Which is perhaps why Jacobs feels his meeting with Goldfarb went a little differently. “I mean, it’s not that he wasn’t excited,” Jacobs says. “He just seems like a very different personality.” And then, “He’s just coming from a different place, I think.”
“I think there’s enough reasonable doubt that says this kind of interference never goes well,” Jacobs says, acknowledging skepticism about the new deal. “For people who don’t really have all the facts and figures and evidence, I think this just looks like a recipe for something else.” In other words, a licensing business.
As Shmidman worked through the deal with LVMH, he struck another one with Goldfarb in which they will each own 50 percent of the Marc Jacobs IP. Per public documents, G-III will invest $425 million in the 50-50 joint venture, also acquiring the operating business of the Marc Jacobs brand and managing the license, which in terms of scale means proliferating product. As in: More Marc Jacobs coming to a retailer near you. He expects the deal to close by October at the latest.
During our conversation, Goldfarb seems attuned to the wariness but prepared with counterpoints. He suggests the successes G-III had scaling Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger with their owner, PVH, as a licensor, and their ongoing revamp of Donna Karan as proof of their commitment. “You’ll find that, uniquely, we have a level of respect for each brand individually,” Goldfarb says of his approach.
He hopes for Jacobs to remain as involved as he’d like to: “The more he is willing to give, the more we will take,” Goldfarb says. “We are not the adversary, we’re his partners.”
While Shmidman did not disclose certain details of Jacobs’s new setup, such as his compensation or contract terms, he underscores that Jacobs’s presence is crucial, and that WHP and G-III are inheriting the infrastructure built by LVMH, through which Jacobs remains creative director.
“We’re the beneficiary of walking into a business that has been owned by LVMH,” Shmidman says. “LVMH is of the highest integrity and certainly brilliant at working with founders, creative talent, fashion designers. Marc is all of the above.”
Goldfarb knows moments of transition can be unnerving. “I think Marc might be a little nervous as to where it goes,” Goldfarb says. “I think if you call Marc back in 18 months, he’s going to say, ‘This is heaven.’ ”
Jacobs implies that his brand’s relationship with LVMH was no utopia. “When people hear LVMH, they hear about this luxury titan kind of thing, but they don’t know the everyday operation,” he says. “I’m not going to put them down, but [people] don’t know about all the different CEOs we’ve had over the years, and they don’t know about all the mistakes that were made by people that [LVMH] employed,” he says. “The reality of it is that just because you’re LVMH doesn’t mean you don’t have a shit ton of problems with people you’re employing.”
