Rubin Leon Gorewitz, a New York tax accountant with an artistic who's who for a clientele, died on March 7 in Manhattan.
He personally bought all of the store's merchandise, and sold it himself on the sales floor to a clientele that included judges, diplomats, Jacob K. Javits and John A. Roosevelt, whose signatures were reproduced on signs in the store.
For decades, it had been assumed that making good money in high-end retail depended on building a clientele: it might take a few years to create a million-dollar book (that is, a client list capable of generating a million dollars in sales), which the better specialty stores would reward with a six-figure salary.
The firm catered to wealthy individuals but also took on a less affluent clientele with the establishment, in 1950, of the Neuberger Guardian mutual fund, one of the first funds to be sold without the usual 8.5 percent upfront sales commission.
While that is an improvement from the 100,000 jobs believed to have been lost immediately after the attack, there is still a deficit that can break a business that is based on a local clientele.
MORE financial advisers are focusing on a single clientele, say, doctors or athletes.
The first, simply called Diner, opened a couple of years ago with a French-American bistro menu at diner prices, and quickly drew on a hipster clientele.
The T-shirt is "a sign Brioni is focusing on a younger clientele and a sign that their loyal clients have changed their lifestyle a lot," said Armando Branchini, a professor of management at Bocconi University in Milan who also serves as the executive director of the Altagamma Foundation, an association of Italian luxury-goods makers.
This week, I re-read the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain's essay "Don't Eat Before Reading This," which brings the sausage metaphor home to its source — food — by detailing the unsavory behind-the-scenes restaurant practices that foist crummy cuisine on a credulous clientele.
He gradually built a clientele for his paintings on his own, and images of his work traveled widely online.
