A History of Marketing / Episode 40

Long before giant balloons floated down Broadway* at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a remarkable young woman with a prosthetic eyeball developed the beginnings of the Macy’s brand in the 1860s.

Her name was Margaret Getchell. She was a marketing visionary who gave Macy’s its iconic red star logo, she captured customers’ imaginations with fantastical window displays, and she cemented the brand’s connection to the holiday season.

Even though she was the first female executive of Macy’s, Margaret Getchell’s contributions were largely lost to time. That was until Stephanie Forshee rediscovered Getchell’s story began the work of restoring her legacy.

Stephanie published Getchell’s belated obituary in the New York Times as part of their “Overlooked No More” series, and introduced her story to a new generation through her children’s book, Hidden Gems: Margaret Getchell LaForge, which is part of a series celebrating fierce females in business.

It’s an inspiring story that gave me new appreciation for the Macy’s brand. Now, here’s my conversation with Stephanie Forshee.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Andrew Mitrak: Stephanie Forshee, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Stephanie Forshee: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Andrew. I’m excited to be here.

Andrew Mitrak: I’m so excited to speak with you and have a great conversation about the life and career of Margaret Getchell. That’s a name, Margaret Getchell, that I’m guessing a lot of listeners haven’t heard before. You’ve written a piece for The New York Times about Getchell, as well as a children’s book called Hidden Gems. So to start, how would you describe Margaret Getchell to someone who’s never heard of her before?

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I think you’re correct that most people don’t know the name. Margaret Getchell was America’s first female retail executive. She worked for R.H. Macy & Co. during the 1860s and 1870s. She worked with the founder, Rowland Hussey Macy, who was a distant cousin of hers. She started with the company in 1860 as a cash clerk, worked her way up to head bookkeeper, and then made history in 1866 when she was named Superintendent of the store. That means she was the manager of the store, overseeing about 200 employees at that time, which would have been a big deal, of course.

Rediscovering a Retail Pioneer

Andrew Mitrak: As well as that managerial and executive experience, she had a lot of contributions to marketing that we will speak on as well. I’m just wondering, how did you first come across this story? When was the moment where you realized, “Wow, I need to help tell this story and make more people aware of Getchell?”

Stephanie Forshee: Early in the pandemic, very early on, when we were still in lockdown, March 2020, I was a business journalist at the time and enjoyed reading about businesses, particularly retail companies. I was nerding out on this book about the history of Macy’s. Within the first few chapters, there was information about Margaret Getchell and some of the early employees of the store. That’s when I learned she was supposedly America’s first female retail executive.

I had never heard the name, so I was very intrigued by her story. I was doing a little searching online, and I just thought maybe it was just my ignorance, silly me for not having heard of this woman, but I quickly realized that not a lot of people knew about her or had written about her. There was an encyclopedia.com entry about her and maybe two or three articles about her at the time. She was very uncovered in terms of what she deserved. I started researching her as much as I could and immediately became more and more intrigued by her story. I was very interested in the idea of uncovering information about this woman that very few people knew about. So that was exciting for me as well.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s always an exciting rush of a feeling when you discover somebody who has an interesting story and realize it is relatively uncovered. You think everything is covered on the internet, and it is surprising, of course, your book is called Hidden Gems, when there is more to be told here. I’ve experienced that myself, and it is a good rush.

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I can definitely relate to that.

Andrew Mitrak: Your background is as a PR professional now, but you had been a reporter as well at some point, so telling stories was in your wheelhouse as well.

Stephanie Forshee: Yes, I was a business journalist for about 15 years and worked for various publications. I was always drawn to stories that were sort of off the beaten path. Finding Margaret fit into that narrative, even though it was something completely new to me—covering a historic figure and researching someone like this. That was a whole new process but used a lot of the same skills.

From Schoolteacher to Retail Executive

Andrew Mitrak: Let’s walk through some of Getchell’s career. To start, how did she get her job at Macy’s? You mentioned that Rowland Hussey Macy, the name of Macy, was a distant cousin of hers. Was that the initial connection for her to start work there?

Stephanie Forshee: Actually, they had not met at that point. She graduated high school at the age of 16. She was very skilled with numbers, so she became an arithmetic teacher for a school on Nantucket. Then she traveled to a couple of different cities in New Jersey and New York.

Years earlier, she suffered an eye injury. It was a freak accident playing a game of tag with her sister. It was a gory accident where she injured her eye. She didn’t immediately lose her vision, but it was deteriorating over the years. When she was 19 years old, she finally had surgery to have her eye removed and replaced with a prosthetic eye. It is one of those incidents that changed the trajectory of her life.

Andrew Mitrak: Just to pause on that—an eye injury. Today that seems gruesome, but in the 1840s or 1850s, just thinking of what eye surgery was probably like back then... there were probably not the same types of anesthesia or processes. It seems like a really horrific, traumatic, formational experience.

Stephanie Forshee: I agree. That is something I’ve been researching the past few years—what that would have been like, that time versus today. You’re right, it is not something that anyone would want to endure. But it did shape her as a person and was something she had to deal with.

So, when she was 19, she underwent this surgery. This was early in the summer of 1860. As she was recovering, the doctor recommended she should consider a change in career. She had been a school teacher at that point, and he was saying that grading papers by candlelight things like that was probably not too great for her eye. That’s how the story goes. In hindsight, the doctor was probably suggesting, “You’re 19, you need to be married and go about your life.”

But she did take it into consideration to change her career. She had heard of her distant cousin Rowland Macy. They had both grown up, he was 20 years her senior, but they both were from the island of Nantucket. He was her distant cousin, even though they never met. She decided to apply there. The meeting went very well; she had an interview with him, she explained that she was skilled, so he hired her as a cash clerk to start, and she made her way up from there.

The Humble Beginnings of R.H. Macy & Co.

Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny that it all started because a doctor allegedly recommended this change in career. It’s funny tho, reading some of these old books, old biographies, how often doctors would recommend things like, “Go move out West” or “Go live near a lake.” Doctors don’t really prescribe that kind of treatment anymore. A lot of changes in medicine and doctors’ recommendations. Anyway, this may have been th...