Another Goodbye to a Summit Business

Eric Model, whose name is attached to the Sealfons department stores gets ready to close chapter in the book about his family's retail business. Seal & Co. is an apparel, furniture and toy mini-department store for the babies and kids. It's in its final days.

The store has over 50 years in north and central N.J. 

In 2005, the New York Times wrote (Goodbye to Days Of China and Hosiery) about Eric and the Model family:

Those people that Mr. Model described from the bustling children's department on a recent Friday morning cannot have been too foreign to him. In his pinstriped suit and designer tie, the Short Hills-based businessman, who is 35 and heir to an empire that once included seven Sealfons stores throughout New Jersey, looked ready to grab his briefcase and board the next Midtown Direct train to Penn Station. But as far as he is concerned, if the diminishing of his family's business can be pinned to a certain shift in retail expectations, yuppies -- or whatever the right term is for the region's surplus of young, moneyed transplants -- are the ones who caused it.

Check out our profile of Model next week.