From the outside looking in, it appears Todd Snyder has had it easy. The eponymous brand he launched in 2011 expects to post annual sales of more than $130 million this year, derived exclusively from his popular direct-to-consumer site and 19 retail stores around the U.S.
He pocketed $11 million when he sold his company to American Eagle Outfitters in 2015, and collaborates with some of the most venerable companies in the business including Champion, L.L. Bean and Red Wing. And he’s the creative director of Woolrich Black Label, a high-end subbrand that launched with great fanfare earlier this month.
But there were times when the designer, who will be receiving the WWD Honor for Menswear Designer of the Year on Tuesday night, almost called it quits.
“I was ready to go work at Nike,” Snyder said. “I was talking to them about going there as the head of product.”
But then he was thrown a lifeline by American Eagle Outfitters Inc., and his new parent company’s support helped him realize his dreams.
How It All Began
By now his life story is well known in fashion circles. Snyder was raised in the small town of Huxley, Iowa, population 2,000, the son of an engineer and his artist/art teacher wife. He played a variety of sports, detasseled corn to earn some spending money during the summer and — no surprise here — was voted the best dressed in his high school class.
Early on, Snyder thought he would follow in his father’s footsteps and become an engineer, but during his six-and-a-half years at Iowa State University, he decided to ditch that idea in favor of, first, architecture, then business and finally fashion.
He was mesmerized by Ralph Lauren’s story about how a boy from the Bronx, N.Y., could create one of the most recognizable brands in American fashion and dreamed of following in those famous footsteps.
“I liked clothes, but I never thought I could [make a living doing it],” Snyder said during a sit-down with Fern Mallis at the 92nd Street Y earlier this year. “But after reading Ralph’s book, where he touched on how he started, I thought I could. My dad gave me weird looks but I didn’t care. It was a dream of mine.”
That dream led him to Badowers, a haberdashery in Des Moines, Iowa, where he worked for two-and-a-half years and learned the art of tailoring.
After graduating from college, Snyder was eager to jump into fashion, so he cold-called all the big design houses in New York — Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Joseph Abboud and others — offering to work for free. “I got a lot more nos than yeses,” he said.
Eventually, he snagged an internship at Polo Ralph Lauren — his dream company — and he was on his way. Once his path was established, it led him to Gap, Old Navy and J.Crew, and it was at the latter that he broke out.
As head of men’s design at J.Crew, Snyder designed The Ludlow, an entirely new suit silhouette that would anchor the retailer’s first stand-alone men’s store in TriBeCa, known as The Liquor Store. The success of this model gave Snyder the confidence he needed to break out on his own.
But it wasn’t an easy decision, he recalled. He was making a good salary, flew business class around the world, stayed at the best hotels and dined at fancy restaurants on the company’s dime, so life was pretty good. But he had just turned 40 and realized it was now or never.
“There are so many barriers to entry,” he admits today. “But at J.Crew, I realized I had an opportunity and a platform for leverage. It was the time to strike.”
The Launch of the Brand
Early on he took the traditional route, selling his collection wholesale to high-end retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and Barneys New York. But three years later, he saw how big his direct-to-consumer business had become and made the decision to discontinue wholesaling and direct his energies to his own website.
“We were selling wholesale to some great stores but it was hard to scale,” he recalled. “We opened our website in 2012 and quickly had a half-million-dollar business online, which was more than we were selling to Bergdorf Goodman.” Plus, selling wholesale meant the collection had to be ready well in advance of what was being offered on the website, which was also a challenge. “For wholesale, you have to be ready to ship everything in June, but we shipped in September,” he said. “It got to the point where we had to pull out.”
While he was managing to gain a foothold, Snyder was also having a hard time making ends meet. “I had three jobs,” he said. He was working with Champion’s European division and collaborating with Target. And he started talking seriously to Nike about closing his company and working there.
Enter American Eagle. Luckily, Snyder had caught the eye of Roger Markfield, president of the retailer at the time, who was impressed with a long-term pop-up shop called City Gym that Snyder had opened with Champion in New York. Markfield brought his boss, Jay Schottenstein, chief executive officer of American Eagle and Schottenstein Stores Corp., one of the first families of U.S. retailing, to see the space and suggested AEO buy the Todd Snyder business.
That came to fruition not long after.
While Todd Snyder would offer American Eagle a halo brand, it was actually another side hustle Snyder operated that truly sealed the deal. In 1991, Snyder and his father launched Tailgate, a line of vintage sports-inspired apparel for college campuses. Because American Eagle was targeting the same demographic, adding Tailgate to its business was a no-brainer.
Today, Snyder is realistic about the sale: “Tailgate was a $20 million business and Todd Snyder was $2 million, so I say, I was a gift with purchase.”
But Schottenstein is an entrepreneur at heart and “loves building things,” Snyder said. They hit it off and Snyder, who also serves in a design capacity for American Eagle, was able to start building his brand.
Rolling Out Retail
In 2016 he opened a 5,000-square-foot flagship in the Madison Park neighborhood of Manhattan, and, in a full-circle moment, in 2019 was able to obtain the lease to The Liquor Store when J.Crew exited the site.
He’s up to 19 stores now with another four in the hopper by the first half of next year. His most recent openings include the Upper East Side of Manhattan — bringing his store total to five in New York City — the Marin Country Mart in Larkspur, Calif., as well as San Jose, Calif.
