In the shopping world, Mickey Drexler is a legend. His pedigree is impressive, with stints at Gap, Macy's, Bloomingdale's and J.Crew. Next week, he's receiving the CFDA Founder's Award recognizing the body of his work so Style Dot Com caught up with the "man who changed the way America dressed," talking about his early days in fashion, his influence compared to Jenna Lyons's and what's next for the big American brand that has changed, but hasn't at the same time. Here are a couple highlights.
On the "Mickey Drexler Effect":
It’s simple. I think it’s in my mind, and it’s driven me my entire life, and it is to offer customers tasteful clothes at good value, meaning it lets the world, or more of the world, afford to dress well. When I was young in the business, I felt anything I wanted to buy personally and professionally was always too expensive. Gap was essentially the American wardrobe that was well-priced, and it was attractive and it was happy and it had great color and it has jeans, and I think we did the same with Old Navy. And I think we do the same with J.Crew at a much higher level, Madewell at another level. And I think that is essentially what I do.
On what's next for J.Crew:
But as for J.Crew, we are going international. We have a lot of stores in America, so we won’t be opening that many more stores [here]. Most importantly, our online business represents really important growth for us, and when we open up international stores, what happens in our online business in those countries, the business online immediately increases pretty dramatically. We are focusing in on more category domination—this is a merchandising thing. For example, online you will see us become an extremely important pant player. We are launching a big category next spring. I can’t tell you about that now, but it’s a category I’ve wanted to do for, like, four or five years.
Is he retiring anytime soon?:
[shakes his head]
Ok then.
