Best Products
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| Public (NASDAQ: BESTQ) | |
| Industry | Retail (Catalog merchant showroom) |
| Fate | Liquidation |
| Founded | 1957 |
| Defunct | 1997 |
| Headquarters | Richmond, Virginia |
| Products | home furnishings, consumer electronics, jewelry, housewares, toys |
| Website | None |
Best Products (also known simply as BEST) was a chain of American catalog showroom retail stores founded by Sydney and Frances Lewis, formerly headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. It was founded in 1957 and went out of business in 1997. At the time it filed the second time for bankruptcy it had 169 Best stores and 11 Best Jewelry stores in 23 states, and a nationwide mail-order service. When in operation Best Products was traded on the NASDAQ exchange as "BESTQ".
The company was founded by Sydney Lewis and Frances Lewis. Sydney Lewis, a lawyer educated at Washington & Lee and Harvard Business School, worked with his father managing an encyclopedia sales operation in Richmond. Lewis thought of selling additional merchandise along with the bills for encyclopedias. In 1957, the Lewises sent out their first catalog. The first showroom was at 4909 West Marshall Street in Richmond, just across the street from the new Willow Lawn Shopping Center.
The company had a strong sense of promotion and artistic sensibilities; it was legend in artistic circles that it would trade store merchandise for art. As a result, the company, as well as the Lewises, gathered a significant collection of 20th-century art. Much of the Lewis Collection can be seen at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
In the 1970s, Best Products contracted with James Wines’ "Sculpture in the Environment" (SITE) architecture firm to design nine highly unorthodox retail facilities, notably a tongue-in-cheek structure called the "Indeterminate Facade" in Houston, Texas with a severely distressed facade. This building purportedly “appeared in more books on 20th-century architecture than photographs of any other modern structure”. In Richmond, the company built the Peeling Wall showroom that appeared to have a peeling facade (located on Midlothian Turnpike) as well as a Forest showroom that appeared to have trees growing out of it (located at 9008 Quioccasin Road). The store in Sacramento also had a unique design. In the morning, its corner entryway would slide open, and would slide back shut at night. The structure, with its breakaway entry removed, is now a Best Buy. Photographs of these storefronts appeared in several Best catalogs. One anchored the Eudowood Plaza in Towson, Maryland, featuring a tilted front. As of 2007, most of these distinctive buildings have been converted into conventional buildings by removing the architectural embellishments, or in a few cases, demolished. The only building to retain its distinctive features is the Forest building in Richmond, now home to the West End Presbyterian Church, which has stated that the forest in the entryway has been an asset to the church's environment.
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Wikipedia