In 1900, the first department store opened in Lebanon with the name Orosdi-Back. This was the first and largest branch in the Eastern Mediterranean region for a Franco-Egyptian chain of luxury retail stores. The chain was owned by Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer, and his son Leon, both of whom were in the clothing business, and Hermann Back, an Austro-Hungarian merchant. The partners established their first store in Vienna in 1893, and then spread east and opened a store in Egypt in 1896. The Egyptian store survived the 1952 revolution and, as most Egyptian companies were nationalized and their ownership moved to the government, Orosdi-Back changed its name to Omar Efendi.
The Beirut store was located at the quays, next to the customs office and warehouses, which helped to make it very popular with pilgrims who were on their way to Mecca. This arcaded department store introduced modern consumerism and gadgetry to the Lebanese upper classes. Soon its popularity developed and matured, which led to its move to the heart of the capital; namely to Banks Street, which leads to Riad El Solh Square. Later, branches of Orosdi-Back were opened in Istanbul, Baghdad, Aleppo, Tunis, Smyrna, and Salonika.[1]
In 1970, the Islamic Wellfare Makassid Association of Beirut opened a shopping mall at the bottom of Martyrs’ Square- next to Cinema Byblos and Al Rayess Restaurant – which was named “Le Grand Magasin in partnership with the French Printemps Group.”
Then few years after an Armenian entrepreneur called Arthur Matossian opened – with the help of his wife Maggie – a department store called Fontana on Abdel Aziz Street in Ras Beirut. The store was situated at a crowded road that comes down from Hamra towards AUB and Bliss Street. The British Bank of the Middle East and Intra Bank were both en route. The three-story building was backed onto by the well-known AUB Alumni Association’s clubhouse and hostel, which, for a long period, was the epicenter of the cultural movement in the Arab world. The ground floor of Fontana was dedicated to electrical appliances, home décor and personal luxury items. The first floor was dedicated to Spanish furniture. Fontana was the first department store to import this type of furniture to Lebanon, while the lower floor housed all sorts of gadgets that were sold in the country for the first time. This basement store carried a sign that read “Grotto of Follies” at its entrance.
Fontana happened to be a client of Publicite Universelle and this is how I was introduced to the fascinating Matossian family: Arthur, his wife Maggie, and their son Jack, who they all called Gyro. Arthur Matossian was a great believer in advertising, but he was a tough cookie when his media plan was questioned or challenged. He was convinced that the products they were selling out of Fontana were only of interest to the Ras Beirut crowd and to Armenians. Accordingly, his media plans were always restricted to The Daily Star, Aztak (the Armenian language newspaper) and L’Orient Le Jour.
Philippe Hitti saw much wider potential amongst young couples who were planning to get married and were in the process of furnishing their first homes and kept hammering this missed opportunity to Arthur and to Maggie[2], who was very much involved in the challenge of developing Fontana’s business. In meeting after meeting, Philippe kept me busy providing statistics about the number of new families in Lebanon, which I was lucky to source from the head of the sociology department at AUB, who was in the process of writing a book about the social fabric of Lebanese family life. In fact, we were lucky to lay our hands on such information – and its breakdown by region and religious sect – at a time when Arthur Matossian and many businessmen like him were making strategic decisions inspired by their experience and gut feeling.
Finally, Arthur Matossian accepted Philippe Hitti’s suggestion to hold a meeting with Dr Lucien Dahdah, the CEO of Télé-Orient. The meeting turned out to be a meeting of minds, as both Matossian and Dr Dahdah were bright businessmen and bold adventurous pioneers. A live weekly program was agreed, the objectives of which were to educate Lebanese families on how to upgrade their lifestyle and environment. In other words, how to live in greater comfort and not to shy away from trying new ways simply because they thought they couldn’t afford it. The challenge, however, was a lack of presenters with the experience of standing in front of a camera and talking directly to viewers without reference to a written script or tele-prompters. There were also no specialized directors or lighting cameramen who were drilled on shooting kitchen appliances and close-ups of food while it was being prepared. As for the scriptwriting, Arthur and Maggie Matossian insisted on writing the scripts for each episode themselves.
Fontana’s “Grotto of Follies” was a weekly program aired before the daily news on Saturdays. Therefore, I started spending every Friday at the studios of Télé-Orient in Hazmieh, supervising the building of sets and making sure that the various hero products we were planning to present were properly held and demonstrated in front of the camera.
Amongst the products that the program introduced were non-stick Tefal frying pans and pots; vacuum-sealed Thermos jugs to keep drinks cool or hot; and Tupperware boxes for storing food and preventing their smell from spreading inside refrigerators. Tefal covered ironing boards, timers for boiling eggs and baking cakes, as well as blenders, meat mincers, hair dryers, shower curtains and bath scales. Every time a new product was demonstrated, Fontana witnessed a rush of housewives dashing into the store on Monday to buy it.
