An excerpt from Texas Got It Right!:
And finally, there was Carrie Marcus Neiman, the store’s cofounder and guiding spirit. Seldom have mercantile savvy and a God-given sense of style so comfortable inhabited the same person. Born in Kentucky in 1883, Carrie Marcus was the youngest of five children of German immigrants and got to Dallas by way of Hillsboro, Texas.
After high school, she worked in sales and married Abraham Lincoln “Al” Neiman, who ran a salvage business. There was a stint in Atlanta, where they worked briefly for a little-known soft-drink bottler called Coca-Cola. But Al deemed Coca-Cola a dead end, and so they returned to Dallas to start a retail store.
With $25,000 in start-up money, Carrie, her husband, and her brother, Herbert, opened a fifty-foot store on Elm Street. They billed their establishment as “an exclusive shopping place for fashionable women” and sourced their inventory based wholly on Carrie Marcus Neiman’s tastes.
Theirs was the first specialty store for women’s fashions in Texas…
Read more about Carrie Marcus Neiman in Texas Got It Right!