Alex Mill Chairman Mickey Drexler is happy.
The former CEO of Gap and J. Crew has amassed enough retail credentials under his full-grain Italian leather belt to know what he wants, and on a warm Wednesday afternoon in June, Drexler told Guggenheim Senior Managing Director Simeon Siegel that he’s passionate about the work he’s doing now.
“I love this job the most,” Drexler said during his closing keynote at the CommerceNext Growth Show in New York. “I don’t have investors, private equity, someone breathing down my neck. And if I make a mistake, I make a mistake.”
He hasn’t always been this relaxed. Drexler ran Gap from the early 1980s until 2002, and during his time there, he launched the company’s lower-priced Old Navy brand.
“Old Navy happened because of an article in The New York Times,” Drexler said. In that 1992 story, the newspaper reported that Target parent company Dayton Hudson Corporation was developing a new concept store to sell less expensive versions of the kind of clothing available at Gap. Drexler was not going to let another company co-opt his brand equity, and Old Navy was born two years later.
However, Drexler said the end of his tenure at Gap was abrupt and unexpected.
“I was fired after 18 years at Gap,” Drexler said. “Steve Jobs called me, because he was on the board there, and he said, ‘You’re going to be fired tomorrow.’” But, said Drexler, “you deal with what you got to deal with and you don’t stop going forward. I get knocked at Gap, and it was a nightmare after 18 years,” he said. “Then they told me two days later that they made a mistake. But you go through that, and politics plays a huge role every time. Profit, profit.”
The following year, Drexler became CEO of J. Crew. He launched that company’s lower-priced brand, Madewell, in 2006. In 2010, J. Crew went private, and in 2014, a deal for Uniqlo owner Fast Retailing to buy the brand fell through. By 2017, Drexler once again found himself out of a job after sales began to slip. He then watched Madewell independently try and then fail to go public.
By 2019, he was ready for something new and somewhat closer to home, so he joined Alex Mill, the privately owned clothing retailer founded in 2012 by Drexler’s son Alex Drexler. Nowadays, Mickey Drexler said he feels like he’s allowed to just be himself.
“I love what I do,” Drexler said. “I'm proudly a micromanager. Someone today asked me, ‘Well, you’re a micromanager, what does that mean?’ That means that I can represent all customers in everything I do, and everything I do is for the customer. Now, in the big companies, it was very difficult to do.”
His main focus now is on finding a balance between classic styles and new ideas, and bringing in color. But he’s also focused on editing things down.
“You go to a supermarket and you see 30 cereals,” he said. “Who wants all those choices? Do what you do, do it well. That's what I'm trying to do now with this job, because I was as guilty as anyone was. I was overassorted, and so now I'm the assortment police.” Drexler is obsessed with editing things down. “I think a huge part is not telling people [what to buy], but letting it be simple and easy to choose,” he said.
He places a high value on creativity, but stays away from artificial intelligence. “When I say AI lacks creativity, people attack me,” Drexler said. That said, he would like to see more new ideas and less discounting.
“I think we lost a lot of creativity, not just in apparel or fashion, but cars,” Drexler said, adding that retail has largely turned to discounting, which he largely blames on leadership decisions.
“Any great business is a function of leadership,” Drexler said. “When I look around, I just think we’re kind of lacking in the kind of merchants, creative directors, marketing.” He added, “leadership sets the tone and sets the standards.”
That said, he’s happy to stay away from the kind of corporate life he used to embrace, even as he sees his friends and contemporaries continue on that path.
“I always respected Ralph [Lauren],” Drexler said. “Now Ralph accuses me of copying him, but I always respected Ralph. He’s doing a great job and he seems very hot. It’s not my kind of business, but it’s a great job, it’s known by people and what they do, they have profits, they have shareholders and quality results and they’re earning money. But you know, I don’t like most stores.”
