Connecticut Invasion

Outside a glassy new brick and marble store in West Hartford, Conn, last week, a squad of men worked feverishly wiring 40,000 artificial appleblossoms to a score of real trees. Inside the entrance, four sequined, papier-mache peacocks bore signs proclaiming: WE'RE PROUD AS A PEACOCK TO BE IN HARTFORD. This week the building opened its doors with a peacock-proud flourish: ten gallons of Arpege perfume (retails at $23.50 an ounce) were sprayed around the entrance.

The new store represented the first move outside New York and its suburbs for Fifth Avenue's Lord & Taylor, bossed by go-getting Dorothy Shaver. It is just the beginning of an expansion program in which Retailer Shaver hopes to "blow perfume across the nation." She is invading the territory of another smart woman operator: Beatrice Fox Auerbach, 65, who has made her G. Fox & Co. Hartford's biggest store.

Lord & Taylor's Connecticut branch, designed by Raymond Loewy, is an airy, two-story building with a huge glass panel in front and a parking lot for 1,500 cars. It is an extension of Dorothy Shaver's firm belief in peddling her wares where the customers live. President Shaver, who started as head comparison shopper 29 years ago and rose steadily to Lord & Taylor's top post in 1945, has since boosted the store's sales 62% to more than $50 million. She launched three suburban branches, kept sales of her Fifth Avenue store rising. In West Hartford, as elsewhere, Dorothy Shaver hopes to keep sales booming by catering to "the American woman who wants clothes to be a part of her personality."

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