Keep pulling the thread on Lou Frankfort.
Lou Frankfort grew Coach from a company with $6 million in annual revenue to a global brand with $5 billion in revenue.
By the time Coach went public, it had reached $500 million in revenue and had successfully expanded into Japan and other international markets.
Coach built a billion-dollar business in Japan, with its initial success founded on a partnership with the department store Mitsukoshi.
Coach's leadership team created the term "accessible luxury" to clearly position the brand for investors ahead of its IPO.
In the 1980s, the US handbag market was dominated by mass-market brands, which accounted for approximately 95% of units and 80% of dollar sales.
Coach was slow to recognize and respond to the competitive threat from Michael Kors, which copied Coach's playbook and opened stores in close proximity.
In the mid-1980s, the Japanese handbag market was valued at $5 billion, was not growing, and was dominated by European luxury brands.
Coach became a multi-channel business by 1981, two years after Lou Frankfort joined, by launching a mail-order catalog and opening its first retail store on Madison Avenue.
When Coach was acquired by Sara Lee, its culture shifted from a paternalistic environment to a performance-based one focused on metrics, which Lou Frankfort termed a "performance family."
Lou Frankfort predicts that AI will permeate every aspect of the retail industry, accelerating learning from consumer data but also creating a risk of brand homogenization.
Coach invested heavily in intellectual property protection and used lawsuits and collaboration with law enforcement agencies to combat the sale of counterfeit products.