Although Bloomborg has reduced or eliminated the use of SEO-optimized headline* we still see ghosts of past glory from time to time.
From Bloomberg Businessweek, July 18:
Jamie Salter has bought and revived dozens of bankrupt retailers from Barneys to Brooks Brothers. Now he’s going after bigger game.
Almost every US president has been inaugurated in a Brooks Brothers suit. Civil War soldiers were outfitted in the brand. Hollywood costume designers consistently turned to Brooks Brothers’ archives, whether for The Great Gatsby’s double-breasted waistcoats, the slim 1960s tailoring in Mad Men or the wide lapels of ’80s power suits in Wall Street. But as casual Fridays—and then casual every days—chipped away at suit supremacy, comfort replaced custom tailoring. After a couple of failed ownership changes, the 202-year-old company finally sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after the pandemic shut down offices, obviating the need for pants, let alone sport coats. The only one celebrating? Jamie Salter, ready to pounce on the iconic retailer for a fire-sale price, adding it to his portfolio of famous dead brands.
Since its start in 2010, Salter’s Authentic Brands Group LLC had been stalking troubled retailers and picking through their corporate carcasses for one valuable thing: their name. By the time Salter subsumed Brooks Brothers, he’d already bought Aeropostale, Barneys New York, Forever 21, Frye, Jones New York, Nine West and Volcom, disassembling and resurrecting them into hundreds of products. It was a business model with little overhead: Authentic purchases a store chain’s intellectual property, usually for somewhere in the low-mid nine figures, and finds contractors to do the design, manufacturing and pretty much everything else but marketing. That way it gets brands that every shopper knows without taking on all the debt, rent and headcount that sank said brands. By the end of the pandemic, Authentic had devoured a mall’s worth of zombie brands, including Eddie Bauer, Izod, Lucky Brand, Van Heusen and part of JCPenney.
The feast was years in the making. Well before Covid-19 decimated foot traffic and Amazon.com seduced shoppers, the private equity industry had ravaged retail through leveraged buyouts that left many too heavily indebted and eventually needing to file for bankruptcy. “People thought the value of a bankrupt brand was zero,” Salter says. “But why would it be zero? So I came up with a strategy to put a value on it.”
Authentic, which Salter says was valued at about $17 billion this year, now owns more than 50 brands and is the third-largest licensor of IP after Walt Disney Co. and media conglomerate Meredith Corp. Its portfolio generates more than $29 billion in annual retail sales, according to the company, which collects a guaranteed minimum royalty of about 5% of each licensee’s annual estimated sales, even if they don’t hit those numbers. But even with those kinds of numbers, Salter, a feisty extrovert with a habit of making midnight brainstorming calls to his business partners, doesn’t want to be a bottom-feeder forever.
During the past four years, Authentic has pushed beyond bankrupt brands into bigger deals, more countries, healthier targets and entirely new industries. The shift began in 2019 with its purchase of Sports Illustrated. Two years later, Salter made his biggest acquisition yet, buying Reebok International Ltd.—fading, though hardly on its deathbed—for $2.5 billion from Adidas AG. Soon after, he bought a majority stake in David Beckham’s lifestyle brand for about $269 million in a deal that made the soccer star a top Authentic shareholder, alongside fellow celebrity-entrepreneur Shaquille O’Neal. Last month, Authentic announced it would continue chasing massive sports-related deals, buying Champion from Hanesbrands Inc. for $1.2 billion. “This was his vision,” Beckham says of Salter’s desire to be a sports and entertainment mogul. “And if me and Shaq have played a little bit of a part in that, well, then that was always the plan on Jamie’s side.”....
November 2013
Strange Bloomberg Headlines Are Still With Us
After last August's Hoyt Review (Recommendations Following a Review of the Relationship Between the News and Commercial Operations of Bloomberg LP) there was fear among the cognoscenti* that the era of Search Engine Optimized Bloomberg headlines had come to an end.
It appears those fears were misplaced at least as far as the SBH Tumblr was concerned:
UBS Sees Banker Grounds Riff Like Keith Richards Winning Asia Equity Deals*See:
Sex With Dementia Facing Boomers Spurs Elderly Care Group to Seek Policies
Sex in Geriatrics Sets Hebrew Home Apart in Elderly CareCrop Insurance Hazards Shown in Lost Pheasants in Grasslands
How come all of these articles about sex among the elderly have suddenly started appearing in a news service owned by a 71-year-old guy on the brink of retirement?
Oh.
Fed Bubble Agonistes Persists as Zero Rates Prompt Great Debate
France Ranks Companies in Carrot-Baguette Gender-Equality Push
Public Vasectomy With Band-Aid Promotes Family Planning
Quartz: Bloomberg’s very strange headlines are in danger of making sense
FT Alphaville: Goldman Gratuity Rankles Hoyt Scolding Newspersons: Compliance
Alphaville Looks at Strange Bloomberg Headlines
And our own posts:
Bloomberg Goes SEO Crazy in the Headline: "Obama $8 Billion Solar Betamax Unwinds as China Backs Rival" (FSLR; GE; SI)
On Bloomberg Headline Writing
From the Strange Bloomberg Headlines blog
Really Bad Business Writing (plus Orwell's rules of writing)
