The CEO Who’s Reinventing J.C. Penney

Marvin Ellison has scored some early successes at the troubled department store, but there’s a lot left to fix.

Question: If you wanted to buy a pair of men’s shoes at a department store, would you look for them next to (a) Men’s Clothing, or (b) Women’s Footwear? Most shoppers would probably answer “a.” But at J.C. Penney, the 114-year-old retailing mainstay, the answer until very recently was “b.” Women make up about 80% of Penney’s clientele, and Penney managers believed that, generally speaking, those women were likely to buy shoes for their spouses and beaus, just as they did during the Kennedy administration. “It was a terrible idea,” says Marvin Ellison, shaking his head as he walks a reporter through a Penney store in Frisco, Texas. “It took space away from women’s shoes, and it made it very difficult for men to want to buy shoes.” Read more at Fortune.