David C. Farrell, an enormous within the retail industry who led the previous May Department Stores Co. through years of profitability and growth, died June 5 in St. Louis. He was 89.

Farrell served as May Co.’s chairman and chief executive officer for 19 years until retiring in April 1998. He’s credited with shaping the fashionable day department store, pioneering matrix buying that requires vendors to satisfy strict sales and profit targets, thereby narrowing the list of vendors that make it into the stores, and running highly productive and tightly managed malls. He was on the forefront of huge brand marketing, acquisitions, consolidations and aggressive cost management.

He also did well by stockholders, who saw their shares rise significantly during his tenure. An investment in May Co. over the period of Farrell’s 19-year CEO stewardship would have given shareholders a complete compound return of 18 percent annually. Profits were often driven as much by cost controls as extraordinary sales productivity.

The late Sam Walton, founding father of Walmart, once called Farrell the perfect retailer within the country.

“I had great respect for him,” said Jane Elfers, the president and CEO of The Children’s Place, who worked for Farrell when she was executive vp of Lord & Taylor, a former May Co. division, before she rose to CEO of L&T. “He could strike fear within the hearts of executives, nevertheless it was in a great way. During his store visits, you higher ensure you knew your numbers, but after the walkthrough, you learned a lot. His attention to detail and capability for numbers was amazing.”

“I studied what he did,” said Allen Questrom, the previous CEO of J.C. Penney, Macy’s Inc., Neiman Marcus and Barneys Latest York. “He was a transformational guy, but very very private.”

“He was a fantastic merchant and mentor to so many retail leaders through the past 40 years. I learned more from David than anybody else,” said Ken Hicks, executive chairman of Academy Sports + Outdoors, and a former May Co. executive. “All of us became higher merchants due to him.”

Hicks said that amongst an important lessons he learned from Farrell was to “discover the large idea, buy it prefer it was a giant idea, and present it prefer it is a giant idea.”

Farrell was a workaholic who micromanaged and had an authoritative management style, often labelled dictatorial. He set a strict culture at May Co., checked out the perfect ideas in each division and exported them to other divisions, and customarily took a centralized approach.

Yet he was admired throughout the industry, managed to draw top-flight managers and merchants who were critical to the corporate’s long-running success, and were well compensated for it, and he was feared by competitors. Under Farrell’s leadership, May Co. grew from 103 malls with $1.7 billion in sales and $95 million in earnings to 369 malls with $12.5 billion in sales, and earnings exceeding $750 million.

A May Co. profession man, Farrell was reputed to work 80-hour weeks, conduct after-midnight store inspections, after which return to the shops on weekends to examine out the competition and more of his own stores. Because the story goes, even at Sunday football games Farrell attended together with his family, he packed some paperwork. He was a giant fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

On the time of his retirement, the notoriously press-shy Farrell said in a press release: “I even have thoroughly enjoyed my tenure at May. I even have had the privilege to work with the perfect talent within the industry and, together, to construct one among industry’s strongest department store corporations. I leave May with completed and committed people throughout the organization, confident that the corporate is in excellent hands.”

Farrell was born in Chicago in 1933. He met his late wife Betty at Antioch College, and so they were married in 1955. 

After graduating from college, Farrell joined the St. Louis-based May Co. in 1956 on the Kaufmann’s division in Pittsburgh. He held quite a few merchandising positions at Kaufmann’s through 1966, rising to vp and general merchandising manager. In 1969, he became a company vp and president of Kaufmann’s. In 1975, he became president and chief operating officer of May Co.and have become its CEO in 1979. In 1985, he added the title of chairman.

He led May Co. through a string of acquisitions within the Eighties and early Nineties, most notably the merger with Associated Dry Goods in 1986. It was one among the most important mergers of retailing corporations of the last decade, involving an exchange of stock roughly valued at $2.7 billion. Because of this, May Co. grew to incorporate 303 department, specialty and discount stores.

During his tenure at May Co., Farrell spearheaded several other department store acquisitions including Foley’s, Filene’s, Thalhimer’s, Wanamaker’s and Strawbridge & Clothier, amongst the key purchases.

He also made one among May Co.’s most difficult strategic decisions – focusing entirely on malls. That meant shedding such major operations as Enterprise, Loehmann’s, Caldor and Payless ShoeSource. By disposing of May’s off-price, specialty and real estate interests, Farrell brought a much stronger give attention to malls.

While May Co. consistently generated strong profits with Farrell on the helm, the corporate hardly stepped out in fashion or in visual display and architecture. The approach was largely cookie-cutter. What May Co. lacked in visual and architectural excitement, it made up for in efficiently moving merchandise out and in of the stores, particularly big name brands. Farrell ran a well-oiled promotional machine, taking sharper, earlier and more disciplined markdowns.

Whatever Farrell demanded, he got. Even pot-bellied teddy bears. He was so intent on presenting hot items, that when within the early Eighties, he wanted all of his divisions to have big presentations of a certain portly bear. However it was an import item out of Korea with limited availability to the stores, and Farrell was about to begin one among his notorious store tours. The staff on the Hecht’s division in Washington, D.C. became desperate.

Because the story goes, Hecht’s staffers pulled together all of the large bears they may find from different branches, enabling the staff to make one major presentation at the primary store along Farrell’s itinerary. He loved it.

As soon as he left, the staff loaded the inventory on trucks that raced ahead of Farrell and beat him to the following store on his tour. One other major presentation was unexpectedly assembled. The identical bears moved from store to store, and Hecht’s officials were within the clear, until Farrell discovered the scheme. But as one witness said, Farrell didn’t fume over it.

After retiring, Farrell devoted much of his time and resources to supporting the greater St. Louis community, including Washington University. In 2000, Farrell and his late wife, Betty, in partnership with May Co., established the David C. and Betty Farrell Distinguished Professorship in Medicine in Washington University’s John Milliken Department of Medicine. The Farrells also provided the leadership gift to construct the state-of-the-art Farrell Learning and Teaching Center on the medical campus.

Amongst his many other community activities, Farrell raised funds for Pope John Paul II’s visit to St. Louis in 1999, supported the St. Louis Symphony and the St. Louis Art Museum, and served as chairman of the Danforth Circle Eliot Society, and on the Community Advisory Board of the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center.

The Lupton Chapel in St. Louis, in an obituary posted online Friday, listed David Farrell’s survivors as his children Mark Farrell, Lisa Heller and David Farrell; 4 grandsons, Theodore Farrell, William Farrell, Christopher Heller and George Farrell-Urvoaz, and his sister, Anne Boho.

The chapel indicated that the family will receive friends at a reception on the Bogey Golf Club in St. Louis from 4 p.m. to six p.m. on Thursday, and that the funeral and interment might be private.