Brand management started out as an idea — strip a fashion business down to its intellectual property and build it back up in an “asset light” manner, focusing on marketing while farming out production and much of the design to licensees.
But the approach was profitable enough that it became a mini sector, growing fast with the likes of Authentic Brands Group, WHP Global and Marquee at the fore.
And, now, it’s an ecosystem.
Witness Gordon Brothers’ recent sale of Laura Ashley to Marquee.
Gordon Brothers — which is mostly known as a liquidator that steps in at the end to do the out-of-business sale — bought Laura Ashley out of administration in 2020, picking up just the intellectual property.
The company took the brand, founded in 1953, and retooled it over four years, building it to $750 million in annual retail sales across 80 countries with the help of 100 or so partners.
Carolyn D’Angelo, senior managing director, brand operations at Gordon Brothers, joined the company in 2021 and was president of Laura Ashley when it was sold to Marquee.
“We had decided that we were going to relaunch this in the U.K. and rightfully so because the brand was born in the U.K., it’s a Heritage U.K. brand,” D’Angelo said. “And the partnership that was established with Next in the U.K. to launch shop-in-shops as well as e-comm was a really smart move on Gordon Brothers’ part.
“So we had a retail partner in place,” she said. “We then started to talk to the suppliers that were supplying the stores about becoming licensees. And so many of the original suppliers of product to the Laura Ashley stores were turned into licensees.”
D’Angelo then sought to build the business off that base, going out to other territories and product categories.
That included going after the home improvement/DIY world with Laura Ashley tile and Laura Ashley wallpaper and then, last year, getting the brand back into fashion.
“It came with an immense archive of pattern print and product,” D’Angelo said. “We had a lot of tools to work with in terms of the design aesthetic and updating the design aesthetic, but also in the archive we discovered an amazing array of fashion. Laura had been in the fashion business starting in the ’60s, and we knew that we wanted to relaunch fashion and all the surrounding parts of fashion, whether it’s jewelry and handbags.”
Gordon Brothers took Laura Ashley, pushed it through the brand management transformation and left enough on the table — including a big opportunity to expand in the U.S. — for Marquee.
“Our model is buy and sell,” D’Angelo said. “So at some point in the lifestyle cycle of a brand that we own, we will sell it. That is just the nature of Gordon Brothers and what our niche is in the market.”
With the brand management biggies all looking to keep buying and so many brands looking for a way to get back to growth, the niche seems like a good one for an expanding ecosystem.
D’Angelo said her group has the ability to work on three or four brands at a time and currently owns the German electronics brand Telefunken as well as Nicole Miller.
Gordon Brothers was a lender to Nicole Miller and ended up buying the company in 2022.
“We have added men’s to the [Nicole Miller] portfolio, we are introducing and have introduced home,” she said. “When we bought it, it had, Nicole was still making product, she was still making dresses and sportswear, and we now have several licensees doing that for us. And we have worked on distributing Nicole in new places. Last year, we launched Nicole by Nicole Miller on QVC. We just launched our dresses at Kohl’s.”
As the brand continues to grow, it grows closer to its next chapter.
