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– Valuable customer. The target customer at J. Jill, the 63-year-old American womenswear brand, is “sophisticated.” Aged 45 and older with $150,000 or more in household income, “she’s well-educated, she’s shopping the social channels, she’s shopping wherever, whenever she wants to,” says CEO Claire Spofford.
So when the brand’s product wasn’t up to snuff, the customer noticed.
J. Jill was founded in Massachusetts in 1955 and acquired by Talbots in 2006 for $517 million. Since then, the brand known for its easy-to-wear basics and catalog business has been through a steep drop-off in value. After its $517 million acquisition, it was sold to private equity for $63 million. It conducted a second IPO in 2017, and its share price nosedived 53% two years later amid problems with quality and inventory. Spofford, who served as J. Jill’s CMO in the early 2010s, says she came back for the CEO job three years ago because she was confident its problems were “fixable.”
“I knew that the issues in the business were addressable,” she says. She joined after a stint overseeing Garnet Hill, a J. Jill competitor.
She shifted the company’s focus from top-line growth to margins and profitability. More importantly, she made some changes to appeal to J. Jill’s customer—a loyal one who sticks with the brand for 10 years when the product is good enough.
The CEO directed J. Jill to adopt a “fabric-first mentality.” “Our customer understands what she’s looking for in terms of fabric—the feel, the look, the drape, the longevity of it,” Spofford, 62, explains. She started allowing items to sell out—rather than trying to stock enough inventory to “never disappoint” the customer—and directed the J. Jill shopper to “move on to what’s next.” And, critically, she brought J. Jill’s extended sizing from online-only into its 245 stores and removed an upcharge for larger sizes, “which was just wrong,” Spofford says.
Those changes have paid off; the brand’s stock is up more than 600% over the three years since Spofford took over. Spofford views the J. Jill of today as a “well-kept secret,” with many potential shoppers still discovering the new changes, especially as Gen X and millennials—the oldest of whom are now 43—become a larger part of the brand’s customer base.
For Spofford, the turnaround has been a lesson in the value of the 45-plus female customer. “I love this customer,” she says. “She deserves a great experience.”
Emma Hinchliffe
[email protected]
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