“Today, we see a path, maybe between now and the end of 2016, to become a $2 billion brand in terms of retail footprint,” added Leavitt.

And we sat round and went ‘Yeah we could be a billion dollar brand, ok!” sitting at a table during the recession, trying to work out where we were going to go and what we were going to do. When Leavitt joined the company he and Deborah Lloyd, chief creative officer and president of Kate Spade New York, shared a belief that, as Lloyd put it, “the brand’s DNA was so much bigger than what was being done. 'We inherited a brand with great DNA and this rich heritage that had kind of just fallen off the radar, become a bit sleepy shall we say.' ' the guidance we have given is in the neighbourhood of $750 million to end this year,' said Craig Leavitt, who took the reins as chief executive of Kate Spade New York in 2008. What Liz Claiborne didn’t predict was that growth of existing lines of business was only the beginning and that, less than a decade later, Kate Spade would financially underpin Fifth & Pacific, the surviving vestige of the now defunct Liz Claiborne.įive years ago, the Kate Spade business achieved $126 million in net sales. Liz Claiborne’s motivation to buy was clear: “We feel there are substantial growth prospects,” Trudy Sullivan, president of Liz Claiborne Inc, said at the time, noting the opportunity “in both domestic and international wholesale accounts, as we optimise the penetration in upscale department and specialty stores.” In 2006, the brand’s eponymous founder elected to sell the company to Liz Claiborne Inc, now Fifth & Pacific.

In 2005, the brand, which then operated 19 retail stores and four outlets, recorded only $84 million dollars in net sales. As the decade continued, Kate Spade, once one of the most visible American accessories brands, headed inexorably towards the ignominy of irrelevance. Founded in 1993 by designer Kate Spade, the company produced practical and comparatively affordable handbags, which possessed significant cachet thanks to its positioning in the fashion press as an 'iconic American brand.'īut by the turn of the new millennium, the company’s initial momentum proved difficult to sustain. NEW YORK, United States - In the mid-to-late 1990s, women in New York seemed to fall into two camps: those carrying Kate Spade's chic, black nylon bags and those desperate to do so.

Kate spade mug life of the party