The honest answer is that almost nobody who rows wears Rowing Blazers, and the brand was never designed for them anyway. It was not an athletic label in the sense that Tracksmith is an athletic label, built by runners for the people who run with them; it was a brand about the costume of belonging, conceived by someone who actually belonged and who understood that the costume was funnier, and more valuable, than the club itself.
The customer it found along the way was not an oarsman but a particular kind of man who grew up on Supreme drops and sneaker raffles, aged into a salary and a mortgage, and decided somewhere along the way that he wanted to look like he had a standing reservation at a place with a dress code. He wanted the club without the membership, and for seven years Rowing Blazers sold him the wink that made that possible.
That was a real business, and in its best years it was a very good one. It was also a business that depended on two specific people to keep the wink sincere, and both of them are gone now, one of them to the competition. What follows is an attempt to explain what happens to a brand when the people who made it walk out the door and the people who bought it try to keep the joke going without them.
The inversion
Every prep brand begins with Ralph Lauren whether it intends to or not, so it is worth starting there. Ralph Lifshitz was a kid from the Bronx who built the WASP fantasy for outsiders, for the millions of Americans who wanted the uniform of a world they had been told, in a hundred subtle ways, that they could not enter. The genius of the enterprise was the distance. Because he was not in the club, he could render it perfectly and without the self-consciousness of a man who had actually sat through a Thursday dinner at one, and that distance is what allowed a department store brand to become, as the Deseret News once put it, the costume department of an entire decade. I have written about this arc on 2PM more than once, most directly in The New Prep and later in Memo: Olympic Fashion, where the argument was that the culture which accidentally made Ralph Lauren in the 1980s and 1990s had by 2021 consumed preppy culture entirely.
Jack Carlson was the opposite case in nearly every respect. He went to Georgetown, then to Brasenose College at Oxford for an MPhil and a DPhil in archaeology, and along the way he served as a coxswain on the U.S. national team. Before he ever sold a garment he wrote a coffee-table book about the history of the blazers themselves, the striped and piped and badged jackets worn by oarsmen on both sides of the Atlantic, and the book was the seed of the company. He was not rendering a fantasy from the outside. He was taking the artifacts of his own life and selling them back to people who found them charming, with just enough irony attached that nobody had to admit they wanted in. If Ralph Lauren sold the dream to outsiders, Carlson sold the joke to insiders and to the insider-adjacent, which in practice meant finance, media, tech, and the men who collect watches.
When I wrote The New Prep in 2020, the argument was that a small cohort of brands, Aimé Leon Dore, Noah, KITH, Telfar, Todd Snyder, and Rowing Blazers among them, were doing to Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers what streetwear had done to Polo a generation earlier: they were taking the codes and making them culturally alive again, and in so doing they were rewriting what it meant to be preppy at all. Rowing Blazers stood out in that group because its presence was noticeably diverse in a way that the category had never managed, and because the images it shared through social channels read as a welcome sign rather than a velvet rope. That reading held for about four years, and it holds less well now.
The proof is the watch
If you want to know who a brand’s customer actually is, ignore the lookbook and pay attention to what sells out, because the lookbook is who the brand wishes it attracted and the sellout is who showed up with a credit card.
By that measure, Rowing Blazers’ most reliable customer has never bought a blazer. He buys a Seiko.
In July, the brand released its fourth collaboration with Seiko and the vintage dealer Eric Wind, a pair of Rally Divers at $495 apiece, each limited to 2,500 numbered pieces. All 5,000 sold through within hours of the 11 a.m. launch, with a small allocation held back for the Elizabeth Street flagship, which works out to about $2.5 million in sell-through before lunch for a heritage-coded brand running a release calendar borrowed wholesale from the sneaker industry. There were numbered editions, a timed drop, a sign-up page teasing a caseback a month ahead of launch, and resale listings by the afternoon. Nothing about that behavior belongs to a rower. All of it belongs to a Hodinkee reader.
The Seiko is the tell that Rowing Blazers is, at bottom, the Aimé Leon Dore trade in a different accent: prep run through the drop calendar rather than the catalog, and a customer who’s the post-streetwear adult. He has the reflexes of a hypebeast and the closet of a lacrosse coach. He is somewhere between 30 and 45; he lives on the East Coast or in a city that would like to, and he will pay $495 for a Seiko 5 with a checkered bezel because the scarcity is the product and the watch is merely the receipt. This matters because the drop customer and the heritage customer want different things from the same brand, and a company can serve both only as long as a creative hand is strong enough to hold the contradiction together. For seven years that hand was Jack’s.
The other half of the store
The rest of the assortment tells you where the brand quietly stopped being about rowing. Paddington is there, and Winnie-the-Pooh, and Babar, and Warm & Wonderful, the British knitwear label Carlson revived and best known for the black sheep sweater Diana wore, now merchandised on the site as “Diana’s Edit.” This is licensed nostalgia and a gift strategy, and it is where the women’s customer and the holiday customer enter the funnel. The crest, it turns out, is a format rather than a heritage; it can be applied to a bear as easily as to a boat club, and the merchandising team knows it.
