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History
Anticipating the postwar baby boom, 22-year-old Charles Lazarus transformed his father’s Washington, D.C. bicycle repair shop into a baby furniture store in 1948. When customers told him they were also looking for baby toys, Lazarus listened and added toys to the products he sold. The policy of determining customers’ needs by simply listening to them became a key ingredient in Lazarus’s success.
By 1957, Lazarus’s baby furniture store was transformed and renamed Toys“R”Us, complete with its distinguishing backwards “R.” Nine years later, Lazarus had four toy stores posting sales of $12 million per year. To expand his business, he sold the stores to Interstate Sales, a large retail conglomerate. Lazarus continued to run the Toys“R”Us stores, and they prospered. When Interstate filed for bankruptcy in 1974, Lazarus took over the entire company. Four years later he led Interstate out of bankruptcy and renamed the company Toys “R” Us, Inc.
The company has grown and expanded significantly since then. Global expansion of Toys“R”Us stores began in 1984 with the opening of toy stores in Canada, England, and Singapore. The expansion of Toys “R” Us, Inc. continued into baby products when the first Babies“R”Us store opened in 1996. A year later, Toys“R”Us acquired Baby Superstores and merged it with Babies“R”Us, becoming the leading retailer in the juvenile industry.
In 1998, Toys“R”Us moved into the cyberworld when it established www.toysrus.com, the company’s first online store. The online site gained significant momentum two years later after entering into a strategic partnership with Amazon.com and becoming a premier online toy, video game, and baby store. With a customer base that exceeds 10 million, Toysrus.com is among the most visited e-commerce destinations for toys, video games, and baby products.
Today, more than 50 years after Charles Lazarus opened his first baby furniture store, Toys “R” Us, Inc. continues to provide customers with exceptional value and selection while never forgetting its founder’s most important rule of business: Listen to the customer. |
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