Almost every US president has been inaugurated in a Brooks Brothers suit. Civil War soldiers were outfitted in the brand. Hollywood costume designers consistently turned to Brooks Brothers’ archives, whether for The Great Gatsby’s double-breasted waistcoats, the slim 1960s tailoring in Mad Men or the wide lapels of ’80s power suits in Wall Street. But as casual Fridays—and then casual every days—chipped away at suit supremacy, comfort replaced custom tailoring. After a couple of failed ownership changes, the 202-year-old company finally sought [Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection] soon after the pandemic shut down offices, obviating the need for pants, let alone sport coats. The only one celebrating? Jamie Salter, ready to pounce on the iconic retailer for a fire-sale price, adding it to his portfolio of famous dead brands.
Since its start in 2010, Salter’s Authentic Brands Group LLC had been stalking troubled retailers and picking through their corporate carcasses for one valuable thing: their name. By the time Salter subsumed Brooks Brothers, he’d already bought Aeropostale, Barneys New York, Forever 21, Frye, Jones New York, Nine West and Volcom, disassembling and resurrecting them into hundreds of products. It was a [business model] with little overhead: Authentic purchases a store chain’s intellectual property, usually for somewhere in the low-mid nine figures, and finds contractors to do the design, manufacturing and pretty much everything else but marketing. That way it gets brands that every shopper knows without taking on all the debt, rent and headcount that sank said brands. By the end of the pandemic, Authentic had devoured a mall’s worth of zombie brands, including Eddie Bauer, Izod, Lucky Brand, Van Heusen and part of JCPenney.
The feast was years in the making. Well before Covid-19 decimated foot traffic and Amazon.com seduced shoppers, the private equity industry had ravaged retail through leveraged buyouts that left many too heavily indebted and eventually needing to file for bankruptcy. “People thought the value of a bankrupt brand was zero,” Salter says. “But why would it be zero? So I came up with a strategy to put a value on it.”