A Nashville store named with a father’s initials.

Dillard’s began in 1938 in Nashville, Arkansas, a small town in Howard County. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says its founder, William T. Dillard, grew up working in his father’s mercantile store in nearby Mineral Springs, graduated from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in 1935, took a graduate business degree at Columbia University in New York in 1937, and completed the Sears management training programme in 1938 before deciding to go into business for himself. The company’s own history page adds that Nashville was his wife’s hometown, that he had spent more than twelve years working part-time and in the summers at his father’s store, and that he left Sears shortly after finishing a training course of only seven months.

The store did not open as “Dillard’s.” The Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives its name as “T. J. Dillard’s”, and the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2005) dates the opening to February 1938 and says customers reacted well to the familiar name of the founder’s father, “T.J.” The same history says Dillard and his wife, Alexa, stocked the shop with name-brand merchandise bought at low prices, and that he advertised heavily from the start. The company makes a similar point in its own words: even in the beginning, it says, Mr. Dillard was well aware of the value of effective advertising, and with each move or expansion the company stressed value in its advertising.

The Second World War interrupted the business. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says Dillard sold his store during the war and reopened and expanded it shortly afterwards; the St. James Press history says he sold his merchandise to another store but kept his own open to collect on credit accounts, and that he and his wife reopened it in 1944. From Nashville he moved on to Texarkana, on the Arkansas–Texas line, as a partner in Wooten’s Department Store. The company dates the sale of the Nashville store and the purchase of a controlling interest in a Texarkana store to 1948; the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says he bought the remaining half of the Wooten store in 1949; and the St. James Press history says he controlled the company by March 1949, after which he began a large newspaper advertising campaign.

Hometown stores, mall anchors and a family-held company.

The pattern that followed was one of buying established local stores and, in time, putting the Dillard’s name on them. The company says it expanded to Tyler, Texas, in 1956 with the purchase of the Mayer and Schmidt store, and to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1960, where its history page captions a photograph with the name Brown-Dunkin. The St. James Press history says Dillard and a group of investors bought the Tyler store in April 1956, remodelled it, reopened it that September and advertised heavily in the local papers. English Wikipedia says the Tyler store traded as “Dillard’s Mayer & Schmidt” until 1974, and that in 1974 the former Brown-Dunkin, Blass, Pfeifer and Mayer & Schmidt stores were fully renamed Dillard’s. For a time, then, the family name sat beside older local names before replacing them.

1964 was a turning point. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says Dillard opened a store in a shopping mall in Austin, Texas, that year, and that suburban mall expansion became central to the company well into the 1990s; it also says he moved his family and the company’s headquarters to Little Rock in 1964, incorporating the business as Dillard’s, Inc. The company says Dillard Department Stores, Inc. went public on 9 May 1969, offering its Class A common stock. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the Class B, or voting, stock remained under Dillard family control, and English Wikipedia says many of the company’s executives and directors are members of the family.

The acquisitions continued for decades. The company says it bought stores from Tandy’s Leonard’s division in Dallas–Fort Worth in 1974, the Stix, Baer & Fuller stores in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas in 1983, two department store divisions from Dayton Hudson in 1984 and Midwest stores from R. H. Macy in 1986. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas adds Joske’s, Cain-Sloan, a half interest in Higbee’s, J. B. Ivey and, in 1998, stores from the Mercantile Stores Company. English Wikipedia says the Mercantile purchase brought nameplates including Gayfers, Castner Knott, Maison Blanche and The Jones Store, and that Dillard’s traded some of those stores to Belk for some of Belk’s.

In 1977, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas says, the founder’s son William Dillard II became president and chief operating officer, with his father remaining chief executive and chairman; the encyclopedia records that William T. Dillard died on 8 February 2002. It also says that in 2026 shareholders approved a restructuring that included a merger with the family holding company W. D. Company, Inc., and that the company later moved its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Texas Stock Exchange after shifting its incorporation to Texas.

Signs, bags and catalogue covers.

A department store brand is carried less by any single product than by the things a shopper sees on the way in and on the way out: the name above the entrance, the lettering on the shopping bag, the colour of a carrier or a box, and, for many stores over the years, the cover of a printed catalogue. Each of those surfaces works at a different distance. Signage has to read from across a car park or a city street; a bag has to read from a few steps away, often folded or creased; a catalogue cover has to read on a doormat or a kitchen table.

Store identities also change as companies change hands. A name may be redrawn, shortened, recoloured or moved onto a new mark when a business is sold, merged or reorganised, and older versions can stay in view for years on buildings that are not refitted at once.

A family name in the possessive.

The Dillard’s identity is, at heart, a surname with an apostrophe. The store opened under the initials of the founder’s father, as T. J. Dillard’s, and the name that went up on the stores the company bought in Texas, Oklahoma and beyond was the family’s own. English Wikipedia records how the older names — Mayer & Schmidt in Tyler, Brown-Dunkin in Tulsa, Blass and Pfeifer in Arkansas — were joined to the Dillard’s name and then replaced by it, and how stores bought from the Fedway division of Federated Department Stores in Texas in 1971 were rebranded Dillard’s in 1972. The possessive has stayed through each change of corporate name, from Dillard Department Stores, Inc. in 1969 to Dillard’s, Inc.

The other constant in the company’s account of itself is advertising. Its history page says value was stressed in its advertising with each move, and the St. James Press history describes the founder’s heavy newspaper campaigns in Nashville, Texarkana and Tyler, and a relationship with the media that became his trademark. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas says the company relied on customer loyalty rather than discount sales, with advertisements in local media and prices set against local competition. Credit was part of the offer early on: the company says its competitive strategy in Texarkana was attractively priced national name brands along with customer credit, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas dates its credit subsidiary, Dillard Investment Company, to 1961. Today the Dillard’s website promotes the Dillard’s credit card and groups some of the labels it sells under a “Dillard’s Exclusive” heading.

For a design guide, Dillard’s shows how a family name can take in a long series of local store names while keeping its own form intact. Compare Macy’s, which sold Midwest stores to Dillard’s in 1986, and Belk, which traded stores with Dillard’s after the Mercantile purchase. For this guide we use ink black, champagne and stone grey with a high-contrast serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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