A brother, a sister, her husband and a store on Main Street.

The name Neiman Marcus joins two family names from one family. English Wikipedia says the store was founded in Dallas in 1907 by Herbert Marcus, his sister Carrie Marcus Neiman and her husband Abraham Lincoln Neiman. Herbert Marcus had been a buyer at the Dallas department store Sanger Brothers, and the Neimans had worked for its competitor A. Harris and Co. Before returning to Dallas the three had run a sales-promotion business in Atlanta, Georgia, and Wikipedia says the new store opened on 10 September 1907.

Wikipedia describes the store as furnished and stocked with clothing of a kind not commonly found in Texas at the time, with its early stock bought largely on a trip to New York made by Carrie Marcus Neiman. The store’s name set her husband’s surname before her brother’s, and the pairing has kept that order since.

In 1914 a fire destroyed the original store and its stock. By the end of that year, Wikipedia says, Neiman Marcus had opened in a new building at the corner of Main Street and Ervay Street in downtown Dallas, and with more space it added accessories, lingerie and children’s clothing. The store began selling menswear in 1929 and came through a further fire in 1946.

The store built its reputation on events as much as on goods. Wikipedia says it staged weekly fashion shows from 1927 and, in 1936, a gala called “One Hundred Years of Texas Fashions” for the centennial of Texan independence. Stanley Marcus, Herbert’s son, took charge of the company’s operations in the early 1950s, and Wikipedia credits him with the fashion shows, New York advertising for what was then a regional chain, in-store art exhibitions and the Christmas catalogue. He used art as a source of colour, Wikipedia says, in one season borrowing paintings by Paul Gauguin from collectors and having their colours translated into dyes for wool, silk and leather.

Branches, owners and a new group name.

The store left Dallas in the 1950s. Wikipedia records a store in the Preston Center that it says was inspired by the art and culture of the Southwest, with Kachina figures on coloured-glass murals and an Alexander Calder mobile named “Mariposa,” and a branch in Houston from 1955. In 1965 the Preston Center store was replaced by a larger one at NorthPark Center, and in 1957 the company launched Fortnight, an annual presentation of the fashions and culture of a single country held at the downtown store each autumn for twenty-nine years.

Ownership changed several times over the following decades. Wikipedia says Neiman Marcus was part of the retailer Carter Hawley Hale Stores before being spun off in June 1987 as a publicly listed company in which General Cinema, later Harcourt General, held control until 1999. Private-equity owners followed from 2005, and in 2013 the company was sold to Ares Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. The Neiman Marcus Group also came to include Bergdorf Goodman in New York.

In December 2024 Saks Global, the company formed by the owner of Saks Fifth Avenue, completed its purchase of Neiman Marcus Group. FashionUnited reported on 23 December 2024 that the combined portfolio comprised Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue and Saks OFF 5TH, each continuing under its own name. The Associated Press reported in June 2026 that the group had left Chapter 11 and renamed itself Exemplar Luxury Group, with Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman as its three store banners. Exemplar Luxury Group, formerly Saks Global, has owned Neiman Marcus since 2024.

The archive of the store’s visual history is public. Wikipedia says the Neiman-Marcus Collection, which includes early account books, advertising and Christmas catalogue layouts along with Stanley Marcus’s memorabilia, is held by the Texas & Dallas History & Archives Division of the Dallas Public Library, where researchers can consult it.

Design and documentation.

A department store is one of the few retail formats where the building itself carries the brand. Many flagships occupy purpose-built premises on major city streets, and their facades, corner towers, clocks and glass domes are designed to be recognised from a distance and photographed from the pavement. Inside, atriums, galleries and grand staircases give the name a physical setting that a logo alone cannot supply, and the building often appears in advertising, on postcards and on the store’s own merchandise.

The shopping bag is the identity that leaves the building. A strong bag uses a single colour, a wordmark or a simple pattern that reads clearly at street level, and stores tend to keep the same scheme for years so that the bag becomes a familiar sight in other parts of the city. Gift boxes, tissue and ribbon usually follow the same palette.

Window displays add a seasonal layer. Many department stores dress their street windows to a theme each season, and the year-end windows are often unveiled at a public event that draws crowds. Spring fashion launches, sale periods, illuminated facades and in-store decorations follow a yearly calendar, so the identity changes on a schedule while the name and the building stay the same.

Two surnames, a city and a catalogue.

One element of the Neiman Marcus identity is the double surname. It records a family partnership between a brother, a sister and her husband, and it has outlasted Carter Hawley Hale, General Cinema, a series of private owners and the move into Saks Global and then Exemplar Luxury Group, which keep the store under its own name.

The second element is Dallas. The store opened there in 1907, rebuilt at Main and Ervay after the 1914 fire and spread to the Preston Center and NorthPark Center, and its archive is kept by the Dallas Public Library.

The third element is the Christmas Book. Writing in the Dallas magazine Advocate on 28 October 2021, Renee Umsted reported that the tradition started in 1926 with a 16-page booklet sent to the retailer’s customers, and that the 2021 catalogue was the 95th edition. The book became known for its fantasy gifts. Wikipedia says the idea took hold when the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow asked Stanley Marcus whether the store would offer anything unusual for his radio audience, and Marcus answered with a live Black Angus bull and a silver barbecue cart. His-and-hers gifts followed. Wikipedia lists past fantasy gifts that include a submarine, mummy cases and seats from Ebbets Field, and the Advocate reported that the 2021 fantasy gifts were curated around family, traditions and togetherness.

The fourth element is art. From the Southwestern-themed Preston Center store and its Calder mobile to the Gauguin colour season and the Fortnight festivals, Wikipedia’s account of the store shows Stanley Marcus treating exhibitions and design as a way of presenting the name.

For a design guide, Neiman Marcus shows how a store can make a catalogue into its signature, with a yearly book that customers and the press wait for. Compare it with Saks Fifth Avenue, its sister store in the same group, and with Nordstrom. For this guide we use night navy, gift gold and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Neiman Marcus’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.