J.Crew embarked on a much-hyped comeback after filing for bankruptcy. Retail experts share what the brand needed to do to right the ship — and whether it's working.

• J.Crew embarked on a comeback after filing for bankruptcy in the early months of the pandemic.
• In recent months, the brand's fresh design talent and new concept store have gotten a lot of hype.

If it weren't for the sign above the door, you wouldn't know it was a J.Crew.

A stylish coffee bar greets you at the entrance, enticing visitors to sip a macchiato while they shop. Slim brass clothing racks sport striped rugby shirts and Irish wool coats. Leather chairs and plush rugs invite you to stay awhile, while the canoe hanging from the ceiling tries to convince you you're in the world's chicest mid-century boathouse.

The store, located in the Bowery in New York City, is a concept shop for J.Crew, and it's just one piece of a broader effort from the brand to turn things around.

After its late-aughts heyday, J.Crew floundered, losing customers to fast-fashion brands that offered trendier items at lower prices. When the pandemic struck, J.Crew was a quick casualty, filing for bankruptcy and later taking on new owners, a hedge fund that provided the time and the cash to get back on track.

J.Crew has since placed a new CEO at the helm — Libby Wadle, who previously oversaw J.Crew's fast-growing sister brand, Madewell. It also hired fresh creative talent: Brendon Babenzien – an alum of streetwear brand Supreme and founder of menswear retailer Noah – on the men's side, and J.Crew veteran Olympia Gayot on the women's and kid's side. Their rise to the top of the creative ladder has made them stars in their own right, with Babenzien splashed across GQ and Fast Company and Gayot's sense of style worshipped on TikTok and chronicled in Vogue.

All these changes have netted J.Crew a lot of attention, but is hype enough to steer the brand into the future? Industry experts broke down the main issues standing in the way of a turnaround — in short, outdated store looks and waning consumer interest — and the signs that show the retailer is mounting a comeback.

A spokesperson for J.Crew declined to comment for this story.

Moving on from the 'cornucopia of product'

The pandemic may have shifted the balance of shoppers from in stores to online, but physical retail still has its place — at J.Crew, 70% of the brand's sales are online, but the brand still plans to invest in brick-and-mortar locations, Wadle, the company's CEO, told The Wall Street Journal in July.

Modern store designs like the New York City concept shop are still the exception — walking into a standard J.Crew store in 2022 feels basically unchanged from a decade or even two decades ago, according to Thomaï Serdari, a marketing professor and the director of the fashion and luxury MBA program at New York University's Stern School of Business.

"This idea of stacking up tons and tons and tons of sweaters on these large piles that you find at J.Crew is not the most exciting experience," Serdari said, describing the current shopping experience as "one step up from an outlet."

Lee Peterson, a longtime merchant and now the executive vice president of thought leadership at retail consulting firm WD Partners, echoed that J.Crew should pare down the "cornucopia of product when you walk in" and urged fewer, better stores.

The brand is already on target in that regard: The company had 281 physical retail stores five years ago — today it has 127. The next step would be replicating the New York men's store, which he described as a showroom, in other markets.

"It's less labor, it's less build-out cost, it's less maintenance," he said. "You also don't need as much inventory, so that costs less as well. Having all that inventory in 500 stores just doesn't make sense anymore."

Hitting a style sweet spot between luxury and fast-fashion

But store experience ranks below the product itself, according to Vincent Quan, chair of the fashion business management department at the Fashion Institute of Technology's Korea campus.

"In our industry, it begins with product," Quan said. "You can have the best website, you can have the best infrastructure, but if the product is not right and the consumer's sort of shying away from the product, you've got a major problem."

And even before the pandemic, J.Crew shoppers were shying away. Customers began complaining in the 2010s that fit and quality had gone downhill but prices remained high. Quan chalked it up to cost pressures, which made both designers and executives get cautious.

"All of a sudden, you're doing the same thing over and over and over again," he said. "The consumers migrated, moved on to other brands, fast-fashion being one of them. They lost their mojo."

These days, J.Crew appears to be recapturing some of that mojo: it's adding more high-end fabrics like cashmere, moleskin, and Harris Tweed into its product array and dipping into its archive to reinvent the classics. Quan credited Babenzien with refocusing on quality — "I don't remember a Supreme sweatshirt falling apart," he said — and said Gayot has the DNA behind the brand's earlier success fully ingrained thanks to her tenure under former creative director Jenna Lyons.

There are also signs that the brand is getting creative with sourcing materials and collaborating with US manufacturers, Serdari from NYU said. A barn jacket featured in a J.Crew catalog caught her eye, she said, because it was made in collaboration with a Tennessee-based brand that used to supply US military uniforms. She said pieces that are "utilitarian but also have a point of view" could be J.Crew's sweet spot, particularly because of the brand's mid-tier price point, somewhere between luxury and fast-fashion.

Quan said he's cautiously optimistic, saying that the product improvements hint that the brand is on the right track.

"Once they hit their stride, it will be exponential," he said. "Keep an eye on them."