Charles Lazarus

Charles Philip Lazarus was born to a Jewish family in Washington, D.C., on 4 October 1923. Back from the war, he opened a children's furniture shop in his father's old bicycle-repair premises in 1948, noticed that customers who bought a crib came back for toys, and turned the idea into something new: a warehouse-sized store stacked with toys at low prices, self-service, open all year. Toys "R" Us grew from that into the largest toy retailer in the world, with the giraffe Geoffrey as its mascot, and forced the whole trade to change how it sold. The American chain closed in 2018, the year he died, but the brand still trades internationally and the format he invented is now the industry's default.