THE FRONT DOOR

Detroit's oldest business closed in April. Its standard walked two miles northwest and kept going.

Harold E. Dittrich had one lesson for every new employee, and he gave it the same way every time. He walked them onto the sales floor, pointed at the entrance, and told them: when someone comes through that door, we treat them like they are coming into our living room. He told his own sons the same thing. Five generations later, the family was still saying it to new hires in 2026, the year they closed.

The line is worth sitting with, because in the 1940s the Dittrichs meant it more literally than most Detroit businesses were prepared to. Theirs was the first and only furrier in the city — and among the first businesses of any kind — to bring African American customers in through the front door instead of the back. The stated reasoning was not complicated. Every hard-working American deserves respect.

Eighty years of Detroit history followed from that. Black-owned WGPR-TV ran Dittrich fashion specials in the late 1970s. Aretha Franklin shopped there, and in 2015, at the Kennedy Center Honors, she dropped a Dittrich Russian sable to the stage floor in the middle of “Natural Woman.” Ask a Detroiter of a certain age about Dittrich Furs and they do not describe a store. They sing the jingle.

On April 30, 2026, after 133 years, the store closed. Jason and Shawn Dittrich, the fifth generation, retired. When the announcement went up in January the line ran from Third Avenue down to West Grand Boulevard, and people stood in it for five and six hours in thirty-degree weather to buy one last thing.

What almost nobody outside the industry noticed is that the standard did not close with the building.

Detroit exists because of fur. That is not a flourish; it is the founding document. Cadillac put fifty soldiers and fifty traders ashore in July 1701 at the point where the river narrows, and he put them there to control the Great Lakes fur trade. For the next four decades a beaver pelt was money — a large blanket cost three beavers, a musket ten to twenty. The trade collapsed locally in the 1820s when silk hats came into fashion and the animals thinned out, and iron and copper built the city that followed. But the craft stayed. By the 1950s more than a hundred furriers worked in Detroit.

Today there are a handful in the whole metro area. One of them is at 19132 Livernois Avenue, on the Avenue of Fashion, behind an appointment-only door, and it belongs to Grantston Bullard.

Bullard has been in leather and fur for more than forty years. His lines have been carried from Rodeo Drive to Manhattan and overseas. He has been covered in Women’s Wear Daily and Fur Age and in Ebony, Essence and Vogue. Nia Long has worn him, and Mary J. Blige, and Quincy Jones, and KRS-One. He is the first African American to serve on the corporate board of the Fur Information Council of America.

And for more than a quarter century, he says, Dittrich Furs was his client.

They sold his work. They built trunk shows and editorial campaigns around him with their own publicist. Hal Dittrich was among the first people in the industry to back the brand, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when backing it was a bet rather than a formality.

Bullard now becomes the legacy retailer for Dittrich Furs.

“What excites me most is Dittrich’s reputation in the state of Michigan,” said Bullard, “and the fact that a standard of excellence built over more than a century now passes to my brand.”

The transfer is not inventory. It is not ownership. It is a reputation and a customer base — several generations of Michigan families whose grandmothers bought at Dittrich, who now need a furrier.

What they will find on Livernois is a different kind of business from the one they left. Dittrich was a retailer with a shop attached. It bought from the world’s best houses and sold, and it did that at a standard almost nobody matched. Bullard does not buy. He makes.

“We don’t buy and sell,” said Bullard. “We make and sell.”

That distinction is the whole economic argument. Four decades of relationships with the largest producers of fur, leather, shearling, pony, cashmere and alpaca mean he sources hides directly. Removing the sales representative, the outside manufacturer and the third-party designer from the chain takes three margins out of the price and puts the fitting, the cutting and the finishing under one roof. The garment is made to the person. The person meets the designer.

He also works the other side of the industry: in-house designer at Aston Leather in Brooklyn, agent and head designer for the Montreal fur house Musi Furs, and a veteran of the design team at the Saga Design Centre outside Copenhagen, where the Scandinavian industry develops its techniques.

None of this was planned as symbolism, which is why it lands.

A London furrier opened a second-story shop near Trapper’s Alley in 1893. Fifty years later his descendants decided that a Black customer would come in the front. Eighty years after that, the standard they built passes to a Black designer working two miles northwest, on a commercial strip that Detroit’s Black middle class made into the Avenue of Fashion, in a house he owns and in garments he cuts himself.

Bullard has a name for what he does. The Furry Godfather. It is a joke, mostly.

The rest of it is not. Dittrich Furs was a case study in what happens when a business decides that the way you treat a person at the door is not a marketing decision but a manufacturing tolerance — a thing you hold to the thousandth, or you have not made the product. That is a hard standard to inherit. It is a harder one to pass along.

The door is open Tuesday through Saturday, eleven to seven.