After a decades of dressing for success, Dressbarn to fold
In an era of knee-length panel dresses and bias-cut skirts, Audrey Hepburn’s star 1961 turn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” helped push the slender, sleeveless dress to top of mind for the fashion masses.
The following February, Roslyn Jaffe opened the Stamford store that for more than a half-century would give those women the clothes they sought to cross — in style — the threshold to the working world at a reasonable price.
In Ascena Retail Group’s Monday decision to close its remaining 650 Dressbarn stores, including 18 in Connecticut, the Mahwah, N.J.-based company is folding a brand that ranks alongside the onetime discount department store Caldor among Connecticut’s most successful retail exports.
The end of Dressbarn will cost 6,800 people their jobs. The company lists 18 Connecticut locations, including in Danbury and Norwalk — both locations owned by a limited liability company controlled by the Jaffe family — as well as in Branford, Orange, Shelton, Southbury, Wallingford and Westbrook.
The decision came just weeks after Ascena announced the immediate retirement of CEO David Jaffe, who had led the company since 2002, including through a $2 billion merger that paired the boutique chains Ann Taylor and Loft with Dressbarn and Lane Bryant. As of last October, Jaffe and sister Elise controlled more than
25.6 million shares, some
3.4 million more than BlackRock, the largest institutional shareholder.
“This was a difficult but necessary decision and one that was not taken lightly,” stated new CEO Gary Muto in an internal memo to employees obtained by fashion-industry trade journal Women’s Wear Daily. “Despite the team’s best efforts to better position Dressbarn in a challenging retail environment, Dressbarn has not been operating at an acceptable level of profitability to sustain itself.”
Only in mid-March, Roslyn and son David opened the Nasdaq National Market on behalf of Ascena, with the company’s stock having dropped by half over the preceding four months, and down since by nearly the same margin to close Monday at $1.14 prior to the Dressbarn closure announcement.
In its second fiscal quarter ending in February, Ascena lost $71.5 million as revenue dropped 2 percent to below $1.7 billion. On a same-store basis, Dressbarn sales were off 1 percent or $2.3 million from a year ago, not including lost sales from Ascena shuttering more than 65 stores over the preceding 12 months.
That store count had peaked at 830 locations in
2011 with slight reductions in the intervening years. In
2015, Ascena went all in with the $2 billion acquisition of Ann Inc. and its powerhouse Ann Taylor, Loft and Lou & Grey chains, adding 4,900 stores and 70,000 employees.
But Ascena began paring operations. Ascena did not say immediately why it chose to shut down Dressbarn rather than seek buyers.
On Monday, Ascena said it has hired A&G Realty Partners to help extricating itself from leases and closing stores. Dressbarn said it will honor gift cards, returns and refunds for the the time being.
Originally from Waterbury and at the time working for the Gimbel’s department store in New York City, Roslyn Solomon met Elliot Jaffe, who worked in merchandising for Macy’s, with the couple marrying in 1952. As the decade progressed, Elliot took notice of the advent of discount pricing in appliance stores and wondered if the concept would work in apparel.
Roslyn ran with the idea, spending months buying up inventory at bargain prices and then opening the store in February 1962. As crowds thronged to the flagship Dress Barn walk-up store on Broad Street, Elliot left Macy’s to run the enterprise. Later that same year, Sam Walton created the first Wal-Mart discount store in Arkansas and supermarket entrepreneur Max Kohl opened his first department store in Wisconsin.
Back in Connecticut, the Jaffes focused on opening one store a year. Roslyn told Reuters last year that the couple knew they had a success after the debut of their sixth location.
In 2013, Roslyn Jaffe told the Business Council for Peace that Dressbarn never lost sight of its foundational goals, if losing the formula for success like other chains in a retail world that came to be dominated by Amazon.
“Our DNA at Dressbarn ... has always been ‘women helping women,’ ” she said.