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Creative Directors: Is a Strong Personal Style Actually Bad?

K. Period.

Veteran

I've been thinking about the shakeup at JCrew and Jenna leaving. It is interesting to me that, while I and lots of other JCrew fans really enjoyed Jenna's personal style, that didn't translate into great sales for JCrew. It also made me think about Banana Republic's problems with Marissa Webb at their helm.

I'm beginning to believe that having someone in charge with a strong signature style isn't a good thing. Most of us will pick or choose a few elements of a person's style to add to our own. But most people won't slavishly follow that person's aesthetic. We all might love to dress with a few Jenna-type items or a few Marissa items (or Tori Burch items, or Anne Fontaine, or ....) but few of us dress head to toe in that person's clothing. So maybe a strong personal style works great for a smaller format company or a luxury company, but it isn't a great place to be for a mass retailer like JCrew who needs to sell to a range of purchasers in order to survive. What do you all think?

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14 replies

Latest reply was from texstyle

rachylou

Veteran

I'm thinking the thing is, to be a good creative director for a fashion company, your creative energies have to be directed towards style for OTHER people...

Suz

(website)

Veteran

I'm not sure. On another thread, a few people were speculating that while people are saying J. Crew's problems were related to design, they might actually have been quality -control issues more than design issues.

I think Jenna Lyons' style was sort of picked up and echoed in the culture (or perhaps it worked the other way -- perhaps she expressed the zeitgeist). I'm not thinking of particulars like big specs (although those are out there, for sure!) or any one kind of item. I'm thinking of the very modern tendency towards unusual outfit juxtaposition and pattern mixing. Those are hallmark J. Crew under Jenna Lyons, and the thing is, they are much wider than J. Crew.

I wonder what role fit played in J. Crew's issues, as well. Do the clothes fit a wide enough range of body types? If not, that will lead to troubles.

Anonymous

A professional creative has to be just that: putting together a program for her customer and advancing the company's style direction according to that company's mandate. That said, I suppose it's impossible to remove all aspects of your own aesthetic from your work (I'm thinking about makeup artists, hair stylists, etc).

Just as Rachy said above.......

I don't understand the JCrew issues to be about her, per se, any more than BR's were to do with MW's style preferences. They are missing the boat in terms of the distribution channel and replenishment systems, more than anything . Anyways - I absolute WANT a creative director to have a strong personal style - that to me seems part of that personality type. And you'd hope such a person is hired because much of their aesthetic and how it's formed jives with the direction of the company.

I love the business of fashion . I NEVER tire of these articles, and in another life, that would have been my dream career.

Suz

(website)

Veteran

LisaP, you'd have excelled at it.

And I was nodding, reading what you said. What good is a creative director with a bland and wishy washy aesthetic? Another way of looking at this might be to say that J. Lyons brought J. Crew up from a bad place (which I believe she did) but then they expected to maintain or surpass and sales began to falter instead -- possibly for entirely other reasons, who knows?

viva

Veteran

I am not sure I would use Jenna Lyons as an example for this theory. I don't know how long Marissa Webb was at BR, but Jenna was at JCrew for more than 20 years, which is a long career, and it was arguably during the most transitional time in retail in recent history. So I think JCrew's troubles were about a lot more than her strong personal viewpoint, to the extent that viewpoint even played a role. In fact, I think you could argue that JCrew gained a real foothold during that period in terms of fashion presence, although to be sure, spreadsheet failures as well. But in terms of personal style, I actually found Jenna's to be much more masculine or androgynous than JCrew's generally; I think she sold to a lot of preppy very feminine dressers who had no aspirations to dress like she did.

I would venture that JCrew's business issues had to do more with things like increased and varying competition (especially from the web), pressure to keep prices down (consumer "sale" mentality), inconsistent quality (resulting from price pressures), changing fashion appetites of older women (30-50), challenges trying to sell to a wider audience (ages 15-50), etc.

Gaylene

Veteran

i agree with Viva that J Crew's problems are mainly due to factors other than the aesthetic of its Creative Director. If anything, it was Jenna Lyon's strong personal style which probably kept J Crew going despite the company's other issues--and missteps--for the last few years. People complained about quality, but kept buying because of the Jenna-lead styling cues and outfit ideas.

