Gordon Brothers is most commonly known for helping companies through bankruptcy, handling things like restructuring, financing and asset liquidation. But recently, a lesser-known division of Gordon Brothers found itself in the spotlight when the company sold the iconic British brand Laura Ashley to brand management firm Marquee.
The deal was managed by Gordon Brothers’ Brand Division, which had spent the previous four years revitalizing Laura Ashley after its 2020 bankruptcy. Carolyn D’Angelo, Senior Managing Director of Brand Operations at Gordon Brothers and former President of Laura Ashley, said that Gordon Brothers’ brand management unit flies a bit “under the radar,” and the company is okay with that.
“Our strategy is to buy and sell,” D’Angelo explained in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Different from [other brand management firms like] Iconix or Marquee or Authentic, we buy brands with the intent of selling them at some point in the future. We look for brands that have a heritage, maybe have lost their way, maybe need some marketing expertise, maybe need to change the model and be moved from an operating company into an asset-light model. We look for brands that we believe have growth potential, not only in their core territory, like the UK, but in other territories around the world.”

Laura Ashley certainly fit that bill. After nearly 70 years in operation, the “quintessentially British” brand, known best for its colorful floral prints, found itself in dire straights during the pandemic and became one of the first retail casualties of COVID-19 in the UK. Gordon Brothers was working with the UK administrator to take the brand through the bankruptcy process, and when the Laura Ashley IP went up for sale the company decided to acquire it.
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Moving from Vertical Operations to ‘Asset-Light’
Gordon Brothers then set to work reimagining Laura Ashley’s business model, while ensuring it stayed top-of-mind with consumers through a combination of product licensing and marketing activations. The biggest shift for the brand involved moving to what D’Angelo describes as an “asset-light” model — meaning that the company no longer owns most of its operations but instead partners with third parties to run its stores and create its products under strict brand guidelines. The brand makes most of its money through royalties rather than direct sales, but it also relieves itself of the financial and operational burden of running stores and designing and selling products.
“Prior to the bankruptcy, [Laura Ashley] was a vertical operation,” said D’Angelo. “They had company-owned stores, and most product categories were being sourced vertically, so they owned the inventory. They did very little, if any, licensing at all. But the interesting thing about when we bought the brand is that we turned some of those vertical manufacturers into licensees, so that worked out very nicely.”
It’s a process that Gordon Brothers has gone through before. In 2017, the company completed a similar turnaround of the Polaroid brand, selling it to Polish investor Wiaczesław Smołokowski after eight years of ownership following the brand’s 2008 bankruptcy. With Laura Ashley now in the hands of Marquee, Gordon Brothers currently has two brands under management — fashion label Nicole Miller and the more recently acquired 120-year-old German consumer electronics and lifestyle brand Telefunken.
“It’s really fun and energizing to rejuvenate and reimagine these brands,” said D’Angelo. “I love watching them grow and watching the success.”
Relaunching and Repositioning a Bankrupt Brand

D’Angelo is no stranger to the world of brand management; she has spent her career at the largest firms in this discipline, beginning with Iconix in 2007, followed by Sequential Brands Group and eventually Marquee Brands, to which Laura Ashley was sold. When asked if the sale of Laura Ashley to Marquee had anything to do with her having previously worked there, D’Angelo said it was just a “weird coincidence,” but that it does give her confidence in the brand’s future: “I obviously know a lot of the players at Marquee, and I was very happy to see where Laura Ashley was going because I know they’re really good brand stewards,” she said.
But it took some work to get the brand there. Over the course of the four years that it owned the brand, Gordon Brothers relaunched, repositioned and expanded Laura Ashley, eventually reaching the point where it was generating over $750 million in retail sales annually.
That work began in 2021 through a strategic relaunch at UK retailer Next. “It was really important to relaunch in the UK with a premier retailer like Next that not only had brick-and-mortar, but also had an amazing ecommerce business,” said D’Angelo.
Keeping Laura Ashley in the Public Eye
Today the brand has 150 brick-and-mortar locations, including shops in 60 Next locations, approximately 60 stores in South Korea operated by a licensee, additional licensed stores in Japan and a few stores in Spain operated under a franchise agreement. Under Gordon Brothers’ stewardship, the brand also has expanded its presence to 80 countries, including re-entering Australia and New Zealand, launching in South Korea and making its Chinese debut through a collaboration with the fashion retailer Peacebird.

