Marquee Brands LLC (USA), a global brand owner, marketing and media company, announced that it will take back the BCBGMAXAZRIA and BCBGeneration licenses from Centric Brands following their bankruptcy filing.
Marquee Brands will continue operations of the wholesale and e-commerce business. The company plans to further accelerate their rapidly growing digital business on its Marquee-Direct platform.
In launching Marquee-Direct, the company made the decision to bring all e-commerce in-house and to handle all site design and development, merchandising, content creation and customer engagement.
Marquee’s long-term relationships with best-in-class logistics partners for delivery and customer service will be crucial to assisting the growth of Marquee’s other operating partners, as well as allowing the company to scale by adding new brands to the platform.
Adding the BCBG Group to this platform, which includes Ben Sherman, Body Glove, Dakine, Bruno Magli, Motherhood Maternity and Pea in a Pod, will allow Marquee Brands to achieve a more sustainable scale while also achieving better operating leverage.
Earlier this year Marquee acquired the two brands under the Destination Maternity umbrella and refocused that business to a largely DTC platform.
Using its digital capabilities, coupled with a more customer-focused merchandising plan, the Destination Maternity e-commerce platform has seen double digit growth in transactions, customer acquisition and increased conversion as well as units per transaction.
“Destination Maternity will be a hugely profitable business with positive cash flow within its first year under Marquee Brand’s direct e-commerce operational management. Prior to the acquisition, they had experienced many years of substantial losses given their antiquated store-based model,” said Jonathan Greller, Head of Strategy & Corporate Development at Marquee.
“Taking back the BCBG business and integrating it on to our Marquee-Direct platform with a heightened focus on product and our global partners will no doubt result in profitability that exceeds what could have been achieved through the prior license,” Mr. Greller added.
