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December 16, 2024
Can Lord & Taylor Work as a Licensed Brand?
Lord & Taylor, under new ownership, is being relaunched as a licensed brand to be hopefully sold at once-competing stores as well as on its own website.
“My idea is to put all these master manufacturers behind the brand to create many different products — womenswear, special occasion dresses, suiting, small leather goods, footwear, and many other categories,” Sina Yenel, chief brand and strategy officer of Regal Brands Global, told The Business of Fashion.
In September, Regal Brands Global, consisting of a consortium of anonymous buyers, acquired Lord & Taylor’s intellectual property following a default by its previous owner, Saadia Group.
The new owners are seeking to capitalize on the nearly 200-year-old department store’s legacy, with Lord & Taylor’s relaunched website proclaiming the chain’s “The Signature of American Style” tagline that arrived soon after its 1983 acquisition by May Department Stores.
The new owners also brought back Lord & Taylor’s sweeping signature logo originally forged in the 1920s by former president Dorothy Shaver, who earned the title “First Lady of Retailing” for bringing innovations, including shop-in-shops and animated holiday window displays, to retail. Saadia Group simplified the logo to a Helvetica font in 2022, which Yenel said was “the biggest betrayal of the brand.”
“The Icon Returns,” Lord & Taylor’s revamped website proclaims. “We are delighted to bring back our beloved logo and are dedicated to restoring Lord & Taylor’s reputation for exceptional customer service and quality. Our focus will be on introducing new products under the iconic Lord & Taylor signature logo.”
The website, set to relaunch in early 2025, will initially feature a luxury category, a Lord & Taylor heritage section, a section dedicated to dresses, and a Gen Z-focused section offering edgier but affordable looks. Yenel told WWD, “Our main focus is to launch the website with very well-known brand names, and to position the Lord & Taylor heritage products next to these brands.”
Contrary to some published reports, the website won’t focus on off-price selling and won’t be a marketplace, Yenel told Retail Dive.
At the same time, Regal Brands Global is in active discussions with potential licensing partners to develop Lord & Taylor-branded products across categories that are expected to be sold on its website, as well as to third-party retailers, beginning in early 2025.
Lord & Taylor has no current plans to reopen stores, with the last one closed in 2021. Yenel sees a quicker path to re-establishing the brand via wholesale partnerships, including shops-in-shops or strategic pop-ups. Though his “dream down the road is to open a Lord & Taylor store, his first priority is to ‘conquer the online presence,’” according to WWD.
The brand will seek to open distribution at retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom but is not restricting distribution to upscale channels. Yenel told Business of Fashion, “We’re telling our licensees that we’re not limiting them on distribution. We dictate the quality. Price points will vary but we don’t want to be at the bottom.”
Past attempts to revive liquidated retailers have largely failed. However, Barneys New York, which shuttered its locations in 2019, has returned as an in-store shop inside Saks Fifth Ave.’s Manhattan flagship and stores in Greenwich, Connecticut. It also has licensed stores in Japan.
Toys“R”Us, which filed for liquidation in 2018, has found some success in forming partnerships and licenses with third-party retailers. Bed Bath & Beyond, which closed all of its locations in 2023, recently formed partnerships with Kirkland’s and Container Store in its attempt to return to physical retail.
Discussion Questions
Does Lord & Taylor have the cachet and familiarity to draw enough interest as a wholesale brand?
What will be the keys to its success as it develops the Lord & Taylor brand across categories via licensed partners?
Poll
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Mark Ryski
Founder, CEO & Author, HeadCount Corporation
Cathy Hotka
Principal, Cathy Hotka & Associates
Jeff Sward
Founding Partner, Merchandising Metrics
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After Lord & Taylor exited, no brand showed up to take its place. L&T was a successful curation of upper-middle-class brands, great accessories, and beautiful boxes to use when giving a gift. There’s a yawning void where L&T used to be. I’ll bet on it.
