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Making business headlines today was the announcement that Paul Charron, a 17-year veteran of the $5B fashion apparel and accessories company Liz Claiborne will retire as CEO. Intrigued by the fashion world thanks to Project Runway and reading this recent news made me realize what a fascinating company Liz Claiborne is. It was the first company founded by a woman to be listed on the Fortune 500. The company has more than 40 brands in its portfolio (including hip fashion brands like Juicy Couture and Lucky Brand) that are available at over 30,000 points of sale worldwide. Lastly, Liz Claiborne is an innovative company that started as a low-end disruptor to established women fashion brands.

Liz Claiborne was founded by a group of designers who identified an important unmet Job to be done in the marketplace - helping women conveniently find fashionable ensemble driven clothes that are appropriate for wearing to work. Fashion brands such as Calvin Klein and Bill Blass were getting this Job done but their ensembles were too expensive for the average working woman. Recognizing the importance of keeping the clothes affordable, Claiborne established a low-cost model in the 1980s (at this time they challenged norms in the fashion industry by testing the concept of manufacturing overseas in Asia). They also recognized the importance making the shopping experience of the working woman more convenient and simpler. They were faced with a major stumbling block addressing this challenge. At this time department stores were classified according to items; pants in one department, skirts in another and blouses in yet another. This made it challenging for women to put together a decent outfit, forcing them to move around from one section of the store to another. Furthermore, the buyers at the department stores were not equipped to make purchases from one manufacturer across product lines. Liz Claiborne worked together with retailers to test a model wherein a section of the store was dedicated to a type of occasion (e.g., sportswear, suits that work, etc.). This model laid down the foundation for the brand and lifestyle "store-within-a-store" concept that is very popular today.

Over the last decade, Liz Claiborne has also had success riding out the waves of disruption in retailing. If you are interested in learning more about these patterns of retailing throughout history from specialty stores, to department stores, to category stores, catalogs and now the Internet, we recommend the HBR article Patterns of Disruption in Retailing authored by Clayton Christensen and Richard S. Tedlow.