I think a Creative Director with a strong personal style is both a plus--and a minus--for a company. People are attracted to the personality and the look--until they aren't. Once the novelty wears off, the longevity comes back to the fit and wearability of the clothes for the average person who is not employed in the fashion business. Jenna's clothes worked better than most in this area; having a 20-year run in a mass market clothing company is actually pretty remarkable.

In my opinion, J Crew's lackluster performance is more tied to its inability to manage quality expectations with the prices most of its customers are willing to pay. Retailers spent the last two decades turning customers into unrelenting bargain hunters and now don't know how to handle the creature they've created.

Suz

(website)

Veteran

Gaylene, preach it!!

I think you are exactly right.

K. Period.

Veteran

YES! I absolutely agree with that Gaylene. I'm in a professional services industry and the first thing that I learned out of school was "don't sell yourself based on low price." If that is the primary factor in differentiation, then you find customers and clients who value that over other things, like like long-term value, which depends mostly on quality with price taking a back seat. The Gap family of brands really messed that up. I won't buy anything there now without a 40% discount because they've trained me and all their other customers to expect it with their constant 40% off sales. Breaking free of that is going to be very difficult because I will always expect the current quality at 40% of the current price.

Really interesting thoughts, everyone. It's fun to think about the different dimensions of the fashion biz! Thanks for chiming in!

Jaime

(website)

Veteran

I think everyone on this thread has analyzed the issues with J.Crew beautifully. I like a strong creative presence at the head of a company, but it is only effective if that look resonates with the core audience and also reaches out to others. Which is a lot to ask in a mass retailer like J.Crew. Victoria Beckham is perfect for her role as her own brand's ambassador, but that is speaking to a narrower audience (so far - hello Target).

Anonymous

Oh yes , Vivian and Gaylene - you're absolutely right . Articles have also cited their out-of -date to-market channels (sorry for all the hyphens ) to be a factor in their decline . Same for the Gap group of stores . Jenna has been noted for being responsible for bringing the eclectic personal dressing style to the mainstream market , and boy did she do it in spades . I LOVE that aesthetic, and had JCrew worked for my body type, I'd have been their best customer .

K.M.

Veteran

I've been thinking a lot about the comments in this thread, and reading up news stories on J.Crew's woes dating back at least to 2015. I agree that the brand's issues were not related to Jenna Lyons. It's almost as if her exit is a symbolic gesture, a marketing move to "reset" the brand in customers' minds (despite Jenna's popularity).

At the same time, wasn't she responsible for both creative and financial decisions?

In any case, the more I read about her, the more I admire her story and personality (and her style, of course). I'm sad to see her go. I hope she ends up somewhere interesting where her fans can follow her.

kkards

Veteran

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0......html?_r=0
i'd posted this before, but its worth a read of you haven't already...its about the intersection of mass retail and fashion setting....
anyway, a big part of jcrew's issues are the massive debt that it has because of the deal that took it private back in 2011. without the debt, jcrew would be in a much stronger position and have a longer horizon to figure out how to weather the current sales down trend. but with the debt looming, the time horizon is short.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0.....ilemma.htm.
http://nypost.com/2017/04/14/j.....ring-debt/

Sal

Veteran

It is a hard time for fashion retailers full stop - I think as with the media, times have changed not altogether in a good way.

For the media there is such an appetite for fast news, free news online, and opinion based news...So traditional investigative slow news sold via print is a hard sell right now.

With fashion we expect quick turnaround of looks, constant sales, strong online service (returns etc). Margins must be being squeezed which is resulting in the lower quality, lack of sizes and possibility the "sameness" which we have discussed in other threads.

Some retailers do a great job of evolving their brand to retain customers, or attract new ones, others try and fail at this.

texstyle

(website)

Veteran

I was a fan of jcrew long before I had any idea whatsoever who Jenna was. In fact, I only became aware of her after joining here - 15+ years into her tenure at jcrew.

I really do believe it has a lot more to do with the underlying economy, the issue with staffing, the issue with manufacturing (too much demand worldwide = more mistakes, lower quality, less availability, higher production costs), etc.

But I will say in my own marketing work through many years I've had designers who "looked" very creative and were not and designers who looked very bland and were actually quite creative. So I don't imagine it has all that much to do with it other than the public's expectations of what the person should look like.