I love coffee and as someone who has traveled over 3 million miles, some of the best of my many coffee memories were from Dean & DeLuca. From the time I first received a gift of a bag of Dean & DeLuca Kansas City Blend (Am I remembering the name right? Is Kansas City even a coffee city?) to the time I was sitting at their midtown location watching what I thought was a taping of the Today show but was actually Russell Brand filming the iconic New York concert scenes for Get Him to The Greek. For me, the Dean & Deluca brand will always be about fond memories.
But from the business perspective, it has been a bloodbath for this once iconic luxury brand. After complicated bankruptcy proceedings, Dean & DeLuca was bought by a Thai company for the price of around 100,000 teeny containers of their formerly glorious house-brand caviar, or $20M in cash terms.
What happened and why should law firms care about the demise of Dean & DeLuca?
Last question first. Building a successful law firm in 2021 and beyond is the act of building a brand. There are a lot of ways to do this, some effective and some not so great. But without regard to the how, the why of brand-building is clear.
Josh Geist, a lawyer at the Pittsburgh firm, Goodrich & Geist, P.C, offers this advice about branding your firm:
“Your legal brand needs to be authentic, honest, and consistent. How you hold yourself out to the world - to your past, current, and future clients - reflects who you are and what you do. Your firm’s brand should speak clearly to why clients should come to you for help.”
This messaging is what killed Dean & DeLuca. Once arguably the most enviable brand in the high-end food space, the brand resonated with all that was the best in and of New York - the city of its founding - as well as having intentional international mystique.
Can Dean & DeLuca be saved?
Actually, yes. A lot of brands have found ways to redefine themselves, to play off the success and cachet of the original brand name. An excellent example of this comes from the world of fashion. Does anyone remember GANT? If so, do you remember it disappearing for a while?
GANT was saved by a Swedish sportswear company that licensed the name in the 80s or 90s and built it into a very desirable brand in Europe while the American company was honestly producing pretty mundane designs and poor quality clothes. In 1999, the American parent company, GANT USA, was bought by its Swedish partner company, Pyramid Sportswear, for a bargain basement price of $71M. Since then, the group of companies has been managed by this new entity, over 96% of which has been owned by the Swiss Maus Frères since the beginning of 2008.
The Gant brand was literally saved by Swedish high school boys, who, especially from 2007-2014, adopted the brand as their own, wearing the bright colors (pinks, greens, yellows) that helped define their ethos.
What is the ethos of your law firm? What is the culture - the spirit - of your firm? How often do you think about what your firm’s brand used to mean, what it means to people today, and what you would like it to mean tomorrow? While we sometimes see happy accidents such as Swedish kids claiming an old American fashion brand as their own, brand reinvention is usually just plain old hard work.
Breathing new life into any brand isn’t easy, but it’s absolutely possible. Every day is a new opportunity to redefine what your brand means. For Dean & DeLuca, which sold America luxury but couldn’t pay its own bills, closing all of their retail stores in bankruptcy is the foundation for their reinvention. The future of the brand will begin in East Asia, with the Thai-owned gourmet business serving delicious summertime drinks in Japan. As GANT did, re-launching a brand where there is less baggage that could damage the brand is a smart move. It is also expected that the brand could begin to relaunch in North America soon, having shed $300M in debt.
Whatever the form and structure of the new Dean & DeLuca, there will be a lot of people for whom just the mention of the brand invokes good memories. Whether that will be enough to spur people to action to buy their products and create new memories remains to be seen.