Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Snapchat settles a discrimination lawsuit, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei unveils new AI model, and J. Jill’s CEO staged a turnaround by prioritizing the store’s core customer. Have a relaxing weekend!
– Valuable customer. The target customer at J. Jill, the 63-year-old American womenswear brand, is “sophisticated.” Aged 45 and older with $150,000 or more in household income, “she’s well-educated, she’s shopping the social channels, she’s shopping wherever, whenever she wants to,” says CEO Claire Spofford.
So when the brand’s product wasn’t up to snuff, the customer noticed.
J. Jill was founded in Massachusetts in 1955 and acquired by Talbots in 2006 for $517 million. Since then, the brand known for its easy-to-wear basics and catalog business has been through a steep drop-off in value. After its $517 million acquisition, it was sold to private equity for $63 million. It conducted a second IPO in 2017, and its share price nosedived 53% two years later amid problems with quality and inventory. Spofford, who served as J. Jill’s CMO in the early 2010s, says she came back for the CEO job three years ago because she was confident its problems were “fixable.”
“I knew that the issues in the business were addressable,” she says. She joined after a stint overseeing Garnet Hill, a J. Jill competitor.
She shifted the company’s focus from top-line growth to margins and profitability. More importantly, she made some changes to appeal to J. Jill’s customer—a loyal one who sticks with the brand for 10 years when the product is good enough.
The CEO directed J. Jill to adopt a “fabric-first mentality.” “Our customer understands what she’s looking for in terms of fabric—the feel, the look, the drape, the longevity of it,” Spofford, 62, explains. She started allowing items to sell out—rather than trying to stock enough inventory to “never disappoint” the customer—and directed the J. Jill shopper to “move on to what’s next.” And, critically, she brought J. Jill’s extended sizing from online-only into its 245 stores and removed an upcharge for larger sizes, “which was just wrong,” Spofford says.
Those changes have paid off; the brand’s stock is up more than 600% over the three years since Spofford took over. Spofford views the J. Jill of today as a “well-kept secret,” with many potential shoppers still discovering the new changes, especially as Gen X and millennials—the oldest of whom are now 43—become a larger part of the brand’s customer base.
For Spofford, the turnaround has been a lesson in the value of the 45-plus female customer. “I love this customer,” she says. “She deserves a great experience.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Settlement snapped up. Snapchat paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the social media company of discriminating against female employees. Snapchat stated it did not agree with the claims but settled to avoid long and expensive legal proceedings. Fortune
- Prompt competition. Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei announced on Thursday that the OpenAI competitor is releasing an AI model that she says is “the best in the industry.” The AI company claims that the new model, called the Claude 3.5 Sonnet, beats out OpenAI's GPT-4o on industry tests. Fortune
- Losing the lead. Dozens of recent polls indicate that President Joe Biden’s lead with women against Donald Trump has decreased from 13 percentage points to about eight since the 2020 election. The decrease in support is most pronounced among Black and Hispanic women and attributed to inflation concerns. New York Times
- Daydream into reality. Entrepreneur Julie Bornstein, the cofounder of The Yes fashion app and former COO of Stitch Fix, announced she raised $50 million for an AI-powered search platform for fashion items. Investors say the company, called Daydream, has the potential to expand beyond clothes and into different areas of shopping. Vogue
- Preventive measures. Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.) introduced legislation on Thursday to repeal parts of the 1873 law that prohibits the transport of abortion materials. Smith and other Democrats fear Republicans could use the law to ban access to abortion medication or the procedure. Washington Post
ON MY RADAR
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PARTING WORDS
“We cannot be defined by a number, and when people underestimate us, they do it at their own risk.”
—First Lady Dr. Jill Biden pushing back against concerns related to her husband’s age
