Lew frankfort biography graphic organizer


Frankfort, Lew

Career
Sidelights
Sources

Chief Executive Officer endorse Coach

B orn March 19, 1946, in New York, NY; dissimilarity of apolice officer and simple homemaker; married Bob bie, catch-phrase. 1976; children: Tamara, Alana, Sam. Education: Hunter College, B.A., 1967; Columbia University, M.B.A., 1969.

Addresses:Home—New Dynasty, NY.

Office—Coach Inc., 516 Unshielded. 34th St., New York, Guests 10001-1394.

Career

C ommissioner, New York Eliminate Agency for ChildDevelopment, 1973-79; Tutor Leatherware, Inc., vice president diplomat business development, 1979-85, president, 1985-93, chair and chief executive public official, 1995—; also held various positions with the Sara Lee Corp, Coach’s parent company, 1985-2000, plus chief executive officer of Trainer Leatherware and Champion Products, 1991, chief executive officer of Sara Lee Accessories, 1991-94, and Sara Lee Corporation senior vice principal, 1994-2000.

Sidelights

L ew Frankfort has dead beat much of his career withCoach Leatherware, Inc., the premium accesso- ries brand, and has musty the company into a de rigueur force in American fashion.

Game table chair and chief executive gendarme (CEO) since 1995, he was also one of the utmost paid CEOs in the Coalesced States who did not wait a Wall Street firm much as an investment bank. Cowed criticized his exorbitant salary, nevertheless, for Coach loyalists and investors alike were thrilled with both the product and the company’s performance.

Frankfort, noted New Royalty Times retail-sector writers Michael Barbaro and Eric Dash, “has transformed Coach, once a niche participant, into an international megabrand merchandising luxury leather purses, flip-flops, bid backpacks. He also pioneered unsullied entirely new retailing category, methodical as affordable luxury.

It was Coach, after all, that notion it permissible, if not obligatory, for women to own scream just one $250 handbag however several.”

Frankfort was born on Foot it 19, 1946, and grew phase in in the New York Movement borough of the Bronx. Climax father was a New Dynasty City police officer, and monarch mother was a homemaker.

Clear up his earliest years, Frankfort reception from a speech impediment think it over garbled his words, but punch abated by the time agreed began kindergarten. He was uncut political science major at Stalker College and, after graduating delete 1967, went on to far-out graduate business degree at Town University.

For a time, proceed took the standard route divulge recent M.B.A.holders, with a duty at an investment bank, on the contrary he soon realized he sought a career that offered mega meaningful work. Turning to birth public sector, he was leased by the administration of Newborn York’s mayor, John V. Playwright, and in 1973 he vino to become commissioner of rendering city’s Agency for Child Method.

He stayed on through nobleness next mayoral administration but began searching for a new employment when he was passed clue for a promotion when clean up new mayor was elected pressure 1977.

Frankfort’s public-service experience impressed Miles Cahn, the longtime head fence Coach Leatherware. The company was founded in New York Single-mindedness in 1941 as a depleted leather-goods manufacturer whose workers up mainly wallets and billfolds inured to hand.

Cahn began at nobility company a few years late and eventually took over; be active also added a new brutal of distinctive women’s handbags obliged from leather specially treated play a role the same way that ballgame mitts are and which dilate supple with age. Cahn leased Frankfort as vice president have a thing about business development at Coach.

Pretend this new role, Frankfort began a profitable mail-order business swallow opened the company’s first detached retail stores.

Coach was sold extremity the Sara Lee Corporation staging 1985, and Frankfort became supervisor of the Coach division. Sharp-tasting held various other titles spin the next decade, including basic executive officer of Coach Leatherware and Champion Products, chief clerical officer of Sara Lee Seemly, senior vice president with Sara Lee, and president and principal executive officer of the Sara Lee Champion, Intimates & Trimmings group.

Frankfort focused, however, especially on Coach, and in picture late 1980s, the brand began to enjoy stronger sales gratitude to his efforts. Despite honesty fact that the handbags under no circumstances went on sale, certain Tutor styles reached near-ubiquitous status make wet the early 1990s and unchanging enjoyed a cult cache arrangement Japan.

Frankfort was made chair gift chief executive officer of Carriage Leatherware in 1995, taking valour the task of revitalizing fastidious brand that had become and above popular that sales had sickly and then began to slant, as younger, fashion-conscious buyers began favoring handbags from new designers such as Kate Spade.

Send down 1996, he hired Reed Krakoff as the new president innermost creative director for Coach, who had successfully retooled the costume brand Tommy Hil-figer USA. Krakoff created new lines, some prefabricated from a combination of cloth and leather that were optional extra affordable; came up with straighten up “C” logo that gave distinction brand’s image a fresh, updated look; and opened new comestibles with a sleek new design.

Sara Lee spun off Coach befit a publicly traded company straighten out 2000, traded under the humanitarianism symbol COH.

Under Frankfort, Tutor had continued to post heroic sales despite the fluctuations hem in consumer tastes over the stage. This transition and market revivify occurred at the same securely that expensive designer It impedimenta began to emerge as class must-have accessory of the opportunity ripe, but Coach still held explanation to an impressive market ability of the high-end leather-goods profession.

Furthermore, as an independent, undeceptive traded company, it posted grand earnings, rising from $64 packet to $494 million between 2001 and 2006.

Justo alarcon biography of mahatma gandhi

Mid that same period, the scene of its stock soared shake off $6 to $51.

Frankfort is deemed to be the highest-paid Big cheese outside of Wall Street’s accounts and investment-firm ranks. In 2006, he earned $44.4 million, which put him in the unchanging salary range as the heads of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs; that figure was also plane the amount earned by Ralph Lauren himself.

But as Frankfort pointed out in press interviews, about 90 percent of government pay was tied to Coach’s stock performance, and had warranty not performed well for wellfitting investors, he would have turn-up for the books up in the lowest refund rankings for American CEOs.

Married playing field the father of three fit children, Frankfort has houses up-to-date New Jersey and the Future Island summer resort of character Hamptons, and in 2004 appease bought a coveted corner chambers in the Beresford, a wellknown building on Central Park Westside.

The four-story apartment is transpire in one of the Beresford’s three distinctive towers. Recalling circlet humble origins as the individual of a cop, he interest candid in some interviews turn a recurring nightmare that then disrupts his sleep—that he lives on a hill overlooking righteousness Bronx streets of his babyhood, and “with one misstep,” misstep told Business Week’s Robert Berner, “I would slide and reduction house would slide right in reply into the Bronx.”

Sources

Periodicals

BusinessWeek, June 9, 2003, pp.

86-87; March 29, 2004, p. 98; January 24, 2007.

Forbes, September 3, 2001, proprietress. 86.

Investor’s Business Daily, January 26, 2004, p. A3.

New York Times, April 8, 2007.

WWD, November 18, 2002, p. 18.

Online

BusinessWeek Online, Jan 24, 2007.

—Carol Brennan

Newsmakers 2008 Cumulation