2 Baumans employees retiring
LR store’s workers reflect on long careers in menswear
Baumans Fine Men’s Clothing, the august 104-year-old Little Rock menswear store, is losing two longtime employees, a salesman and a former owner who has worked at the store for nearly half its existence. Rick Maldonado and Wayne Ratcliff have helped generations of men dress well, saying success in their industry comes more than anything from giving customers a personalized shopping experience.
“We’re probably the second or third generation of salespeople who were either smart enough or dumb enough, one of the two, to stick with it a long time,” Ratcliff said. “But the reason we like it is because of the people, what we did — we enjoyed clothes — and the whole nine yards.”
Ratcliff, a Central High School graduate, decided after a year at Little Rock University that college wasn’t for him and served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve before working at the former Lou Hoffman’s downtown. He rose to management and inventory buying there.
“I grew to really know fabrics quite well,” he said. “I knew color; I could put a tie with most anything. But I enjoyed the buying aspect of it, the selling aspect of it, and interacting with my customers.”
Baumans approached him in 1973. Amid the early-1970s recession and poor store management, the “sleepy and tired” business, then located downtown on Main Street, was struggling. Ratcliff took the job, and a salary raise, after other recruits from bigger cities rejected the position.
Ratcliff said the experience didn’t significantly change upon transitioning from employee to owner because of Baumans’ focus on its customers.
“We’re a one-on-one business. We’re not a mass business at all,” he said, estimating that 90% of customers are repeat customers.
Several generations of owners had passed since Simon Bauman opened the store in 1919. In 1983, Ratcliff bought into ownership and became its full owner in 1997.
Maldonado, from San Antonio, entered JC Penney’s management program after graduating college in 1974, then moved to Shreveport to run a menswear store, which The Limited bought during the early-1980s recession. Dillard’s hired him to work at their Bossier City, La., department store, where he set up and managed the menswear department.
He found success with back-of-store management but longed to be back on the floor. Store management required buying experience, so they sent him to corporate headquarters in Little Rock for experience. Here he met Ratcliff, who offered him a job.
Some Baumans shirts sell for hundreds of dollars today, but Ratcliff said they may have sold for $5.50 in 1973, even as clothing costs have lagged behind other consumer prices in recent decades and households continue spending less of their income on clothes. Ratcliff noted that fabric grew significantly finer over the past five decades, as milling and yarn-spinning techniques became more refined.
“I took the company in ’83 and made a determination, simply because I was determined to turn it around and make it not an old country store, to bring it up to the level of some in New York,” he said, noting the time decades ago that a cab driver there asked him if Arkansans were wearing shoes yet.
“We wanted to be able to offer everything that others had, in this market,” he said. “It’s level now.”
Ratcliff said he has sold ties ranging from 2½ inches to 5 inches wide over the years and said he embraces fashion trends as they come.
“The only thing I miss is men dressing like men,” he said. “Today is quite different than it was in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. Men wore suits to work every day, pretty much. And there are very few businesses, especially in Little Rock, that require [suits today].
“There’s nothing that I really miss other than the fact that I just think a man, when he’s got an occasion to dress up, ought to dress up,” he said. “You go to restaurants today, regardless of the quality, and the women always out-dress the guys. The guys … look like they don’t match the gals, typically. I’m not putting anybody down about that. I’m just saying it’s not the way I was raised — not the way most of us were raised, actually.”
Taste can be taught, especially if could-be workers already like clothes. Both men said personality — an ability to talk to people, both as a manager and in terms of making sales with customers — is vital for success in the industry.
“You have to be able to talk to not just clients, but your employees,” Maldonado said. “You have to be able to help them improve. It takes talent, and you have to be sincere about it.”
Thomas and John Cole, of the Fayetteville family that owns the Walker Brothers menswear stores, bought Baumans in July 2019. Ratcliff and Maldonado are both in their 70s and ready to retire. Ratcliff will stay in Little Rock and plans to continue showing up for customers once in a while at Baumans. Maldonado plans to return to Shreveport, where a daughter and grandchildren live.
Thomas Cole called the two legends.
“They’ve been next to people who have changed the landscape of Little Rock over the course of 50 years,” he said. “Not having that is brutal, but we have to go forward somehow, someway.”
Even amid the retail industry’s much-reported headwinds and a career spent amid old ways and old-styled formality’s continual retreat, Ratcliff is optimistic about Baumans’ future, noting an increase in 35- and 40-year-olds who are coming in for their first suits.
“Keep making it better, making it more personal. Bring back the trends of the ’50s and the ’60s and communicate with your customer to look like something,” he said, defining the task as “retraining a community.”
“We make guys feel good about themselves. We make them function better.”