New York is about to lose a 100-year-old landmark.
Blumberg Excelsior, a legal supplies retailer located near the city’s World Trade Center, plans to close its store, and sell entirely through catalogs, telemarketing and the Web.
The firm closed its store in Albany, NY last year, and was getting ready to move toward closing the lower Manhattan location. But the process was accelerated by the events of Sept. 11.
Blumberg, which was sitting on about $500,000 in inventory, lost nearly 4,000 daily walk-in customers in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, according to CEO Robert Blumberg.
The catalog operation was hurt as well.
By late September, the company had received only about 50% of the orders it usually gets from its catalog mailings. Roughly 750,000 catalogs were mailed only a few days before the disaster, said Blumberg.
Overall sales for the month were down about 20%. The company was also hurt by the unanticipated expense of having to spend several thousand dollars to set up temporary telemarketing operations and get its Web site (www.blumberg.com) hosted from the outside because it could not access its New York location.
Direct and online marketing now account for less than 20% of Blumberg’s business.
The catalog offers a variety of office products, as well as legal documents and software, some of which are downloadable from the company’s Web site.
Blumberg’s customer base includes several thousand attorneys, some who work independently and others who are employed at larger law firms.
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