The J. Crew founder who sold a preppy dream

Arthur Cinader was a proud perfectionist. The founder of the preppy clothing brand J. Crew repeatedly rejected one employee’s reports because the staples on the pages weren’t straight. He once ended a meeting early because an employee had used the wrong abbreviation for the season “spring”: Cinader wanted his spring reports titled SPR, not SP. But this obsession with detail helped turn J. Crew into a global success. Through meticulously curated catalogs and in sleek, woodpaneled stores, Cinader sold elegant but unpretentious clothes—and an aspirational Northeastern lifestyle of Ivy League schools and summers on Nantucket—to upper-income consumers. “Wives of investment bankers,” he once boasted, “talk about the latest J. Crew catalog the way they talk about shopping at Bergdorf’s.” Cinader was born in New York City to a father who co-founded the Popular Club Plan: “a catalog company for moderate-income families,” said The Washington Post. He dropped out of Yale School of Medicine to join his father’s business, and “soon took the reins, expanding the company enough to acquire the First National Bank of Albuquerque in 1969.” Fourteen years later, Cinader launched J. Crew as a catalog firm. The “Crew” was inspired by the Ivy League–associated sport of rowing; he added the “J.” because “he thought the letter looked nice on the page.” His daughter Emily, then in her early 20s, oversaw the designs, which included T-shirts in block colors, stonewashed Oxford shirts, and cashmere sweaters, said The Wall Street Journal. Cinader looked after the finances and fussed over photos and wordings in catalogs, “seeking what one colleague described as a tone of ‘sophisticated whimsy.’” In 1989, the company opened its first retail store, in Manhattan. Many more followed, and by the time Cinader sold J. Crew to a private equity firm in 1997, “annual sales were around $800 million.” After Cinader retired, J. Crew stumbled and “churned through several executives,” said The New York Times. It rebounded in the mid-2000s by incorporating more expensive fabrics and high-fashion elements, but has struggled to win over Millennial consumers. Still, Cinader never believed that his brand should aim for a mass audience. “J. Crew is a design spirit,” he said in 1990. “There’s a smallish part of the population that would respond to it. It’s hard to put it into words. If you could put it into words, you wouldn’t need designers.”