I can’t say I was surprised to hear earlier this week that Rag & Bone co-founder Marcus Wainwright was stepping down from his operational role at the business, where he was most recently chief brand officer. After a significant push in the mid-2010s to become the next billion-dollar fashion brand, progress had been a struggle, with a revolving door of executives recruited to help take the label to the next, difficult-to-achieve level.
Wainwright, by all accounts (including my own), is well-meaning. He loves clothes. But he probably shouldn’t have been playing a significant day-to-day role in running a company with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales, and that disconnect was bound to catch up with him. (His co-founder, David Neville, left the daily operations several years ago to help manage his wife Gucci Westman’s wildly successful beauty line.)
