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J. Crew Reminds Us That Brands Without Meaning Are No Longer Essential
Retailer J. Crew announced a bankruptcy filing last week that will potentially close its nearly 200 stores and those of sister company Madewell.
Problems for the company have been racking up for years: unsustainable debt, fit and quality issues, a misguided push toward higher income consumers (which alienated its core customer base) and extreme discounting.
But J. Crew’s real problem is that the company doesn’t mean anything to anyone. It has no thematic reason for being.
The challenge of creating a successful anything is to take a product that is essentially meaningless — let’s say a T-shirt — and imbue it with meaning. I must make it divine.
Brand identity, relevance and changing media landscape — cited in The New York Times as J. Crew’s fault lines, are all just game stakes — like style, fit, quality and selection.
As a consumer if you don’t mean anything to me, I don’t care.
Truth is, meaning is created through story and
