Later this month, J. Press will open a new flagship store at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 44th Street in Manhattan. The store, with its wood panels, old photographs, and letters to the company penned by former American presidents, feels suitably reverent for a clothier on the eve of its 125th anniversary, and a natural complement to the stacks of rugby shirts, tweed sport coats, and other Ivy League staples within. It’s also a homecoming of sorts for J. Press, which operated a store across the street from 1932 to 2014. Students of American menswear will note that the intersection is the longtime home of the Brooks Brothers building, which was built in 1915 as the flagship of J. Press’s more famous Ivy League rival and has sat empty since the brand filed for bankruptcy in 2020.
This significance is not lost on J. Press creative director and president Jack Carlson, who was finalizing a deal to take over the former Brooks Brothers space when the building was sold. The founder of Rowing Blazers, a prep revival label specializing in colorful takes on Ivy staples, Carlson is now tasked with leading J. Press through the biggest expansion in the brand’s history. Over the next four years, J. Press intends to expand its footprint in the United States, opening as many as 20 new stores in an effort to increase its sales tenfold to $100 million per year. It’s an ambitious plan, and as the crumbling hulk of the Brooks Brothers building attests, growth on that scale is both complicated and risky. The fashion business is notoriously fickle, especially for mid-market brands like J. Press, and the road to success is littered with the corpses of promising labels that succumbed to changing tastes, economic downturns, and the demands of private equity.
To reach his goal, Carlson will need to attract a host of new fashion-oriented customers while appealing to a base of old-school menswear aficionados who bristle at the idea of J. Press as a capital-F fashion brand, particularly given the fashion industry’s reputation for low-quality, high-volume churn. Still, Carlson is bullish on his prospects. “I’m not trying to be flippant about it, but $100 million is not a massive company. That’s where we probably should be, if J. Press and Ivy style matter in the conversation,” he says. “From my perspective, a lot of what we need to do to grow is doubling down on the things that make J. Press J. Press.”
