In 1905, Sam Stein, a young Jewish immigrant from Russia, arrived in New York with $43 in his pocket and dreams of building a better life. Sam soon drifted west to Memphis, and then down the Mississippi River to Greenville, Mississippi. He became a peddler, carrying a heavy sack of inexpensive household goods to rural homes throughout the Delta. Within a few years, he opened a small store in Greenville called Sam Stein’s. From that humble beginning over a century ago, has grown a national retail chain with stores from coast to coast.

The history of Stein Mart is the story of a remarkable family. Sam Stein built a successful business selling work clothes and inexpensive merchandise to workers in town and to tenants and sharecroppers on the large farms surrounding Greenville. His four children continued the business, which eventually split into two stores, Sam Stein’s and Stein’s Self Service Store.

Sam’s oldest son, Jake, had dreams of building something bigger and better. With a flair for merchandising and a commitment to deeply discounted prices, he expanded and transformed his Self Service Store to a whole city block. On November 12, 1964, the store opened as Stein Mart. During the next two decades, he would further refine his merchandising strategies and continue to operate a tremendously successful local Greenville business, one that soon became the most well-known store in the entire Mississippi Delta.

Jake’s son, Jay, had his own vision for taking the family business in a new direction. Growing up, Jay worked at the store after school and on weekends, and in 1967, he began working full-time at the store. In 1977, Jay started to realize his vision as he opened a second Stein Mart store in Memphis, Tennessee, and continued each year to add one or two new stores throughout the Southeast. At the same time, Jay changed the merchandise mix to a more upscale focus on higher-quality, brand-name clothing, offered at prices 25 percent below those charged at department and specialty stores.

With 11 stores and a desire to consolidate the leadership of the company, Jay moved the company headquarters to Jacksonville, Florida, in July1984. Stein Mart spent the rest of the 1980’s and early 1990’s modernizing its operations, escalating the pace of store openings, developing a more structured corporate organization, and refining its merchandising strategies. By the end of 1991, Stein Mart had grown to 45 stores in the Southeast, Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado. Jay took the company public and formed the first Board of Directors in 1992. He then began a national expansion strategy that grew the company to 100 stores by 1995 and to 205 stores by 1999.