In Europe, Gordon Brothers also developed an innovative ecommerce strategy: “Gordon Brothers was not prepared to run a [multinational] ecommerce site, so we did a test in Europe,” explained D’Angelo. “We had four countries — France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium — where we developed an ecommerce presence that drove to retailers in the region. So if you’re in France and you go to LauraAshley.eu, you’ll get to the site in French. It looks beautiful, it looks just like the Laura Ashley site, then when you go to buy the product, you will be driven to a retailer of your choice to [finalize the sale]. It’s been really successful.”
In addition to building out the brand’s licensing roster and retail partnerships, some of the most important work D’Angelo and her team did was on the marketing side of the equation. “We’re a very big believer in marketing, especially on a brand level,” said D’Angelo. “You have to make sure that your brands stay relevant, that they stay in the public eye and there’s a demand. What we’ve done with Laura Ashley, and other brands in our portfolio, is make sure that it stayed at the forefront of the consumer’s mind.”
In addition to more standard marketing of new products and collections, for the Laura Ashley brand this also took the form of collaborations with brands such as Lucky Brand and Rag & Bone (both also managed by brand firms, Authentic and WHP Global, respectively). Gordon Brothers also coordinated Laura Ashley activations at events including the 2023 Chelsea Flower Show, a takeover during the Formula 1 British Grand Prix, and a fashion relaunch with a special edition collection for the brand’s 70th anniversary in 2023.
The Asset-Light Model Isn’t for Everyone
Laura Ashley is far from the first iconic brand to find new life via an IP-based operating model. The major brand management firms’ rosters abound with familiar names that many consumers may not even realize are now run this way — Aéropostale, Lucky Brand, Toys ‘R’ Us, Eddie Bauer, Reebok and Vera Wang, to name just a few.
Which begs the question, why wouldn’t every brand want to run its business this way? The financial risks are minimal, the operational costs are light and, when done well, consumers can’t really tell the difference.
“When I worked for Iconix, which was the original brand management company, it was a fascinating and revolutionary idea that the brand itself was a very valuable asset,” said D’Angelo. “But in order to be successful with this model, and I’ve been doing this for a long time, you can’t just own the brand and say [to licensees], ‘You do all the heavy lifting and we’re just going to sit here and collect a check.’ You’ve got to market the brand.”
As D’Angelo pointed out, many brands, especially in the luxury sector, choose to take this approach only for certain categories. Eyewear and fragrance are particularly popular “because those are two mega-categories that a lot of people, for example, don’t really want to open their own fragrance house, so they’ll license it to somebody [who’s an expert],” said D’Angelo.
Additionally, licensing out your brand means ceding some control of product design, and even ecommerce and store experiences in some cases, to third-party licensees, which not all brands feel comfortable with, particularly if they are successfully running things vertically.
Not to mention that not every brand has an IP that is strong enough to license. “The brand has to have some form of emotional connection to the consumer,” said D’Angelo. “The consumer has got to want the brand and there’s got to be a design aesthetic. If I say Ralph Lauren, you know what the bedding is going to look like. A brand has to have that emotional connection, and that takes some time.
“It can be really hard for a new brand to start licensing, because your licensees want to know what they are paying a royalty for,” D’Angelo added. “That’s why for us, when we look at brands we want to invest in, it’s about a heritage. There’s a defined aesthetic, there’s a consumer demand.”