Millard Drexler's To Do list: Leave the Gap, join J. Crew.
Millard Drexler, who "was credited with a retailing revolution: creating a store that sold only its own private- label merchandise,"and who made "the store a brand, and the brand a store," has now joined J. Crew as CEO soon after being forced to resign as CEO of the Gap to make way for a senior Disney Theme Parks executive.
According to this New York Times story (registration required) J. Crew had almost three-quarters of a billion dollars in revenue last year and has gone from being a family-run business (founded by Arthur Cinander) to being bought by San Francisco-based Texas Pacific Group that's famous for profitable turnarounds in the last five years.
J. Crew, which began as a catalog merchant, now has 195 stores, including 43 factory outlets. The stores account for 64 percent of the business, with catalog and Internet sales making up the rest.
...Mr. Drexler, who will also become chairman, is investing $10 million of his own money in J. Crew, which is not publicly traded. Analysts hailed his arrival yesterday as a coup for the company — whether he brought his checkbook or not. He will succeed the current chief executive, Ken Pilot, who once worked under Mr. Drexler at Gap and was considered to be doing a good job in turning around J. Crew for Texas Pacific, which bought 60 percent of the company in 1997. "It was just this unusual circumstance to be able to get someone of Mickey's caliber," said Owen Blicksilver, a spokesman for J. Crew, sidestepping the issue of who approached whom. "It grew out of a mutual interest," he said.