Blake Nordstrom, who headed a trio of brothers that ran the luxury apparel store chain that their Swedish-American family founded has died at 58. He died in Seattle on 2 January, the company said in a statement, less than a month after disclosing he was undergoing chemotherapy for a treatable form of lymphoma.

Nordstrom was sole president of Seattle-based Nordstrom Inc. for 15 years, beginning in 2000. In 2015, the company named his brothers, Peter and Erik, as co-presidents in charge of the chain's brick-and-mortar stores and nordstrom.com unit, respectively. Blake Nordstrom remained the public face of the company for shareholders in the absence of any chief executive officer.

Like his brothers, Nordstrom spent his adult life at the company, starting as someone who swept floors and restocked shelves with shoes, the sole product offered at its founding in 1901. Blake Nordstrom's principal challenge as president was to counter declining sales at its large, luxurious mall stores in the face of online competition. In charge of the company's chain of discount stores, called Nordstrom Rack, he increased profitability at that unit right after his promotion and helped implement innovative revenue-increasing ideas; one of these was to open small stores, called Nordstrom Local.

In 2018, the Harvard Business Review named Blake Nordstrom, who reported only to a non-executive chairman, one of the 100 best performing chief executives, as it had for several years.

Blake Willard Nordstrom was born Oct. 4, 1960, in Washington, DC, and was the great grandson of Nordstrom founder John W. Nordstrom.

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