There is a particular kind of person who can look at a rack of clothing and tell you, without hesitation and without much charity, what will sell and what will still be hanging there in six weeks. Judy Duzich has been that person at the same address in lower Manhattan, on and off, since the first George Bush was in office. She started at Century 21 Stores in June 1990 as an assistant buyer, which is the retail equivalent of being handed a clipboard and told not to break anything. She is now its chief merchant. The clipboard, one assumes, has been upgraded.
Century 21 is not a department store in the way that phrase is usually meant. It is an off-price retailer, which is a polite trade term for a place where designer merchandise arrives having taken a wrong turn somewhere in the supply chain and is sold at 40 to 65 percent off. The store occupied a stretch of Cortlandt Street directly across from the World Trade Center, and for roughly four decades it functioned as one of New York's genuinely democratic institutions: tourists, bankers, students, and - quietly, persistently - the costume designers of half the television produced in this city, all elbowing each other over the same rack.
Then, in 2020, it closed. All thirteen stores. The insurers and the pandemic had a disagreement, the family that owned it lost, and the whole thing was liquidated with the abruptness of a plug being pulled. Duzich, who had been running kids, home and beauty as a divisional merchandise manager, went to Haddad Brands as a vice president of business development - the vendor side of the childrenswear business she had spent years buying from. A lateral move into enemy territory, if you want to be dramatic about it. Reconnaissance, if you'd rather be practical.
We feel we're part of this community. We've been here before and we are building back.
Judy Duzich, on the return to Cortlandt Street
Chapter TwoThe Return, Sixty Percent Smaller
She came back in March 2022. Century 21 was reopening - one store, not thirteen - and someone had to fill it. The reopened flagship is about 100,000 square feet across four floors. The old one was roughly 250,000 across seven. That is not a renovation. That is a different building doing an impression of the old one, and the merchandise inside it had to be rebuilt from absolutely nothing, because the previous inventory had been sold off to the last belt.
Most retail executives spend their careers making incremental adjustments to an assortment that already exists. Duzich was handed an empty store and a deadline. The store opened on 16 May 2023, and the line outside on day one produced foot traffic at pre-pandemic levels, which suggests that three years of absence had done nothing at all to the appetite.
Before and After
The obvious move, when your store shrinks by sixty percent, is to jam the same amount of stuff into less room and hope nobody notices. Duzich did the opposite, which is the more interesting and considerably more nerve-wracking choice.
There is more of a boutique focus. We don't just throw things on racks. It's not as jammed up.
Judy Duzich, WWD, May 2023
Merchandise is now organized by brand and by style rather than by the traditional off-price principle of organized bewilderment. It is a heretical position in a category built on the pleasure of digging. Off-price retail has spent decades teaching customers that mess equals bargain, that if the store looked nice the prices would be worse. Duzich's bet is that a customer in 2023 will accept a bargain that has been tidied up, and might even prefer it.
"It's more curated, elevated and relevant. There's more fashion, more luxury, more trend."
The MechanicsScarcity, Manufactured Daily
Here is the difficulty at the center of the job. The thrill of Century 21 is scarcity - the sense that the thing in your hand is the last one, that it will not be here tomorrow, that hesitation is fatal. But scarcity is expensive. It means buying shallow across many brands instead of deep across a few, which multiplies the number of vendor relationships, the number of decisions, and the number of ways to be wrong. Duzich runs it anyway, because the alternative is a store full of things that are always available, which is simply a store.
Every day, we get new deliveries. We try to keep it constantly rolling in, with new products. It's going to be gone. It definitely keeps the customers coming.
Judy Duzich, Glossy Podcast, 2023
Note the construction of that second sentence. "It's going to be gone" is stated as a fact about the merchandise, not a warning to the shopper. The urgency is baked into the buying plan rather than bolted on by the marketing department afterwards. This is the difference between a retailer that says "limited time only" and one that means it.
The Buying Doctrine
That fourth principle deserves a moment. "It's not juniors" is a sentence that only makes sense if you have spent your professional life in a business where the distinction between juniors and young contemporary is the difference between a good year and an explanation to the board. Duzich spent more than fifteen years running the children's division, first as a buyer and then as a divisional merchandise manager. Kids is a punishing category - narrow margins, brutal seasonality, customers who grow out of the merchandise on a schedule. Anyone who survives it for a decade and a half arrives at the adult floors with a very calibrated sense of what a price tag can support.
The Long RoadThirty-Odd Years, One Address
Read that timeline as a document about loyalty and it is touching. Read it as a document about competence and it is more useful. Four decades of buying for the same customer at the same address produces a kind of knowledge that does not transfer and cannot be hired in. She knows which floors move in August. She knows what a rainy Tuesday does to the handbag numbers. She knows, presumably, exactly which vendor calls back.
"In the past, we did see that our top doors were very city-focused, in urban areas. We could go to larger cities, if need be, we could go to Miami, we can go to L.A."
That is Duzich on where this goes next, and it is characteristically unromantic. Not "we dream of a national footprint." Just an observation that the stores that worked were the dense urban ones, followed by two cities that are dense and urban. The company had thirteen stores and it now has one. Whatever comes after will presumably be chosen with the same arithmetic.
The Digital QuestionTreasure, but Online
The e-commerce site launched in the autumn of 2023, and it poses an awkward question for a business whose entire appeal is physical. If the joy is in the finding, what exactly are you selling on a website with a search bar? Duzich's answer is not to pretend the problem away.
Will everything be there? Definitely not. The store will have probably more treasures. But there'll be great treasures online as well. What we don't have the space for here in the store, we can carry online.
Judy Duzich, on Century 21's e-commerce plans
"Definitely not" is an unusual thing for a retail executive to say about their own website. It is also correct, and the site is positioned accordingly: an overflow valve for categories the four floors cannot hold - lingerie, home - rather than a replica of the store. The technology stack around it is thoroughly modern, self-checkout and new point-of-sale and the rest. But the core job has not changed since 1990. Someone still has to look at a line sheet and decide.
CodaThe Costume Department's Open Secret
One footnote that says more about the store than any sales figure. Century 21 has long been a working tool of the film and television industry in New York - costume designers dressing a whole cast on a budget that would not cover one runway look, quietly clearing the racks. It is a compliment of a very specific sort. Professionals whose job is finding good clothes cheaply chose this store, repeatedly, for decades, and the reason they chose it is that someone upstairs kept buying the right things.
Judy Duzich has now done that job in the nineties, the two thousands, the twenty-tens and the twenty-twenties. Retail is an industry that treats institutional memory as an expense to be trimmed and taste as something you can hire an agency for. Century 21 shut down entirely, then came back and put a thirty-year veteran in charge of the merchandise. On the evidence of the line outside on 16 May 2023, that was not sentiment. It was the plan.