Word: crewed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Drexler showed up at J. Crew in 2003, no one was doing much of anything. Sales had dropped four out of five years running; the company's majority owner, private-equity firm Texas Pacific Group, had changed CEOs like last season's fashions, three in five years. On Drexler's watch, J. Crew rebounded dramatically, earning $3.8 million in 2005, its first profit since 2000. On March 13, the company reported 2006 sales of $1.15 billion, up 21%, and a healthy profit of $77.8 million...
That turnaround is especially sweet for Drexler, who arrived at J. Crew with a down-and-out story of his own, having weathered a two-year slump and ouster at Gap, the company he built into a $14 billion icon over 19 years, most spent as president and ceo. Today, while Gap flails--in January it got rid of Paul Pressler, the CEO brought in to replace Drexler--J. Crew, with only 226 stores, is one of few companies in the overdeveloped specialty-apparel arena with the potential for real growth...
...Crew got here traces to Drexler's beloved p.a. system, a technology of choice for the hyper-communicative 62-year-old, who wears jeans and an untucked dress shirt to work and uses phrases like "You da man." Drexler, a Bronx Science grad who got an M.B.A., then followed his father, a button buyer, into the clothing business, is always in motion--hence the p.a. system he uses like a high school principal to bark out questions (Who shops online?) and commands (Don't forget to turn off the conference-room lights). On one of his first days, Drexler...
...Drexler has one. He has rebranded J. Crew as a store that sells basics like tank tops and Capris but also dares to inch up the food chain of craftsmanship (think cashmere sweaters), avoiding the race to the bottom by refusing to woo price-conscious consumers and sell ever cheaper clothes made with ever cheaper labor--a trend driven by discounters like Wal-Mart and Kohl's that has rippled to specialty shops. He has also taken away the fashion-by-engineering ethic that made J. Crew predictably boring...
...Crew's good news is evidence that Drexler's gift for knowing the right goods has returned. "There are perhaps four or five people in specialty retail who can, at a very high success rate, stand in a room of clothes and say, 'I like that--buy 10 of that. I like that--buy 10,000 of those,'" says Jim Coulter, the founding partner at Texas Pacific who recruited Drexler. Or, as J. Crew president Jeffrey Pfeifle says, "It's like allocating a portfolio--and Mickey is a great investor...