Lord & Taylor had more owners, investors, and combinations of parent companies than anyone could recall, and in nearly all cases, the brand needed to be rescued and saved. Not withstanding the history of the brand is quite extensive and prestigious.
In order to evaluate the brand’s value in modern times, I will examine it as merely a May Company store from 1986 to 2006, and as a Federated Stores company thereafter, until the brand ceased to exist, at least in brick and martyr.
There is still a lot of doubt in my mind about Lord & Taylor’s ability to transition into a wholesale brand. Lord & Taylor suffered a crisis of identity after becoming a subsidiary of May Co. Despite being more premium than May stores, the brand’s positioning did not match that of upscale competitors like Sacks or Neiman Marcus, and probably not even Nordstrom.
Lord & Taylor’s inventory differed little from May Co.’s store inventory, and its image was less premium than Nordstrom’s. There was always a feeling that Lord & Taylor was merely, “also a May Company store.”
The brand itself, even with it’s ancient history, is probably not strong enough, nor even recognizable enough to stand on its own. Keep in mind that after it was acquired by Maye Company, Lord & Taylor because a composite of several regional brands, each, which probably had more brand equity on their own.
It was never a Federated brand …at least beyond the short time it took to divest it. The “brick and martyr” may be the perfect Freudian remark, as LT certainly became expendable once Saks was acquired (by what’s now HBC.)
The market is extremely crowded, and consumers are trading down. Dusting off a brand like Lord & Taylor from antiquity and attempting to make it relevant in the world of Temu and Shein feels like a big stretch. What can they offer that consumers can’t already find at countless other retailers? Sorry, but bringing back an old logo—even a once-iconic one—just isn’t going to cut it.
This sounds like a long shot. I arrive at that conclusion by asking myself the question, “Does anybody under the age of 50 still have a soft spot of ANY of the regional department stores?” No question that Lord & Taylor was revered in its day. So was Marshall Field’s, and Filene’s, and Burdines, and Foleys, and Bullock’s (my alma Mater), and, and, and. The relationship customers had with their regional department store was based on the in-store experience. Those were relationships developed long before the rise of the internet and e-commerce. (And the One Day Sale, I might add.) Will those memories, will that Brand Promise translate into a present day differentiated product offering? I think it’s a long shot even for boomers. And maybe even a non-starter for folks under 30. And now I’ll say…I hope I’m wrong. It would be great if there was an evolved version of some of the regional department stores that could live on.
I was going to write a positive statement about the L&T Brand. You raise such a good point that I’ve changed my mind. Hard no.
God knows I want this to succeed – certainly far more than the usual losers RW parades before us – but…
But what, exactly, is being revived? None of the actual stores are returning…are some of the buyers? Other employees? The whole point of the concept of the “Woodsman’s ax” is that there is some thread of continuity (however transitory): this seems to just be (attempting) a borrowing of a heritage; I don’t know that the name (trademark) itself really counts as a thread.
My question here is: what is Lord & Taylor bringing to the market that doesn’t exist already? Heaven knows, the landscape is crowded with a plethora of brands, and many stores – like Macy’s – are now developing more of their own labels to differentiate. While I think Lord & Taylor was highly regarded as a department store, this doesn’t automatically lend it the authority to start launching a clothing brand.
The Lord & Taylor which lives in people’s memories was a well curated selection of the best brands for conservative, risk averse, well dressed customers. Always appropriate, safely tasteful and the best assortment of dresses in the market. Now, to ask ourselves, is there meaningful demand for this image any longer?
Well they have to do something, given that the traditional department store business is all but dead. I give this very low odds to succeed however, I mean, it is basically a brand equity play. As in “how much goodwill do you put on the balance sheet and is that goodwill revenue generating as opposed to just an accounting entry.?”
I don’t see it.
I can see Lord and Taylor as a department store private brand but how would it position itself differently from any of the other department store private brands out there. Alternatively, to gain credibility as a desirable national brand it would need an enormous spend and significant repositioning. I can see it gaining traction potentially in an off-price setting but not sure if there would be enough upside.