Mickey Drexler

But I think the...

And Mickey, Mickey Drexler is also an example of this.

Like, he's not a designer or creative director, but he could've been.

Like-

So we've got to

pause on that real quickly, and I think you'd be aware of this too, but in my generation of retailers, the amount of people that spent some time at Gap – And it's something, particularly in the Mickey Drexler years, that was such, I'm sure, an amazing experience for you.

And it has just created all these merchant leaders really across our industry that had to stop at the Gap.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah.

And, um, You know, I was a CEO that didn't have an MBA.

I would get asked that all the time, right? And I said, well, I have the MBA of life and I worked for nine years for Mickey Drexler at the heyday of the gap.

That was like getting an MBA in retail.

So I have an MBA of life.

And I do feel as an industry, to your point, the need is higher than ever because the thing that people don't understand when they get to the C-suite, and this is what I tell young people is it takes a village.

Like you, you'd get up there and you are not, I don't know.

In fact, I've met some of the probably, biggest I've worked with some of the people who are considered the biggest leaders and I've had opportunities but I mean you know because I know you talked to him too Adam like I got to work with Steve Jobs right and then I got to work with Bob Iger and you compare those two styles of leadership and you learn from everybody Mickey Drexler like that's the thing is that I feel like younger in your career and even into the middle part of your career, you just have to be a sponge and drink it in and learn and listen.

And I've told the young people too, you learn as much from the bad ones as you do from the good ones.

But Jack, we got three fantastic stories for today's T-Boy.

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That's the most important thing, right? Yeah.

For me, when I came out of business school in 84 and decided to go into retail, that was the year Mickey Drexler, he was 31 at the time, I think, or 32, had left A&S to go to the Gap to reinvent the Gap.

And that's what created the modern specialty store.

You know, specialty stores back in 84 were multi-brand, they weren't a private label.

One of these memorable moments.

Gap had great advertising.

And then the gap, Mickey Drexler turned out, joined the Apple board the year before I got there so we could have some retail experience on the board.

And Mickey's the one who said, you know, when you're creating a new store, just rent a warehouse and build it out.

This episode comes out next week with...

His name is Mickey Drexler.

You know Mickey?

Of course.

And at the time, they were looking, uh, I mean, so Madewell is, uh, is a brand that's owned by J.Crew and is underneath, like, the J.Crew umbrella.

And, uh, Mickey Drexler was the founder of, of J.Crew and kinda like the head merchant, and they called him, like, the Merchant Prince.

And he is such an incredible merchant, and, like, the really kinda the bread and the butter of their business is really, like, the store business, and they were really, um, and each, e- e-commerce is a big channel for them, but they were looking for somebody who had, you know, strong digital merchandising experience that could take what they were doing in store and thread that needle through in a compelling way, uh, to their e-commerce channel.

So they were looking for somebody to kind of, like, stand up si- kind of like the site merchandising, digital merchandising, um, side of their, their business.

Um, uh, so, so it was just this kind of everything was just so.

And what was interesting about that, I mean, I think some of this is just, that's just like merchandising 101, and if we were talking to, you know, some, one, s- one of these like longtime retail folks, Mickey Drexler, who of course was involved in Warby Parker, you know, they would say like, "That's just how you open a successful store." What was unusual, I think, is that this was a venture capital-backed web startup that was making a massive investment of, of money and time in physical real estate.

I think at the time that LA store opened, they only had like two other ...

They were sort of almost more like pop-up shops rather than full-

Well, my wife and I, career-wise, we were high-level executive assistants in New York City for 20 years.

She supported two different hedge fund CEOs, as well as the CEO at J.Crew, Mickey Drexler.

I supported the chairman of USA Films for a stint, and then supported the chief operating officer of Deutsche, which was a billion-dollar ad agency.

And I was also director of admin services for them, where I oversaw a team of about 12 assistants supporting about 60 executives.