According to a recent story from Retail Dive, former J.Crew CEO, Micky Drexler, once tried to get Amazon to buy out the struggling company [insert saddest emoji possible].
“We went to visit some of [Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s] team members,” Drexler said in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times’ DealBook conference. “And to me, it would have been an extraordinarily smart thing to do.”
Considering that J.Crew was having trouble refinancing some rapidly maturing debt, it makes sense that the then-CEO and part-owner (Drexler owns 10 percent of the company) would’ve wanted a lucrative acquisition deal (apparently, he also thought about approaching Walmart and Target). What doesn’t make sense, however, is what, exactly, Amazon would’ve gotten out of the transaction, save for what Drexler earnestly called his “machine of style and taste in fashion.”
Making the answer to what’s in it for Amazon? even more elusive, is that even though he hoped the company would acquire J.Crew, Drexler didn’t want Amazon to actually sell J.Crew product, fearing “the e-commerce giant would knock off any bestsellers and ultimately undermine the brand.”
Change that sad emoji to a very confused one.
You can read more about it at Retail Dive.
