Mike Jeffries Bio
Mike Jeffries is an American businessman, who was chiefly responsible for reestablishing the clothing company Abercrombie & Fitch and developing its modern brand image. He was the company’s CEO until 2014 and was born on July 15, 1944, in Oklahoma, the U.S.A. with a middle name Stanton.
Born in Oklahoma, Mike grew up in Los Angeles, California where his father owned Party Time, a chain of party supply stores. After high school, he attended Claremont Men’s College (now Claremont McKenna College) where he graduated in 1966 with a BA in Economics. He received an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1968 and also studied at the London School of Economics.
That same year Mike Jeffries joined the management training program at Abraham & Straus, a now-defunct New York City department store. During this time Mike Jeffries worked along with Allen Questrom and Millard S. Drexler. In 1984, Mike founded Alcott & Andrews, a brand targeted at career women.
The brand was initially successful, but in 1989 it fell into bankruptcy due to overexpansion and closed. Afterward, Mike took a position at Paul Harris, a Midwest clothing chain.
On April 3, 1971, in Miami, Florida, Mike Jeffries married Susan Marie Isabel Hansen, daughter of Charles Henry Hansen, president and founder of Charles Hansen Music Publishing. They have one child, Andrew Hansen Jeffries. Following a quiet separation from his wife, Mike lives with his partner Matthew Smith and three dogs. Matthew Smith heads the Jeffries Family Office, an Ohio limited liability corporation that “advocates for the personal interests of Abercrombie’s CEO.”
Smith also reviews internal Abercrombie & Fitch documents and consults on real estate matters. He, a former hairdresser, often inspected the A&F offices by walking through and doing “desk checks” to keep offices, conference rooms, and employee dress to strict standards published in employee memos. His involvement with the running of Abercrombie & Fitch has been criticized in some quarters as an example of poor corporate governance since he holds no official position within the company.
Age
Mike Jeffries celebrates his birthday every 15th of July. Considering that he was born in the year 1944, the American businessman is aged 75 as of 2019.
Net Worth
After completing his degrees, Mike Jeffries worked for various retailers, before launching his own company in the mid-80s, called Alcott & Andrews. The company went bankrupt five years later. He was hired by Limited Brands to run Abercrombie & Fitch in the late 80s. The retailer had gone bankrupt and Limited purchased the remaining assets. However, their management was not particularly interested in running the company themselves and gave Mike Jeffries almost complete control.
Mike completely retooled the brand, and it became immensely popular. By the mid-90s, he had total control of the company. Today he owns nearly 3% of the company’s shares. Over the years, he has sparked a great deal of controversy due to inappropriate comments he has made to the press, his management style, and his stringent physical requirements for employees. He stepped down from the company in 2014. Mike Jeffries is an American businessman who has a net worth of $300 million dollars.
Mike Jeffries House
A Manhattan townhouse that beauty maven Elizabeth Arden once called home is now owned by former Abercrombie & Fitch chief executive officer and chairman Mike Jeffries. Mike, who made headlines for his controversial comments during his time as head of the retailer about how it was targeting good-looking clients, paid almost $11 million for the townhouse in 2006 and has been trying to sell the four-bedroom property since October.
The house in Sutton Square, a tiny adjunct of the posh enclave of Sutton Place close to the East River, was first listed for $19.5 million, only for the price to be cut by $2 million in April and now it’s reappeared for $16 million after a brief stint off the market. Built in 1921 for inventor Henry Sprague and later occupied by Arden (whose real name was Florence Nightingale Graham), Mike Jeffries hired architect Daniel Romualdez when he bought it to undertake a three-year restoration of the five-story, four-bedroom home.
Romualdez’s other work includes 70 Vestry, the luxury condominium in TriBeCa that is being erected and is where Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen and her NFL player husband Tom Brady dropped more than $20 million on a five-bedroom apartment. The results of the extensive restoration include seven wood-burning fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling paneled windows that allow natural light to flood the house, elevator access to all floors and a staff room in the cellar.
A grand curved staircase with wood banisters, meanwhile, leads to a third-floor master suite with a wood-burning fireplace and a cashmere-lined walk-in closet. Elsewhere, there is a formal dining room and a two-level library and sitting room with mahogany wood-paneled walls and ceilings. It is also just one of 18 houses that has access to a communal garden on the banks of the East River. Another home for sale in Sutton Square that also has access to the garden is Aristotle Onassis’s former townhouse, which is asking close to $30 million.
