Two brothers, a hosiery business and a store in Hyannis.

Zayre grew out of a hosiery business started by two brothers, Max and Morris Feldberg. The Los Angeles Times, in a notice published on 29 April 1988, reported that the brothers had come to the United States from Russia in the early 1900s to escape conscription in the czar’s army, settled with their mother in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and began a small hosiery business there in 1919. The company’s own history, as archived from tjx.com in 2013, places the start of that business in Boston in 1919 under the name New England Trading Company; English Wikipedia describes it as an underwear and hosiery wholesaler that supplied department stores and specialty shops.

Retail came a decade later. TJX says the Feldbergs opened their own store, selling women’s hosiery, in 1929; English Wikipedia gives its name as Bell Hosiery Shops, later shortened to Bell Shops, and says the business grew into a chain of women’s specialty stores and in 1946 bought Nugents, a women’s apparel chain based in New York City. According to the TJX history, within twenty years the family’s apparel stores stretched from New England to Washington, D.C.

The discount store was the work of the next generation. TJX names Stanley and Sumner Feldberg, the founders’ sons, as the people who set out in the mid-1950s to build the Zayre discount department store chain. English Wikipedia says the opening came through the grocer Stop & Shop, which offered to build the family a store beside a new supermarket in Hyannis, on Cape Cod; it dates the Hyannis Zayre to 20 September 1956 and a second, larger store in Boston’s Roslindale neighbourhood to the same month. The Los Angeles Times notice likewise records Zayre stores in Boston and Hyannis in 1956.

English Wikipedia says Zayre Corp. became a public company on the New York Stock Exchange in 1962, a step the TJX history also records, and that through the 1960s the chain opened stores in clusters across the eastern half of the country so that each market shared its advertising. The company’s headquarters were in Framingham, Massachusetts, as the Chicago Tribune noted in 1990.

A Yiddish word, flashing lights and a family of chains.

The name has a well-recorded story. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1988 that the Feldbergs took the name Zayre from a phonetic spelling of the Yiddish word for “very,” as in “very good.” The TJX history says simply that Zayre “means ‘very good’ in Yiddish.” English Wikipedia quotes a fuller account from a 1985 article by the New York Times retail writer Isadore Barmash: the Feldbergs and an advertising consultant, Bert Stern, were casting about for names when Max ended a telephone call with the Yiddish phrase for “very good”; Stern repeated the opening word, and the group agreed to spell it Z-A-Y-R-E.

In the stores, the brand ran on promotion. English Wikipedia says Zayre held flashing-light “15-minute specials,” announced over the public-address system to send shoppers to particular departments, stayed open around the clock in the weeks before Christmas, and used the slogan “Fabulous Department Stores” in the 1960s before “Compare… you can’t do better than Zayre” in the early 1970s. The Chicago Tribune reported in June 1990 that Zayre stores “had been known for frequent promotions, heavy advertising and discounted fashion items.” The TJX history describes the format as a neighbourhood, self-service, general-merchandise discount department store emphasising convenience, fashion and value.

The mix began in clothing. English Wikipedia says the early stores leaned toward softlines because of the family’s years in women’s apparel, and that during the 1960s they added toys, sporting goods, records, books and health and beauty products, initially through leased departments that Zayre later bought out.

Zayre Corp. also built other retail names. The TJX history says the company acquired Hit or Miss, an off-price women’s apparel chain, and then hired Bernard “Ben” Cammarata, previously general merchandise manager of Marshalls, to launch a new off-price chain: T.J. Maxx, which opened with two stores in Auburn and Worcester, Massachusetts — in March 1977, English Wikipedia says. TJX also credits Zayre with introducing BJ’s Wholesale Club, a self-service, cash-and-carry membership warehouse, to the Northeast; English Wikipedia dates it to 1984. Hit or Miss later tried a mail-order catalogue, Chadwick’s of Boston, which TJX says became its own division by 1985.

Design and documentation.

A discount or variety store’s identity is carried by things that are easy to overlook because they were made to be used and thrown away: the sign above the entrance, the weekly circular folded into a newspaper, the receipt, the price card on the shelf and the shopping bag a customer carries out of the car park. Each of these repeats the store’s name many times a week, often for decades, and together they do more to fix a chain in local memory than any single logo drawing.

Signage had to be read from a road and a parking lot, so store names were usually set large, short and in one or two strong colours. Circulars had a different job: crowding many items onto cheap paper while keeping the name and colours instantly recognisable on a doorstep or kitchen table. Bags travelled furthest of all, into homes, schools and other shops.

Each guide in this group looks at one store name — who founded it, who owned it, what became of the stores and of the name itself — and separates what independent sources record from what the companies said about themselves.

The stores went to Ames; the company became TJX.

In 1987 Zayre Corp. grouped its off-price chains into a subsidiary called TJX, English Wikipedia says, and the following year it sold the Zayre stores. The buyer was Ames Department Stores of Rocky Hill, Connecticut; the Chicago Tribune dated the purchase to September 1988, and English Wikipedia to October 1988. In June 1989, English Wikipedia says, BJ’s Wholesale Club and HomeClub were spun off to shareholders as Waban, Inc., and Zayre Corp. bought out the TJX minority, merged with it and took the name The TJX Companies, Inc. — a restructuring the TJX history also records. TJX still traces its own history to the Feldbergs’ 1919 business, its archived history shows.

Ames converted the stores to its own name. English Wikipedia says some stores kept the Zayre name until 1990, by which time all had been closed or converted to Ames. The Chicago Tribune reported on 9 June 1990 that Ames, which had filed for Chapter 11 protection on 25 April that year, planned to close all of its former Zayre stores in Illinois and northwestern Indiana. The same report quoted Ames insiders as saying the company had underestimated how changing the name of the well-known Zayre stores to Ames might affect customers, and that Ames had dropped many of the discounts and promotions Zayre shoppers were used to.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Morris Feldberg died in 1969 and that Max Feldberg died in Boston in April 1988.

For a design guide, Zayre shows a store name built from a single spoken word, carried by promotion and advertising, and retired when the stores changed hands while the company behind it carried on under another name. Compare T.J. Maxx, the off-price chain launched inside Zayre Corp., HomeGoods, another TJX chain, and Ames, which bought the stores. For this guide we use a turquoise, a deep teal and white with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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