It’s curtains for Marshall Field’s–and a pox on Macy’s for that–but the other Field in town is doing rip-roaring business in Hugg-A-Planet pillows and Balinese bat kites. Financial statements that went to the Field Museum’s board this month show that revenue from its business enterprises–largely retail–jumped 36 percent to more than $11 million in 2004. Laura Sadler, who oversees the museum’s businesses, including the stores and a new licensing program, studied the fashion merchandising branch of anthropology and got her training at the Limited, I. Magnin, and the May Company. She’s the one to blame for the large commercial appendage attached to any special exhibit worth mentioning at the Field–a maze of T-shirts and commemorative toys that visitors have to navigate on their way out. Under her leadership the museum’s exit shops have sold everything from a $4 Sue Skull Snapper toy to a $42,000 pearl necklace.
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The museum, home to a mind-boggling 23 million specimens, is a dinosaur itself: 112 years old and coming off some tough times. Construction at Soldier Field eliminated its parking temporarily (and permanently on game days) at the same time the stock market took a dive. Attendance, which hit nearly 2.4 million in 2000, when the museum hosted the Dead Sea Scrolls and opened its Sue exhibit, began to fall, leveling off at about 1.3 million in each of the last two years. Net assets last year rose 10 percent, thanks in part to a “rebalancing” of investments that includes a diversity of hedge funds. But corporate, foundation, and government funding are all harder to come by these days. As a result the Field’s been trimming programs and staff: it had more than 700 full-time employees in 2000 and is down by about 100 today. CFO Jim Croft says that’s been accomplished by attrition and by eliminating jobs supported by special funding when the funding ran out. The museum’s “doing well in light of the challenging not-for-profit marketplace,” he says, with revenues up almost $8 million in 2004. But it hasn’t yet raised the money to pay for improvements, including the huge new underground repository it just opened (a capital campaign with a goal of $176 million is pending), and a midyear belt tightening this summer reduced the $61 million budget for 2005 by 1.5 percent. Going forward, Croft says, earned income from activities like retail sales will be increasingly important.
