G-III, which topped first-quarter earnings projections and raised its outlook for the year, said it bought a 12 percent stake in Madrid-based All We Wear Group.
In an interview with WWD, Goldfarb, looking to describe where the company is today and how it got here, went back to before G-III’s $650 million acquisition ofat one point to possibly combine both companies and their prior CEO, Manny Chirico, cited the fact that we don’t have a chit — the value of a brand as great as the value of the entity that we operated,” Goldfarb said. “Without the brand, we didn’t really have much. I went back home and said, ‘You know, maybe he’s right.
“It’s the first time that we got a big vote, or maybe the only vote, on how marketing money is spent,” Goldfarb said of the boost to DKNY and Donna Karan. “Our people in the marketing area have stepped up.That’s true with the company’s finances too. Sales for the three months ended April 30 inched up 0.5 percent to $609.7 million from $606.6 million, while inventories at the end of the quarter were down about 24 percent from a year earlier.
Marcella Wartenbergh, CEO of All We Wear, said: “We are incredibly proud to have G-III, an industry leader with a track record of scaling brands, as our shareholder. We look forward to partnering together to propel the growth and European expansion of DKNY, Donna Karan and Karl Lagerfeld, leveraging our global brand platform, operational excellence and Indian market capabilities.”