I spent my last two years as a W2 employee working for Tapestry, the holding company that owns Coach and Kate Spade (and, when I was working there, Stuart Weitzman).
In this role I was exposed to the marketing, merchandising and eCom operations strategies and tactics for all three brands. And I learned a lot, both good and bad.
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As my first day approached, I prepared to have my mind blown by the sheer level of excellence I was about to encounter.
This was it. 9 figure brands. I was about to learn the “secrets” that helped Coach and Kate Spade thrive* while the brands I once worked for continued to struggle.
The reality was…more complicated. The Tapestry brands did some things well, and some things really, really badly. Here is a summary of the lessons and anti-lessons I learned in my time at Tapestry:
Good: Operational Excellence
The smaller fashion brands I worked with before Tapestry would burn their operational energy on table stakes nonsense that was not a way to differentiate or win.
For example: not just one, but two of my former employers let junior employees design the process for uploading product data to the website.
For both brands, the resulting process was convoluted, easy to mess up, and incredibly time consuming. Both of these brands were launching dozens of new products per month–days of time wasted.
Inevitably, the junior employee who owned the process would resign every six to nine months, throwing the entire team into disarray and diverting everyone’s resources.
Tapestry took a much smarter approach, ruthlessly outsourcing table stakes ops work to offshore consultants. A team in India did our product uploads. Another team in India maintained our website’s code base. A US-based agency handled email coding and scheduling.
Marketing and eCommerce employees rarely did “hands on keyboard work”. There are drawbacks to this approach, but it allows the highest paid employees to focus on work that the organization perceives as high leverage.
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Good: Strategic Merchandising
A nine figure brand can’t simply pop a new product on the website and expect revenue to soar. A successful product launch–one that contributes meaningfully to top line growth–must be engineered. Coach had this down to a science:
- Customer insights work to deeply understand five core buyer personas. These personas were based on sense of style, psychological motivation and tangible needs–not just demographics.
- Market research to understand trending bag shapes and the most important functional attributes that consumers require in their handbags.
- A disciplined price architecture and line plan to ensure balance between price points and style families.
- A marketing machine to shove the new styles down the throats of young millennials and gen Z's across digital channels
Product development was anything but “design driven”, although the design was good. Every new product launch was a carefully calculated chess move.
Good: Talent Acquisition
Obviously, Tapestry had access to a broad pool of talent because its brands were prestigious, aspirational and well known. But they also paid above market–top of market for the New York fashion industry, and comparable to mid-tier tech companies (obviously lower than FAANG).
I got a 40% salary increase moving from Tibi to Tapestry, and they increased my salary again in my first 12 months because it was below the company pay band for the position.
I was seriously impressed. Most fashion brands cheap out here majorly, especially the big luxury houses (because they can–people will work for the employee discount).
The level of talent in the company reflected this approach. There were some incredibly smart people at Tapestry, especially the junior employees.
Bad: Digital Marketing
Burn. I know. But…99% of the folks I worked with on the brand digital marketing teams had no idea what incrementality meant.
They were running paid digital based on traffic forecasting. New and repeat customer orders had the same ROAS target. No one understood that new customers were a requirement for growth.
Basically, I encountered the same outdated approach to digital marketing that I dealt with at all my other employers up to that point.
Brands with global awareness don’t have to be sticklers for aMER–sales growth does not live and die by Meta ads performance. But putting that aside, there were hundreds of thousands of dollars being wasted on non-incremental ad spend.
It was something that my team tried to address, but there was really no tangible reason for anyone to change. If sales go up and quarterly goals are met, people get bonuses. Why complicate things?
Bad: Brand Repositioning & Evolution
The thesis of creating Tapestry was supposed to be twofold: the brands would be more profitable with some shared/optimized cost centers, and Coach could apply its winning marketing and merchandising playbook to the other two brands.
That didn’t work. Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade struggled to grow consistently, basically from the time each brand was acquired.
Coach succeeded because their market positioning was fundamentally strong–the accessible but covetable alternative to Euro luxury brands. Kate Spade and Stuart Weitzman struggled to find this same footing, so no amount of data-backed merchandising wizardry could help.
Additionally…the brand teams remained incredibly independent of each other, and suspicious of each other, and suspicious of the Tapestry mother ship. So few of the “best practices” honed at coach were thoroughly applied elsewhere.
Bad: Brand Integration
In business school, I learned that company mergers have a very high failure rate. When one company bids to buy another, the price they're willing to pay is based on two assumptions:
- "Synergies"–they'll be able to share functions like HR and accounting, cut jobs, and lower costs
- Future growth of the acquisition target, which will bolt on billions of revenue to the acquirer's bottom line
Tapestry really struggled with both of these. We discussed #2 in the last point; now I'm going to cover #1.
The goal of my team was to identify shared marketing functions that could be removed from the brand teams and centralized.
One example: why did we need three different teams managing various paid ads channels (Google, Meta, affiliate) for each brand? Especially when all three brands used the same agency.
Only one problem with this strategy: no one wants to lose their job, or their "power" in the form of number of direct reports managed.
In the end, we wound up with more head count in most areas: a Tapestry team of "experts" who were "managing the ops" and a brand team who were "managing the brand aspects of the channel".
I'm sure the same drama played out in other areas where integration was attempted. Fast forward to today: Stuart Weitzman was divested (for a big loss) and there are rumors that Kate Spade is next.
*only Coach was thriving, and that continues to be the case