Dickinsonians with a flair for the fun side of fashion are the focus
of our cover feature for summer. You’ll
encounter designers Sophie Simmons ’94 and Kate
Duvall ’04, company
co-owner Scott Beaumont ’75,
marketing professionals Jeff Funk ’91 and Marisa Jacobs ’78, boutique
co-owner Debbie Dickson ’82,
and photographer Doug Inglish ’91
and get a peek at how the presidential style of William G. Durden ’71
evolved.
-
- Scott Beaumont ’75 (below)
Life Is Good in Lillyland
Scott Beaumont ’75 shares in the success
of a luscious line of leisure wear
By Sherri Kimmel
Just a couple of miles from the sprawling expanse of the King of Prussia Mall lie acres
of bland and boxy generic office buildings. A hint of shocking pink on the exterior
of one suggests that inside it may not be cubicles as usual.
It’s a good clue.
In the entryway are posters of laughing children by a pool wearing lavender, pink and
turquoise play wear and tanned ladies of leisure in pink and green golf togs. On a
coffee table is a thick book whose cover is emblazoned America’s
Elite 1,000: The Ultimate List. The Inside Story Behind America’s Top 1,000 Names.
A few flips of the pages bring you to the name you knew you’d find. Lilly Pulitzer.
And now, to that top-1,000 name is linked another, Scott Beaumont ’75.
But before
Scott there was only Lilly. Lovely Lilly, with the swanky lineage (old money) and famous
friends (the young Jackie and Jack Kennedy). Married to handsome publishing heir Peter
Pulitzer (who in the 1980s made the scandal sheets with his disastrous second marriage
to Roxanne, a woman dubbed by Spy magazine, “the strumpet with the trumpet”).
After
Lilly eloped with Pulitzer in 1952, they settled near his Florida orange groves. By the
late 1950s, Lilly became restless and, with a friend, opened a citrus-juice stand on
Palm Beach’s tony Worth Avenue. As Beaumont tells the story, “She had
the pink of grapefruit, green of limes, orange of oranges, yellow of lemons” all
down the front of her as she prepared the juice drinks.
Being a typical affluent woman
of her day she also had a full-time seamstress and dressmaker. Tired of staining her
clothes, Lilly asked her to fashion a simple dress whose fabric encompassed the color
scheme of the fruit juices.
“She came up with an A-line, braid-trimmed dress with
lace hem tape,” explains
Beaumont. “People came by the stand—Jackie Kennedy, C.Z. Guest—and
said, ‘Lilly’s juice is good, but her dress is great. Where can we get one?’ She
starts having a few more made up and hanging them at the juice stand. She’s [soon]
selling more dresses then juice.”
Lilly eventually left the juice business and established
her line of bright and happy resort-type wear in 1960. In 1984, more motivated to play
with her grandchildren than to design clothes and run a business, she closed the company.
Two astute Harvard MBAs and veterans of the fashion industry, James Bradbeer and Scott
Beaumont, who’d met while working for the clothier Eagle’s Eye, bought the
Lilly Pulitzer name in 1993. They knew a good brand when they saw one. Bradbeer, president,
and Beaumont, CEO, have spent the last decade re-establishing and expanding the reach
of the Lilly Pulitzer line.
Beaumont splits his time between the Philadelphia-area headquarters
and West Palm Beach, where Lilly still resides and makes suggestions for the line. But
he manages to work in plenty of quality time with wife Judith and their four children.
Now,
besides 51 independent “signature” stores around the country, they have
brought the line into Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and other high-end
retailers. A Lilly dress recently made the cover of the fashion bible, Women’s
Wear Daily, and the success of the Bradbeer-Beaumont team has been chronicled in Vanity
Fair and other large-circulation magazines.
Envisioning the right moves to bring back
the Lilly line is a skill that Beaumont, an English major at Dickinson, learned early
on. “I was a chess player, so I’m
always looking 12 to 14 moves ahead. I need to know how all the pieces move together.”
He
adds, “I know how a brand needs to be positioned in the marketplace and how
to make it successful. Everything we do is consistent with that.”
While the founding
days of the Lilly Pulitzer company may have smacked of the upper crust, the present approach
is truly egalitarian.
“I don’t like the whole big-shot thing,” Beaumont
pronounces firmly. He points to the layout of the offices of the headquarters, where
100 people work at designing dresses as well as preparing them for delivery around the
globe. His corner office is on the same level as the rest of the staff’s, and when
he walks around the warehouse, workers stop packing boxes to say, “Hi Scott,” and
chat a while.
His three objectives, he notes, have been, “to attract and maintain
top-caliber people, to reinvigorate the brand and to provide the capacity to run the
business. Our core value is ‘upbeat with a team approach.’ ”
The downstairs
design of the headquarters building reflects this attitude, as well as the heritage of
the business. Designed to replicate the sunny openness of Worth Avenue, an atrium with
arched doorways, skylights, pale yellow walls, and pink-, green- and white-striped awnings
serves as a lunch area for all. Against one wall is a juice stand, modeled after the
Lilly original.
As the posters in the building’s entryway suggest, for Lilly lovers,
it’s
all about “life, Lilly and the pursuit of happiness,” says Beaumont. “Fashion
can be uplifting and make positive changes in people’s behavior and attitude.”
Staying
original and limiting the Lilly line to its niche—fun wear, not career
wear—is essential. “In fashion, bigness is the enemy of cool,” says
Beaumont. “If your brand is everything to everyone, then it is not special to anyone.”
A
brand not to emulate is ginger ale: “It’s the third or fourth choice of
many but not the first choice of anyone. You need to be the first choice of some rather
than the third choice of many.” |
