J.Crew thought their men’s business was
considered irrelevant and wanted to rebrand it. At the time [2007-08] there
were a lot of blogs about menswear that gave a lot of smaller brands an
outsized footprint and large reach. J.Crew was making great products, they had
amazing attention to detail, they just weren’t part of the conversation. Mickey
Drexler, the CEO, asked what they could do to remedy that: Was it a national
campaign or rethinking their catalogue? Our answer was a small space with no
overt branding that was outside the retail corridor. We believed the Liquor
Store had the perfect makings to recontextualize J.Crew menswear. The rent was
half of what a billboard in Tribeca would cost. For us it was a big lesson:
There is more than one way to rebrand a company. Offering something
experiential and acting smaller reverberates on a much larger scale.