Snyder selects the store locations by analyzing the data from his online sales. New York remains his biggest market, followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. Leases have also been signed for Nashville and Boston.
While retail continues to represent the key growth strategy for the business, Snyder knows that someday he’ll start wholesaling again. In January he was one of the featured designers at the Pitti Uomo menswear show in Florence. He staged an elaborate runway show and started exploring reentering wholesale. But despite interest from a number of global retailers, he put the brakes on that idea — at least for now.
“I feel bad, a lot of people want to buy it, but we realized we’re just not set up to sell wholesale,” he said. “We don’t have the team or the systems. We would have to set up a whole new enterprise. But we do have the structure for a DTC format and that’s on fire.”
Since joining the American Eagle family, Snyder said he’s been able to expand the number of employees from four to 80. And he also leans into the parent company’s legal and real estate expertise.
Schottenstein has said publicly that he sees the Todd Snyder business growing to $500 million in sales and 50 stores in the not too distant future. Snyder jokes that when he first heard that projection, he was thrilled and honored, but now it scares him a little.
The goal for him is to open around five stores a year for the next several years, but because he’s so involved in the site selection and design of each unit, it takes a lot of work. “The weather patterns are different and we have to get the assortments correct for each one,” he said. “So we’ll be focusing on that.”
Overall, tailored clothing remains the brand’s most popular category, he said, although he’s also seen a lot of interest in his sneakers and other footwear. Eventually, he’d like to expand into other categories such as fragrance, grooming and home, but for now he’s going to concentrate on what he’s already producing and continue to work on getting his name out to consumers.
Return to the Runway
One way to do that is through fashion shows. In the beginning, he was a menswear anchor for New York Fashion Week, but he took a four-plus-year hiatus as he focused on building his own direct-to-consumer business.
But after showing at Pitti, he realized how much he missed the runway so he returned to the calendar in September with an intimate show at a restaurant in New York.
Snyder said that fashion shows today don’t serve the same purpose they did historically, which is to showcase a collection to retailers and press. “There’s so much heat that’s driven by a show,” he said. Because they’re livestreamed, consumers can tune in, and including influencers in the audience is also helpful to raise a designer’s profile.
“In a good year, I’ll get 1 billion impressions,” Snyder said. “But I had about 1.2 billion impressions in the U.S. for my show in September, and 3.2 billion after Pitti. It’s not just for the wholesale model anymore.”
Another way to get his name out is through collaborations. Snyder has done so many during his career that he’s referred to as the King of Collaborations, a moniker he’s OK with.
He said he first got the idea for collaborations during his frequent trips to Japan. He would browse vintage shops there and saw Champion, Red Wing, Alden and other American brands on display. “The Japanese really covet Americana,” he said.
So does Snyder, who embraced the opportunity to work with these brands as well as others.
“I enjoy doing them and I love working with brands that have a rich history,” he said. Snyder pointed out that he was the first designer to work with L.L. Bean on a collaboration and he relished the chance to pore through the brand’s archives for inspiration.
With L.L. Bean or Timex or Champion, he endeavors to “think of things in a different way” and not just create products that are a “regurgitation” of what’s already been done.
Extending the Reach
That was the strategy he took with Woolrich. That company traces its history to 1830 in Plum Run, Pa., where founder John Rich opened a woolen mill. The brand expanded into outdoor garments, many of which sported the company’s Buffalo Check.
The founding family continued to run the company for eight generations but in 2016, the Italian company W.P. Lavori, which had previously held the license for the European market, acquired a majority stake. Two years later, the last plant closed in Woolrich, Pa., and the business was sold to the Luxembourg-based investment firm L-Gam and the Japanese company Goldwin.
The new owners approached Snyder about coming on board as creative director of a new, more premium line, Woolrich Black Label, that would blend the company’s heritage with a more modern aesthetic.
Snyder teased the product during his show at Pitti Uomo and the collection debuted for fall.
“It’s the biggest collaboration I’ve done,” Snyder said. “The brand is almost 200 years old, it’s very American and very traditional. They gave me the keys to the brand and told me to reimagine what it could be.”
The initial collection encompasses two newly created collections: Heritage, which consists of sophisticated updates of iconic Woolrich designs such as the classic Buffalo Check shirt in cashmere, as well as the Arctic parka, a style once worn by Admiral Richard E. Byrd, the leader of the first American scientific missions to the Antarctic.
The second component is called Technical and features sartorial pieces in high-performance materials intended to meet the demands of the outdoors while still being chic enough to be worn in the city.
Snyder believes there’s a big, untapped opportunity for Woolrich Black Label to become a giant brand. “There’s so much history there and I’m injecting a lot of luxury into it,” he said.
The collection is being sold primarily at Woolrich stores globally as well as at a number of Snyder’s stores in the U.S.
With so many irons in the fire, Snyder is well on his way to reaching the $500 million projection set out by Jay Schottenstein. But what does he believe to be the secret sauce that has allowed him to prosper when so many other talented designers have crashed and burned?
“I’ve had more experience than most other designers,” he said, adding that the relationships he developed over his years in the industry have also proven invaluable.
“Then, you have to convince the factories, the creditors and the banks to believe in your dream.”