How Marquee Brands is thinking about growth and global reach after its Laura Ashley acquisition

Founded in 1953, Laura Ashley is based in the United Kingdom and is known for its bedding, wallpaper, home decor and textiles. This is the brand’s second time trading hands in five years; in April 2020, the investment firm Gordon Brothers acquired Laura Ashley out of insolvency amid the coronavirus pandemic. According to Gordon Brothers, under its purview, Laura Ashley grew to have more than $750 million in global retail sales.

Now, Laura Ashley is one of Marquee Brands’ 17 brands — an eclectic list that crosses the food, fashion and lifestyle categories and includes Martha Stewart, Sur La Table and A Pea in the Pod. Marquee Brands, which launched in 2014, is a brand owner, licensor and marketer with its own content and media studio. It acquires brands’ intellectual property and partners with other companies to make and distribute products under those brands’ names.

Marquee Brands has ramped up its acquisitions in the last couple of years. Before bringing on Laura Ashley, it added umbrella brand Totes and gloves brand Isotoner to its ranks in June 2024. Marquee Brands says that adding Laura Ashley brings the retail value of its global portfolio to more than $4 billion.

Terrace spoke with Modern Retail about Marquee Brands’ reasons for acquiring Laura Ashley, as well as its approach to growth, licensing and brand-building in its 11th year as a business. Below are excerpts of the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why was Marquee Brands interested in Laura Ashley? How does the brand fit into the company’s larger acquisition strategy?
Our mission as a brand management company is to harness and grow the value of timeless brands. When we look at acquisitions, we are really looking for brands that we consider to fall under that umbrella… The Laura Ashley brand is really synonymous with timeless design, [has] a very clear aesthetic centered around romantic florals and vintage-inspired design and is known for high-quality craftsmanship in all of the categories that the brand is in, particularly in home and fashion. So, the brand’s heritage and clear position were really appealing to us and something that we always look for in a new brand that we acquire.

The appeal also is really what we would call “universal and global.” [Laura Ashley] is a truly global brand. It clearly has a huge presence in the U.K., [and] also a very large and growing presence in the U.S. and in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan. [There is] a lot of opportunity to grow the brand into other territories around the world and really continue to expand the brand’s presence around the world.

And then, I would say, from an integration standpoint, the brand has already been in a licensed model for the last few years since it was bought out of administration by Gordon Brothers. And so, as [we are] a brand management firm, that’s really going to allow for a seamless transition into our model. It allows us to add on and keep all of the employees in the U.K. We now have a London office, which is a very exciting development for Marquee and something that we’ve been looking to do for a while. So, being able to leverage that team that has done such an incredible job building the brand in the U.K. and now integrating them into Marquee’s broader team and model is something that’s very appealing to us, as well.

What are Marquee Brands’ goals for Laura Ashley? How does it hope to transform the brand going forward?
I think the Laura Ashley brand is in a really healthy position at the moment. It’s got a robust global footprint. It’s distributed in over 80 countries, [in] 200 categories, [with] 100 partners. We are inheriting the brand in a great place, and we want to continue that work and leverage our expertise in a few areas.

The first is digital marketplaces and retail partnerships. We have a really terrific digital marketplace team. We have a history, particularly in the home category, of successfully launching and growing brands into digital marketplaces, specifically, for example, [on] Amazon, where we’ve really launched and grown the Martha Stewart brand in a very compelling way over the last couple of years. We would like to plug the Laura Ashley brand into that model and really allow that to take off, particularly in the U.S. and in Europe. Really modernizing that omnichannel presence will help us to grow the footprint in North America, Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

Then, we want to continue to evolve the Laura Ashley brand into what we would call a full lifestyle brand. So, continue to launch new categories and foster more collaborations and engage multi-generational audiences. Lean into kids’, lean into more women’s fashion, particularly in the U.S. There’s a lot of compelling opportunity to extend the lifestyle presence in North America and the U.K. There’s a lot of untapped opportunity in Western Europe, as well.

And then, there are areas of the world where Laura Ashley really doesn’t have a big presence today, where we would like to continue to grow the brand. So, Asia-Pacific, the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates]. We have this big, incredible archive of designs that we can lean into that can help us authentically translate the brand to different markets and launch new categories and even new retail operations around the world.

Has this acquisition changed how Marquee Brands is thinking about international growth? In other words, now that Marquee Brands has a new British brand in its portfolio, is bringing on more international brands going to be a focus for 2025 and beyond?
I love that question… While the bulk of the existing [Laura Ashley] team is in the U.K., the brand truly is a global brand. And I would say that the majority of the brands in our portfolio are actually global brands, as well.

Ben Sherman is a brand that we own that is a heritage U.K. brand and obviously has a strong presence in the U.K. but is a global brand. We have the Ben Sherman brand in Asia. We have it in Western Europe. We are growing it aggressively in North America and in Latin America.

Martha Stewart, a brand that has had a home in North America for so many years, we are now making ubiquitous around the world. We are opening our first-ever Martha Stewart mono-branded stores in the GCC within the next few months. We’ve launched Martha Stewart into the Philippines. We’re in Mexico. We are launching in various different markets around the world and really turning that brand into a global brand.

So, I would say that it is key to Marquee’s strategy to A) acquire brands that either are already or have the opportunity to become truly global and B) organically grow the brands within our portfolio into new territories in the world to develop them into global brands. So, of course, as we look towards new acquisitions, we are looking for brands… to plug into our model and bolster our business development opportunities and activity around the world.