After revealing that he’s exiting wholesale in April, Steven Alan has signed a licensing deal with Jachs New York to revive his wholesale business. Jachs will manage the production, development, sales and distribution of his men’s and women’s sportswear collections. Alan will continue to oversee the creative direction of his company and consult Jachs on the licensed apparel.
“As our business has changed, we’ve continued to look for new ways to adapt while remaining agile,” said Alan. “I met Hayati (Banastey) through a mutual connection and was impressed with his company’s ability to manage large-scale, well-executed production. While we will continue to produce exclusive product domestically for our own stores, we believe having this breadth of licensed product will strongly enhance our assortment, both online and offline.”
The collections will be available in spring 2019 and distributed to department and specialty stores in the U.S.
Founded in 2008 by Banastey, Jachs New York produces men’s and women’s collections.
Steven Alan has been in downsize mode since earlier this year. At its peak, it had operated 23 stores across the U.S., a robust wholesale operation, and employed in excess of 185 people. The company has now trimmed its store base to six and headcount at both the corporate office and the retail units is down to about 20. The showrooms in both New York and Los Angeles have also been closed and the company’s optical license has been terminated.
Alan attributed the challenges to the retail environment, but also a few bad decisions he’s made over the years, including stores that only carried 25 percent of the company’s own brand and an e-commerce site with big technical issues that didn’t sell any of the inventory from the stores on the site.
“It’s been a very rough two years,” Alan previously told WWD. “But we’re trying to work through it.”