shop located in that now-landmark building. More than 1,500 guests attended the grand opening of Miss Jackson’s Shop inside the Philtower on April 2, 1928.
“Of course, she had this wonderful sense of style and taste and she was always there to assist in selecting items, whether it was china, silver or clothing,” Bird says. “I don’t recall her at all being aggressive with her patrons but rather sedate and collected.
“My mother would often shop at Miss Jackson’s and one time, when she was getting ready to travel to Europe by boat — this was before planes — (Nelle Jackson) suggested a lovely cape for her to wear on deck. That’s the way she was, never devoid of opinions in those matters and never in doubt about her opinions.”
Those opinions and cultivated tastes earned Jackson the respect of clients for decades. While the shop prospered through the end of the 1920s, Miss Jackson’s almost faced its demise in the early 1930s when business suffered severely during the Great Depression.
According to sources, a bank decided to call in the note on Miss Jackson’s Shop. Jackson herself confronted the bank’s directors at a meeting in which she insisted that if only the directors’ wives (and supposedly mistresses) would pay their bills to her, then she could afford to make payment on the note. The bank’s board relented and Miss Jackson’s survived its biggest scare of that era.
Jackson continued to serve patrons at her shop well into the 1950s until her age and declining health forced her into retirement. The shop continued under different management until 1962, when it was sold to Tulsa businessman A. Ray Smith. In 1964, The Vandever Co., where Jackson had started her Tulsa retail career, bought Miss Jackson’s and in August 1965 the store moved to its present location in Utica Square.
Meanwhile, Jackson, now in her 90s, had fallen ill and on June 30, 1966, she died at age 93. The following year, William Fisher and his father, William Fisher Sr., purchased Miss Jackson’s from Vandevers, determined to preserve and enhance Miss Jackson’s reputation in the Tulsa community.
Jackson’s vision lives on in Utica Square
For the next 35 years, Fisher Jr. carried on Nelle Jackson’s legacy of service to her patrons.
“What separates Miss Jackson’s from the rest is her vision — the vision of providing the ultimate in service so that nobody who dealt with a patron was allowed to say no,” Fisher Jr. says. “You couldn’t do that. If you couldn’t say yes, then you had to find out how to say yes. She built the business on that premise, and when I came on, I made it my goal to find out as much about what she believed in as I could.
“What I found out was that she didn’t just talk the talk; she walked the walk.”
One of the first things Fisher learned was that at Miss Jackson’s, customers weren’t customers; they were patrons.
“The whole key to her success is what is now known as relationship selling,” he says. “She did that her whole life. Once a person came through the doors, they were a patron and your job was to take care of them.”
Patrons at Miss Jackson’s aren’t passed off to different sales people in different departments. Instead, staff members cultivate one-on-one relationships with their clients, actually getting to know them and their tastes and preferences.
“That is the secret to success and it’s the only way to compete against the larger specialty or department stores,” Fisher says.
Fisher compares Miss Jackson’s approach to the way much retailing is done today, in which the customer is often left to his or her own devices in a large store.
“I was in one of those large stores just the other day and I couldn’t find anyone to help me,” he says. “It was so frustrating. You could spend hours in there by yourself and still not get the assistance you need.”
By contrast, step inside Miss Jackson’s today and you are politely lavished with attention.
“When I was there, we harped and lectured the staff all the time on the importance of the principles Nelle Jackson used to create her clientele and the result was, we had a staff that had a passion for Miss Jackson’s and who personified her values,” Fisher says. “The bottom line if you work at Miss Jackson’s is that you’ve got to like taking care of people.”
Miss Jackson’s into the 21st century
That ethic of taking care of people continues today at Miss Jackson’s under the leadership of General Manager Judy White. A native of Brazil who moved to Tulsa 20 years ago, White joined Miss Jackson’s in 2002 as an accountant before becoming business manager, assistant comptroller and then general manager.
“I see a large part of my job as being a good steward of Miss Jackson’s heritage and so everything we do is geared toward providing the best service and to try to make our patrons’ lives more beautiful, elegant and enjoyable,” she says.
Miss Jackson’s employs 52 people in departments that include designer clothing, gifts, gourmet, fine jewelry, accessories, skin and beauty and more. Knowing patrons remains as central today as it was when Nelle Jackson opened her small shop a century ago.
“We work hard to get to know our patrons and to anticipate their needs,” White explains. “In fact, we even buy our merchandise with specific customers in mind.”
Rita Manzelmann-Browne has been with Miss Jackson’s for 16 years and is the store’s senior buyer. She travels regularly on buying trips to fashion centers such as New York, Dallas, Las Vegas and London. Her most important trips, however, are those across the floor at Miss Jackson’s, where she learns as much about patrons as possible.
“I get out on the floor and get to know people,” she explains. “I make friends and form relationships with our patrons and, by doing so, I know how to better meet their needs. When I go to shows, I often have certain patrons in mind.”
In one case, a patron asked her to find a mother-of-the-bride dress.
“I found the dress for her on one of my trips and called her and she was so excited,” Manzelmann-Browne says. “It’s so much fun to make someone feel so happy.”
Manzelmann-Browne says working for Miss Jackson’s is different from working at chain retailers.
“It doesn’t have the corporate feel,” she says. “It’s one of a kind. Here, the patrons are your friends.”
Many employees have made lifelong careers out of Miss Jackson’s, White says, selling products to successive generations of shoppers.
“We have some associates who have been here over 40 years,” she says. “That’s so important to continuing our relationships with our patrons and we see the results of this when we have multiple generations of people coming here — grandmothers, mothers and daughters. Whenever we have a new associate, we make sure to immerse them in the culture of Miss Jackson’s and nurture them so they are ready to help the patrons enjoy themselves while they are here.”
Nearly a decade ago, W.H. Helmerich III bought Miss Jackson’s from Bill Fisher. It was a business decision that made good sense. His contract drilling company, Helmerich & Payne Inc., also owns Utica Square.
“Miss Jackson’s is a Tulsa institution,” he says. “When it was downtown, it was Tulsa’s premier retail store, and when it moved to Utica Square 40-plus years ago, it became the key store here because we didn’t have Saks at the time.”
Helmerich says competition between Utica Square’s two, big upscale stores, Miss Jackson’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, benefits both businesses as well as Utica Square.
“One of the things I’ve learned is, when you have competition, they both do better,” he says. “Miss Jackson’s has been around a long time and over its years it has helped to build up Utica Square’s reputation as the state’s only upscale shopping center.”
A century in business is cause for any retail establishment to celebrate. For Miss Jackson’s, it’s proof of the power of founder Nelle Shields Jackson’s vision and uncompromising commitment to making her patrons’ lives more relaxed, enjoyable and elegant. Will Miss Jackson’s survive another century?
No one can say, but it’s hard to imagine Tulsa or Utica Square without it.
“It would leave a huge vacuum,” White says. “As long as we remain true to Miss Jackson’s vision, I think we will be here.”
