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EXCLUSIVE: Draper James Names New CEO, Maps Out Expansion Plans Under Consortium
Jean E. Palmieri
12 min read
The term “lifestyle brand” has become one of the most overused in the fashion business. But when it comes to Draper James, the description is accurate.
Since its launch in 2015 as a Southern-influenced women’s apparel brand founded by Reese Witherspoon, the company has expanded into pet products, outdoor furniture, crafts, bedding and gifts.
Now Draper James has brought an industry veteran on board to accelerate its growth. Jeannie Yoo, who has 15 years of experience at Coach, Michael Kors and, most recently, Adam Lippes, joined Oct. 15 as chief executive officer. She will take the reins from Erin Moennich, who will exit the brand at the end of the month.
Jeannie Yoo
In addition to Yoo, the Draper James team added Lauren Frohlinger, vice president of merchandising, and Piper Parsley, vice president of brand marketing and e-commerce. Kathryn Sukey continues as head of design and Witherspoon, who still owns a minority stake, is on the board of directors and remains active in the brand.
These changes come just over a year after the company was purchased by Consortium Brand Partners, a fund manager and brand builder founded by three former Marquee Brands executives — Cory Baker, Michael DeVirgilio and Jonathan Greller. Draper James was the first acquisition for Consortium, which was created in 2022. Since then it has also purchased Outdoor Voices.
With both of these brands, Consortium has mapped out a similar game plan: add categories, open stores and explore international distribution. Because it has controlled Draper James for a longer period of time — Outdoor Voices was purchased in June of this year and Draper James in August 2023 — the strategy for Draper James is further along.
“We’re pretty active in our M&A,” said DeVirgilio. “So we meet very talented, experienced people as part of our network. When the opportunity came and this job opened up, we knew Jeannie was the right person for the job.”
Dialed Into Digital
Yoo has a varied background that appealed to the Consortium team. Her experience runs the gamut from product development and retail to digital.
“Digital and direct-to-consumer is my wheelhouse,” Yoo said in an interview at the Draper James offices in New York. She started at Adam Lippes on the DTC side — growing it to half of the business in her six-year tenure — and opened the company’s first flagship. At Coach, where she spent nearly five years, she oversaw the digital business for both the outlets and the full-price business.
“What excites me about Draper James is our potential to grow and scale internationally,” she said. “And here in North America, we have tremendous unlocks as well with retail and e-commerce. There’s so much passion for this brand that it feels palpable whether you’re in the stores or the office.”
Yoo said that what helped seal the deal for her is that Draper James was founded by Witherspoon. “I think the storytelling is so authentic, and the community that Reese and the team have built is just incredible,” she said. “I knew in my next chapter that I wanted to work for a brand that was woman-founded. But it’s not just that. Reese wants to create a legacy brand that honors her grandparents.”
Draper James is named for Witherspoon’s grandparents and targets “women who wanted clothes and accessories that were special but not precious, easy to put together and always polished,” as the New Orleans-born actress describes it in the foreword of the company’s new holiday catalog. “A classic American style, steeped in Southern charm, feminine and pretty.”
Looks from the Draper James holiday collection.
No surprise then that the brand is strongest in the South, where it operates three stores: two in Nashville and one in Lexington, Ky.
DeVirgilio said the Nashville flagship in the 12 South neighborhood has experienced strong sales of late.
“We were trailblazers,” said Parsley. “The neighborhood wasn’t half as hot when we first got there, but it’s really picked up.” She said the store’s cabana striped wall, a signature of Draper James, has emerged as a popular Instagram photo spot and the design and decor of the store really immerses visitors in the Draper James aesthetic.
Rolling Out Retail
The strong performance of that store gives Consortium the confidence to open more stores. Next up is Charleston, S.C., where it hopes to open a store by the spring or summer of next year. The brand recently installed a pop-up there, inside of Sewing Down South, a store co-owned by Craig Conover, one of the hosts of Bravo’s “Southern Charm” show. “It was extremely successful,” Parsley said. “We’re really excited to be able to eventually call Charleston home. But that’s just the beginning.”
She said the company has opened a series of pop-ups around the U.S. to gauge interest from customers in different cities. “We partnered with Hilton’s Graduate Hotels this year for four mini pop-ups during big SEC football weekends,” Parsley said. “The first one was Ole Miss in Oxford, then we did Columbia, and Fayetteville in Arkansas last week. Auburn, Ala., is next month. It’s a nice way to gauge interest and see who the customer is, and what they respond to. That’s been a strategy of ours.”
But Draper James’s reach extends beyond the South, they said. New England is also a strong market for the brand. “That customer really loves a good monogram moment,” Parsley said.
Greller added: “When you look at our e-commerce business, it follows a U shape, so from Northern California through Texas, Florida and even into Connecticut. There’s an ability to go where the opportunities are and Jeannie and her team will look at that for sure.”
Wholesale also plays a role in Draper James. The brand has a strong business with Kohl’s, which has carried the the more-affordably priced Draper James at Kohl’s apparel collection since 2022.
Before the end of 2024, the company’s new pet collection, which debuted earlier this year, will be offered at Petco. And next March the fabrics, crafts and outdoor collections will be offered at Joann Stores.
Yoo said that as Draper James expands beyond apparel, the message needs to be consistent and stay “true to the brand’s DNA, which is hospitality, Southern charm and graciousness.”
That message also resonates outside the U.S., they said. Mexico, Australia and the European Union are among the markets the company has identified as its first targets.
