Catherine Moellering, 37
Best & Co., President
WHEN Catherine Moellering’s parents agreed to pay for her to attend Harvard University, they hoped she might become a doctor or lawyer, or at least an investment banker.Looking back, Ms. Moellering says, her folks should have known she would end up in retail. As a child, while her siblings were building spaceships out of Legos, she was using the blocks to construct a credit card imprint machine so she could play Store.
After college, Ms. Moellering rose through the retail ranks swiftly. Her first post was in the Bloomingdales' management training program in New York City, working in the men’s neckwear department. After Bloomie’s, she moved to San Francisco to work for the Gap on a fledgling project called Old Navy, staying long enough to watch it go from about 15 locations to 585.
In 2001, she joined Liz Claiborne Inc. to hone her management skills. There, she helped oversee a handful of brands, including then-white-hot DKNY, and served under the tutelage of retail all-stars like Angela Ahrendts, now the chief of Burberry.
“She’s bright [and] intellectually curious,” says Paul Charron, former chief executive of Liz Claiborne. “I think she is going to be influential on the New York stage for a long time to come.”
In her latest role, Ms. Moellering became president of posh childrenswear maker Best & Co. last year, just in time for the collapse in retail spending. The luxury line, a 130-year-old company, had already been losing money for years $10 million in 2007 alone. To stanch the bleeding, she pared the company’s vendor list to 20 from 300 and launched a wholesale division to lure less-affluent customers to the brand.
“I just fell in love with it,” Ms. Moellering says. Though sales last year were just over $10 million, she predicts big things for the company. “I think this is a $100 million brand.”
Jonah Staw, 33
Miss Matched Inc., Chief executive
WHEN Jonah Staw goes to work in the morning, he gets to sit at a desk made of a bunk bed and drink chocolate root beer from his office’s new soda fountain.“I realized I’d be most successful if I tap-danced on the table instead of being a conservative businessman,” says the co-founder of the LittleMissMatched brand of socks and accessories.
He’s always had an entrepreneurial spirit. At age 8, Mr. Staw started his own postcard company, drawing birdlike images on special paper to sell at local bookstores in Berkeley, Calif.
“As an 8-year-old, you’re rolling in dough if you can buy an extra pack of Now and Later candy,” he says.
After an early career as an architect he designed and built his own dream house and a stint at design firm Frog, Mr. Staw launched Miss Matched in 2004.
The quirky sock company has since expanded to pajamas and bedroom furniture and has an upcoming apparel line for tweens. Last year, revenue jumped 28% from 2007, to $32 million, and Mr. Staw says e-commerce sales grew 80%. The brand is carried at Macy’s, FAO Schwarz, Bed Bath & Beyond and at 3,000 specialty shops.
But that’s not the endgame. Despite the recession’s chilling effect on retail, Mr. Staw plans to open a store in Grand Central Terminal this spring and is searching for another location. The expansion is part of a business plan underwritten by private equity firm Catterton Partners.
“People get a good idea but are afraid to go forward on it,” says Doreen Lorenzo, chief executive of Frog and a former colleague of Mr. Staw’s. “Jonah left Frog to start this business, and that takes a lot of guts.”
Ed Rosenfeld, 33
Steve Madden Ltd., Chairman and chief executive
MICHIGAN native Ed Rosenfeld has been immersed in retail his whole life. Dinner table conversation while he was growing up revolved around the family business, specialty department store Jacobson’s, where he worked cleaning the bathrooms and operating the cash register. Just after graduating from Amherst College, he moved to New York and worked as a retail investment banker for Peter J. Solomon Co.When he wanted a change, he didn’t stray from his roots. Last year, he took the helm of footwear and accessories giant Steven Madden Ltd.
“I got tired of advising clients. I wanted to make decisions and actually live with them,” he says.
Heading a $457 million retailer during one of the worst periods in shopping history has certainly given Mr. Rosenfeld reason to make decisions.
The firm is distributing new bargain labels at J.C. Penney and Walmart to appeal to strapped consumers and has teamed with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen on a high-end shoe line that will hit shelves of retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue next month.
Though Mr. Rosenfeld could have used an easier first year, he has helped Madden weather the current economic storm better than most fashion firms. Same-store sales dipped only 0.5% for the fourth quarter, even as many other retailers have seen double-digit declines. In 2008, revenue grew 6%, though earnings dropped 21%.
Steve Madden, who founded the company nearly 20 years ago, says he relies on Mr. Rosenfeld’s steadiness.
“When things are unbelievable, he doesn’t jump up and down, and when things are bad, he does not panic,” says the footwear designer, comparing Mr. Rosenfeld’s calm to a “warm bath.”
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LINK
You're a DouchebagAccept it: your upscale lifestyle plants you squarely within the doucheoisie.
[EXCERPT]
THERE'S a fine line—a harrowingly fine one—between being the guy who sneeringly points out That Guy in public and actually being That Guy yourself. I am not, of course, suggesting that I’m anywhere near being a douchebag on the order of, say, bad-boy heir Brandon “Firecrotch” Davis. But a run-of-the-mill, everyday douchebag? Maybe sometimes. Possibly semi-often. The point is, the burgeoning class of people constantly calling other people douchebags are almost certainly members of the doucheoisie themselves. It’s the perfect insult for our times, because the insulter can congratulate himself for being provocative, slightly outré, a little extra nasty. But when it comes to wielding a word that originated on the playground, playground logic reigns: It takes one to know one. [...]
American Psycho: Business Card Scene (vid)
Douchebag: illustrated definition
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BOOK
A MERGER has taken place between Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea's books Depraved English and Insulting English. The result? Depraved and Insulting English. "Some of the entries are lascivious," the authors say, "some revolting, and others derogatory. A few are all of these things." This book will provide blissful browsing for anyone who ever got a fourth-grade thrill from looking up naughty words in the dictionary or, later, felt a frisson of pleasure from using obscure but racy words that few others understood. Many of the terms here--such as coprolagnia, cypripareunia, hybristophiliac, peotillomian, and sacofricosis--sound downright illicit. More intriguing are the words that sound perfectly acceptable, like blissom, feist, and plooky. But watch out for the plooky fellow who lets out a feist when he blissoms; he's actually a pimply guy who farts silently while copulating with ewes. Eeew. -Amazon.com__________________________________________________
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Sylvie Guillem
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