Even as the first customers walked into the new Von Maur store at Perimeter Mall on Monday, Jim von Maur was still fretting about a blank wall in the pink-carpeted dressing room of the store’s third-floor lingerie section.
It could use a bench, or a table, mused von Maur, president of the company. Maybe a piece of art. Something to make it look a little less empty.
“I’m a little nervous,” von Maur said as he walked the store just after noon, during its first hour open. “It’s more excitement than anything else. I want to have a good turnout. I want them to love it as much as we do.”
The official grand opening of Von Maur’s second Georgia store is this weekend, in space Bloomingdale’s vacated early this year. The opening comes just ahead of Black Friday and the busiest shopping season, and it is a rare case of a department store expanding in metro Atlanta.
Before the first store opened at North Point Mall in Alpharetta last year, von Maur said he saw Atlanta as a way to access the Southeast. The family-owned chain was founded by von Maur’s great-grandfather in Iowa in 1872, and had one store until the 1960s. It will open three next year.
Von Maur said he would like to have four or five stores in metro Atlanta — one at the Mall of Georgia, perhaps, or at Atlantic Station.
“We’d like to surround the whole city, if we could,” he said. “We want to serve the whole community.”
The company plans a store in Alabama and is looking for opportunities in Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina. The Alpharetta store, he said, is doing better in its first year than nearly any other new store has done.
Monday, Von Maur’s ears were tuned to the sounds of cash registers, and he stopped at the bottom of an escalator to ask customers how they liked the store. He scoped out an interactive tree in the children’s area, where kids can climb through a fiberglass trunk, and pointed out an Irish bar, an English phone booth and a ship in a glass case, antiques designed to make Von Maur feel less like a store, and more like a home.
At the front entrance from inside the mall, von Maur noted the floral arrangement and a back-lit sign.
“Looking good,” he nodded. Inside, he pulled out his cell phone to take pictures of the new jewelry cases, and wondered whether the stools set to encourage customers to sit and browse were too high.
“I think we should cut the legs down,” he said.
He photographed a display of Von Maur branded sweatshirts — a first for the company, after his father saw a relative wearing a college sweatshirt and thought Von Maur should sell a similar style. The pictures would be going home to his father, so the men could discuss how to improve the company’s 27th store.
“Everything looks so great right now,” he said. “To me, it looks flawless.”
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