“We have a lot of interest from partners that are outside the United States,” said Greller. “I can’t provide the name yet, but we will be signing a license for a holiday of ’25 launch in the U.K.”
Connecting With Consumers
Right now, the brand’s most popular category is dresses, but other non-apparel products have also found fans, Parsley said. “Our customer index is high in decor — she loves to decorate for the holidays. She truly does love to shop the full lifestyle. We saw that initially with the home and the bedding launch when she was super excited to dress her house in Draper.”
Greller said that when Consortium acquired the brand, 98 percent of the sales were in apparel. But while sales within clothing are still projected to grow, their overall percentage will shrink as childrenswear, fabric, outdoor furniture and other product categories pick up steam.
Many of those categories are included in the company’s first catalog that was mailed out last week. It features a foreword from Witherspoon, her mother’s biscuit recipe and a newly launched cashmere sweater program — V-necks are $178 and crewnecks are $168 — that is expected to become a key gift for holiday.
The executive team declined to provide a volume figure for Draper James but said they have high hopes to further expand the company. “We’re brand accelerators,” Greller said. And that means signing licenses when it makes sense, such as with sleepwear, as well as operating stores and running e-commerce businesses. “We’re not just a licensing portfolio company.”
Baker added: “This brand began with Reese’s vision and Reese’s money. She wasn’t gifted equity like a lot of celebrities. This is something intrinsically meaningful for her, in terms of its accessibility to women, the beauty, the elegance, the way of creating beautiful grace, inspired by Southern hospitality, without being overly sexualized. These were things that were really important, that she saw as a white space in the market. And so when we talk about category extensions, it doesn’t really matter if it’s licensing or whether we do it ourselves. The point that we’re focused on is ensuring that Draper James is reaching customers where they want to be.”
And that doesn’t involve “label slapping” the name on any and all products to make a buck. “We’re trying to be good stewards of the brand,” DeVirgilio said.
Buying and Building
Consortium is one of the newer players in the brand management business, joining Authentic Brands Group, WHP Global, Bluestar and the founders’ former company, Marquee.
The three men left Marquee in 2021 and immediately started brainstorming about the evolution of the brand management business model, which they found limiting. “There’s often a lack of alignment between the retailers, brands, licensees, manufacturers and international platform partners,” Baker said. “The economics are not always aligned and licensees often feel like they’re renting brands and getting beaten up over guaranteed minimum royalties.”
So they set out to create a different structure where investors were both both strategic and institutional. Traditionally, institutional investors such as Ares, Leonard Green and even their old partners at Marquee, Neuberger Berman, “are great for dry powder and for capital to do deals, but they can’t actually help you grow your brands,” Baker explained. “So we wanted to create an opportunity and a platform where we could mix institutional investors with strategic investors to really help grow things together.
“We love the brand management model — it’s asset light and the financial and institutional investors seem to really like this model. So they’ll be more capital coming in. We like it too. But it can also be very narrow in the sense that some of the groups that are out there will only do things that are 100 percent royalty revenue. There’s an allergic reaction to something that has a vertical operations component to it. That means you’re leaving a lot of great brands out there without a better home.”
Baker said Consortium employs a team of operators and retailers and has the skills to build brands by using “smart operations and efficiencies. But that doesn’t mean 100 percent conversion to royalty revenue. If you’re so wedded to that model, you’re leaving money on the table.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel. It’s thinking about ways we can do it with a broader aperture, and a more strategic real story.”
DeVirgilio said that other firms tend to gravitate toward distressed brands while Consortium concentrates more on what it views as businesses with growth opportunities or those that “need that extra jet fuel.”
Investing to Grow
They used Outdoor Voices as an example. Although the business faced numerous financial challenges, internal management rifts, excess inventory in off-price channels, cash flow issues, a revolving door of executives and store closures, “the consumer doesn’t see it as depressed,” DeVirgilio said. “Under a traditional brand management structure, this would not be a candidate.” But Consortium is prepared to invest in Outdoor Voices to bring it back to its glory days.
“It’s about buying companies with a strong brand voice because what we do is build brands,” Greller said.
Baker added: “We have to put in time and money into this brand, and we will. Our job is to re-engage [the consumer] with good product in authentic way.”
Outdoor Voices still operates an e-commerce site and the team in place now is designing fresh product for spring ’25, Greller said. “Outdoor Voices had a tremendous community and all these community events” that originated from its stores, Greller explained. So getting back into physical retail is definitely in the plans. “We’re hoping to open at least one store by holiday or in spring ’25,” Greller said. “We think brick-and-mortar is very much part of our future.” Wholesale is also an option down the line.
What’s next for Consortium?
“There are brand management companies out there that buy dead brands, and that’s not a bad strategy,” Baker said. “It’s just not one we want to do.”
Instead, Consortium will scour the market for acquisitions with growth potential, but not just in apparel or footwear.
“We’re category agnostic,” said DeVirgilio, adding that Consortium looks at companies in a variety of industries including food and beverage “as long as it’s a consumer-facing product.” Baker interjected: “We can get equally excited about kitchen electrics as couture fashion.”
Baker summed up Consortium’s strategy this way: “We serve at the pleasure of our investors and our goal is twofold: to deliver value for investors and leave brands better and stronger than how we found them. That may sound cliche, but it’s as simple as that.”
Ultimately, they visualize Consortium as a business with around 10 brands under its existing funds structure. Baker said: “If you have a portfolio of too many brands, it starts to be like the old lady with 30 cats — she loves them all but only five get fed a week.”
