Few names are as closely associated with success in plus and specialty sized apparel than the Lane Bryant company. Founded at the turn of the 20th century, Lane Bryant has become a leader in providing attractive, quality clothing for women for whom traditional sizes won’t do.

Lena Himmelstein arrived in New York City in 1894 alone and only sixteen years old. She’d been raised by her grandparents in Lithuania and apparently learned sewing as a child since she soon held a job as a dressmaker working long hours for very little pay, even by the standards of the time.

I get emails, lots of emails, from business people looking for wholesalers and liquidators they can trust and who will provide them with the merchandise they need with a minimum of trouble. As a result I keep an eye open for new or lesser-known wholesalers that fulfill these needs.

I was fortunate enough to recently come across a very good wholesale auction liquidation company called United Auctions of Saddle Brook, New Jersey. I was impressed by the variety of merchandise they provide and, compared to many case lot wholesalers, the abundant information on the products available.

Many people are interested in trying to sell merchandise on eBay but are unwilling or unable to invest the time and energy to try out something that may not be right for them. Either due to a lack of familiarity with technology or a busy schedules the process of setting up an account and jumping through the hops of online auctions is just a little too much for some people.

If you fall into this category of merchant you might consider making use of an eBay trading assistant. Trading assistants are long time sellers who will sell your merchandise for you for a fee. Paying the fee will take a bite out of your profits but by taking advantage of their expertise your items might just sell faster and for a higher price than you could get on your own.

An under appreciated but highly profitable branch of the online wholesale industry tree is the sale of electronic digital scales. Sometimes tiny but highly accurate scales serve a thousand purposes both at home and at work. Advances in technology and manufacturing practices have made scales that would have been too expensive for most uses just a few years ago available and affordable to just about any budget.

The frost and snow have moved on to the southern hemisphere at last. Warmer weather is upon us and the change of seasons can mean only one thing to online wholesalers, a rush on spring and summer merchandise.

Retailers are starting to roll out bright new apparel lines. The spring dress colors are in bloom, summer hats are finding their way into shopping carts, and it’s time to dust off those sunglasses. It might also be time to take a look at the state of the industry and its potential.

The petite size department is disappearing from many clothing retail stores. After years of struggling to find clothes that fit, small women began to enjoy lavish attention from apparel retailers in the form of entire departments dedicated to petite sizes. The stores were followed by all the biggest designers and before long Donna Karen and Versace offered lines especially for short women.

Now it seems that the glory days of petite size retail have ended. Over the last several months Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdale’s have all drastically reduced or eliminated their petite departments entirely. Neiman Marcus has removed the petite departments from all but 8 of their 36 stores and by fall that number will have dropped to just 2.

We will never know the identity of the shoe’s inventor; it is lost deep within the recordless past. The earliest depiction of shoes comes from an ancient Egyptian tomb dated at about 4000 BC. The wall carvings of the tomb shows figures wearing sandals held together by leather straps.

It would be several thousand years before what many would regard as the most important development in foot wear since their inception, the invention of the high heel. About 200 BC Roman tragic actors, short ones presumably, began wearing shoes comparable to modern platform heels. The thespians increased their height by adding wooden or cork risers to the bottoms of their sandals.