At that time a French electrical appliances company called Moulinex had a very active dealer in Lebanon by the name of Sami Ghorayeb, who instantly recognized the potential of stocking the Moulinex range at Fontana and giving Arthur Matossian the opportunity to demonstrate it on TV. Ghorayeb was in the final stages of his cooperation with the French manufacturers on developing a special meat mincing/blending machine for the preparation of Lebanese kibbeh which, up until then, was only prepared in homes that had heavy stone mortars (jorn) and wooden meat beaters (madakkah) in their kitchens. The preparation of kibbeh in this traditional way was very noisy, particularly for young families living in multi-story apartments. This was one of the reasons why Kibbeh was about to lose its prominent place at Lebanese family Sunday lunch tables and retire as a restaurant menu item, when Sami Ghorayeb’s invention, the “Moulinette”, came off the assembly line on the outskirts of Paris. This instantly found its place on the shelves of Fontana and was repeatedly promoted on Fontana’s TV show. The result was a brilliant marketing success story which earned Sami Ghorayeb the title of regional marketing coordinator for Moulinex in the Middle East and kept the cash till on the ground floor of Fontana continuously ringing for a long time.
Obviously, and due to the live transmission nature of the program on Lebanese TV, mistakes were made, which were often corrected while the program was still on air. Nevertheless, this caused a great deal of anxiety, frustration, and heartburn. Télé-Orient presenters in turn offered their excuses for ducking this assignment. Some even went vocal, claiming it demeaned their image as newscasters, or even weather report readers. Fontana and the agency were adamant that they would not let Télé-Orient use this excuse to stop airing the program, so we embarked on an immediate search for our own presenter.
Lena Chkaiban had a Lebanese TV anchor’s look and was a university graduate in the Arabic language. However, she had no experience of standing in front of the camera, which raised the concerns of the Matossians. Having been found and recommended by Publicite Universelle, we took on the responsibility of coaching her. One section of the program introduced an item that would be sold at a dramatically discounted price the coming Monday. Fontana had a stock of bathroom scales that were selling at 90 Lebanese pounds each and which they offered at 73 pounds that evening. Lena Chkaiban had developed a habit of scribbling her own cue sheets to remember instructions on how to use – or the prices of – the machines under offer. When the time came to present the special offer of that week, she mixed up the numbers and announced a price of 37 Lebanese pounds instead of 73. The Matossians had been invited to a wedding ceremony that evening, which they didn’t want to miss despite their discipline of not accepting any engagement on a Saturday, while Philippe Hitti and I had a much earlier engagement to take one of the agency’s international clients to dinner. Fontana’s “Grotto of Follies” had no supervision for the first time, and the mistake passed unnoticed.
Arthur and Maggie Matossian had a habit of driving to Fontana at 8.30am every morning, half an hour before the store opened. As they approached Intra Bank they noticed something strange ahead of them at the intersection of Abdel Aziz and Sourati Street. Cars were in a seemingly complicated jam, including a couple belonging to Squad 16, whose sirens did not stop and whose red lights were blinking. Pedestrian traffic looked like it was moving fast in one direction towards AUB. Finally, when their own car turned onto Abdel Aziz Street, they realized that all this commotion was being caused by a mob piling up in front of Fontana.
All the people who had watched “Grotto of Follies” on Saturday had dashed to their phones to share the “bathroom scale at 37 Lebanese pounds offer” with their relatives and friends. Then, at Monday’s sunrise, they rushed to queue in front of Fontana, since they were aware that such offers were dependent on stock availability. Neighbors dialed the police emergency number and the Squad 16 officers quickly appeared on the scene. The Matossians explained their predicament to the senior officer, but there was no way of stopping the waves of people, so they were forced to offer their entire stock of bathroom sales at 37 pounds apiece, and a great number of people left empty handed and continued to swear at Fontana for many months.
The Matossians, Télé-Orient and Publicite Universelle made a breakthrough by introducing new consumer trends to developing Arab markets. More impressive were the lessons they learnt on how new products could be dynamically launched in a geography where disposable income was on the rise and where literacy was still at its lowest. The case of Fontana’s “Grotto of Follies” may have been messed up, but the learning from this experience allowed us to revise our plans and introduce the necessary measures and controls.
Fontana created a legacy in Ras Beirut and across Lebanon, as people drove all the way from Baalbek, Zahlé, Tripoli and Saida to buy the products they had on offer, be it a Moulinette kibbeh machine, a bathroom scale or a Noritake tea set. I will always be proud of my humble contribution to Fontana’s success story. Sadly, Fontana closed as the Lebanese Civil War grew messier and messier. The Matossians emigrated to North America, but their memory continues to linger in the minds of the people who knew them, and of those visitors to the Arthur Matossian Gallery at Haigazian University.
[1] Fin de siècle Beirut- The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital – by Jensen Hanssen – From page 252 till 258