Tamara Mellon Said to Be Looking to Buy Back Jimmy Choo
Tamara Mellon is feeling nostalgic — and thinking about bringing her Jimmy Choo past back into her present.
Mellon, who co-founded the business in 1996 with Mr. Jimmy Choo, is among the players looking to buy the brand from Capri Holdings, according to three sources familiar with the process.
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While Mellon helped catapult Jimmy Choo and its sky-high heels into the zeitgeist, the business has been struggling lately as casual styles have become more popular.
A new owner would be nothing new to the business. Jimmy Choo passed through a number of different hands before Michael Kors Holdings bought the company for 898 million pounds in 2017. That was part of an acquisition push that would also see the company buy Versace and adopt the name Capri.
But the power of a portfolio was not quite enough for Capri, which agreed to sell itself to Coach-parent Tapestry Inc. only to see that buyout tripped up by regulators last year.
Now Capri, which reports its third-quarter results on Wednesday, is recalibrating and has been working with Barclays to sell off both Versace and Jimmy Choo.
While it’s Versace that has been garnering most of the interest in that process, Jimmy Choo has actually had the stronger business lately.
Jimmy Choo’s revenues for the six months ended Sept. 28 slipped 0.6 percent to $313 million, producing an operating loss of $1 million. (Versace’s revenues dropped 22.1 percent to $420 million with a $20 million operating loss for the six months).
Neither Capri nor Barclays responded to requests for comment or have acknowledged the sale process, which was first reported by WWD in December.
In November, after the Tapestry deal fell through, Capri chairman and chief executive officer John Idol laid out his vision for Jimmy Choo and looked back at its recent past.
“To accelerate Jimmy Choo’s growth, we are focusing on engaging and energizing both new and loyal consumers, broadening our product offering, improving store productivity and stabilizing wholesale,” Idol said.
“Reflecting on the past one-and-a-half years, like our other brands, Jimmy Choo’s sales have been impacted by softening demand for luxury fashion goods globally with an outsized decline in China,” he said. “Additionally, occasion wear experienced a notable slowdown following the post-COVID rebound, impacting Jimmy Choo’s sales of both footwear and accessories. Although we have been expanding our casual assortments, we need to respond more quickly to this shift in trend. Sales of our casual assortments continued to increase double digits over the past two years. However, this growth was not enough to offset the more significant declines in occasion wear.”
But that work might well be picked up by someone else, maybe someone who was there at the very beginning.
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