It was home to Onassis and his first wife, Athina Livanos, during the Fifties and Sixties. He later married former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The listing agents for Mike’s house are Michael Passaro and Lauren Muss, both of Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
Check out Abercrombie & Fitch Instagram page below @london_abercrombie.
Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
Mike Jeffries was hired by Leslie Wexner to invigorate Abercrombie & Fitch. The company, founded in 1892, had been purchased by Limited Brands in 1988 after bankruptcy. Mike is considered to have been the main creator of the new look for the company, saying that he wanted A&F to “sizzle with sex”.
It was rebuilt as an upscale apparel retailer for the collegiate, and by the mid-1990s, Abercrombie & Fitch had opened dozens of new stores. By 1996, LBrands was no longer heavily involved with the company and eventually left it under the management of Mike Jeffries.
During this time, A&F has offended groups as diverse as the feminist movement and the American Decency Association and has attracted a fair number of other controversies and lawsuits. An outspoken businessman, Mike Jeffries has been quoted making statements in the press that are considered controversial. Such comments include his assertion that “We hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.”
In 2004, he made approximately $25 million USD with a “stay bonus” of $6 million USD, which dropped from $12 million after a controversy involving his “excessive compensation”. After surveying 2,000 US corporations, the Corporate Library named Mike Jeffries as the “Highest Paid Worst Performer” of 2008, after he received a compensation package valued at $71.8 million.
The businessman, Mike Jeffries, refused to lower prices or offer discounts at Abercrombie & Fitch stores during the retail recession until September 2009, after the company posted same-store sales losses for 17 consecutive months.
Mike Jeffries’ employment agreement was set to expire on December 31, 2008. On December 22, 2008, A&F corporate announced that it had been renewed. It expired on February 22, 2014. His total compensation in 2011 was estimated at $46,609,075, most of this being in the form of stock options. Mike owns about 2.9% of the company’s shares making him difficult to remove without his consent. His most recent contract calls for a payout of over one hundred million dollars should he lose his job due to an ownership change.
On December 9, 2013, it was reported Mike had agreed to a new contract with A&F that would tie his pay to company performance. Also in December, market commentator Herb Greenberg named Mike Jeffries the worst CEO of 2013. Greenberg pointed out that the share price for Abercrombie and Fitch had collapsed by 40% during the year. This was after Jim Cramer of CNBC had earlier named Mike to his “Wall of Shame”.
Mike Jeffries was once one of the best-paid CEOs in retail but he saw his compensation shrink 72 percent in 2013. His total pay was $2.24 million in the fiscal year of 2013, which ended February 1. That was down from $8.16 million in the previous year and $48.1 million before that.
On December 9, 2014, Mike stepped down as A&F CEO amid mass criticism of the company’s performance and 11 straight quarters of negative company comparable-store sales. The shares jumped 8 percent after the move was announced, marking the biggest one-day gain in more than nine months.
Mike Jeffries Quotes
» “How does a store look? How does it feel? How does it smell? That’s what I’m obsessed with.”
» “We hire good-looking people in our stores. Because good-looking people attract other good-looking people, and we want to market to cool, good-looking people. We don’t market to anyone other than that.”
» “I think that what we represent sexually is healthy. It’s playful. It’s not dark. It’s not degrading! And it’s not gay, and it’s not straight, and it’s not black, and it’s not white. It’s not about any labels. That would be cynical, and we’re not cynical! It’s all depicting this wonderful camaraderie, friendship, and playfulness that exist in this generation and, candidly, does not exist in the older generation.”
» “People said we were cynical, that we were sexualizing little girls. But you know what? I still think those are cute underwear for little girls. And I think anybody who gets on a bandwagon about thongs for little girls is crazy. Just crazy! There’s so much craziness about sex in this country. It’s nuts! I can see getting upset about letting your girl hang out with a bunch of old pervs, but why would you let your girl hang out with a bunch of old pervs?”
» “Listen, do we go too far sometimes? Absolutely. But we push the envelope, and we try to be funny, and we try to stay authentic and relevant to our target customer. I really don’t care what anyone other than our target customer thinks.”
» “Dude, I’m not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.”
» “In every school, there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” he says. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You don’t alienate anybody, but you don’t excite anybody, either.”
» “Promotions are a short-term solution with dreadful long-term effects.”
» “With a challenging economic environment, the consumer continues to show a reluctance to spend on premium brands; a price consciousness dictating shopping habits, unlike anything I have ever seen.”
» “We trust each other. We trust in our business partners and in all of you. Working passionately on strengthening our business will bring us back into stronger times.”
» “The reasons for the weak traffic we’ve seen in the U.S. are not entirely clear.”