Then scroll to the bottom of the same site, where an Archive Sale is running at up to 75 percent off with a tiered promotion attached: spend $250 and take 25 percent off, spend $350 and take 35 percent off, applied automatically at checkout. So the brand is running scarcity at the top of the funnel and a spend-and-save cadence at the bottom, numbered sellouts on a Thursday and markdowns by the weekend. I have been an operator in this industry long enough to know what that pairing means. It means two merchandising philosophies live inside one P&L, and neither is in charge. The drop model tells the customer that the product is worth more than he is paying; the tiered markdown tells him it is worth less than the ticket and that the house already knows. A brand can run either of those and be coherent, but a brand that runs both is telling you, whether it means to or not, that inventory is heavy and that the people managing it come from a cadence background rather than a cult one. In 2021 I wrote that you could walk into a J.Crew and feel soulless. That feeling isn’t confined to J.Crew anymore.
Who bought it, and who left
In February 2024, Carlson sold a majority stake in the company to Burch Creative Capital, the firm founded by Chris Burch of Tory Burch, alongside Tom Vellios, who co-founded Five Below, and Jason Epstein of Stonecourt Capital. The stated plan was the customary one for a founder-led brand taking institutional money: install a professional management layer, expand women’s, broaden the core, and open a larger flagship. Within months, the brand hired its first chief executive, Laura Willensky, whose résumé runs through J.Crew, Talbots, Madewell, Janie & Jack, and Away, and its first chief financial officer, Grant Simm, who came over from Aimé Leon Dore.
An operator reads those two hires as a thesis. J.Crew, Talbots, and Madewell are the cadence-and-markdown school of American apparel, while ALD is the drop school, and Burch hired one of each, which is almost exactly what the website looks like today.
Carlson stayed on as creative director, then as creative advisor, for roughly a year before exiting entirely in March 2025. David Rosenzweig, the co-founder who brought four decades of operating history from Perry Ellis and Sonia Rykiel to the partnership and who, by most accounts, was the adult in the room at the In-N-Out next to the USRowing Training Center where the brand was first sketched on a napkin, had already left. Reporting on David’s timeline conflicts: one outlet notes he remained director of strategy through the sale, while another says he left in 2024, but the distinction hardly matters to the argument. By the spring of 2025, the two men who built the thing were no longer building it.
Then came the turn that makes this memo worth writing.
In September 2025, J. Press named Jack Carlson its president and creative director. J. Press, founded on the Yale campus in 1902 and owned today by Onward Holdings of Japan, is the most literal Ivy brand still standing, the one that Rowing Blazers had spent its entire existence affectionately needling, and Carlson showed his first collection for it at the Explorers Club during New York Fashion Week to a room full of repp ties and navy blazers.
He went home, in other words.
The brand he sold now has to compete against the house he grew up in, run by the one person alive who knows its customer by name.
The competitive set, as of today
When a founder leaves, the brand stops competing against its own past and begins competing against every adjacent operator who can credibly claim a piece of its customer, and the list for Rowing Blazers is now long. It is best sorted by which version of that customer each competitor is positioned to take.
J. Press is the obvious one and the dangerous one. For a century and change, it was the brand Rowing Blazers made fun of, and now it has Jack, Onward’s capital, Japanese manufacturing discipline, and the heritage Rowing Blazers could only ever quote. If the Rowing Blazers customer decides at some point that he wants the real thing rather than the wink, the door is open, and the man who knows his name is standing in it.
Aimé Leon Dore owns the post-streetwear prep customer outright, and has since before Rowing Blazers existed. Teddy Santis is Queens, Greek immigrant parents, Ralph and Supreme as his stated reference points, and LVMH money behind him. ALD is what Rowing Blazers would have been had it never been about rowing in the first place, and the shared CFO is not a coincidence.
Drake’s is the British answer and, for the connoisseur end of this customer, the current reference point. Michael Hill’s company has come to define soft tailoring, rugby shirts, and the shaggy-dog sweater for a generation, and it has done so with an editorial voice that is witty without being ironic. Drake’s sells the club without the wink, to the same man, at a higher price, and he pays it gladly.
Sid Mashburn is the Southern gentleman’s version, with real stores, real tailors, and a proprietor whose face and manners are the brand. Mashburn has the single asset Rowing Blazers lost, which is a founder in the building, and he has a women’s business in Ann Mashburn that was built from the start rather than bolted on after a sale.
Quaker Marine Supply is small, Long Island, and recently revived, and it represents what a heritage revival looks like when it stays close to the dock. It takes the sailing customer that Rowing Blazers always implied but never actually held.
Buck Mason is the West Coast foil. It sells the same man a plainer uniform with no heraldry at all, at accessible prices, through a store fleet that is growing steadily while Rowing Blazers is still talking about a single flagship. If the irony fades and the customer simply wants good clothes, this is where he goes.
Noah remains the conscience of the category. Brendon Babenzien’s brand does the rugby, the crest, and the nautical reference with a point of view about how things are made and who makes them, and it has the credibility to make that point of view stick. The two brands collaborated once; they will not need to again.
Todd Snyder is the scaled, American Eagle-owned expression of the same instinct, with a Madison Avenue townhouse and a collaboration machine that was running years before Rowing Blazers launched.
J.Crew is back from bankruptcy with Babenzien directing men’s (at least for a time), which means the mass version of New Prep is now being run by one of the people who invented the niche version. The J.Crew rugby is $98, and the customer who bought one Rowing Blazers rugby at $195 as a statement will buy three of J.Crew’s as a wardrobe.
Blackstock & Weber, Chris Echevarria’s loafer brand, which I covered on 2PM as part of the class of brands that walked through the door The New Prep described, takes the footwear wallet and, increasingly, the cultural credibility that once belonged to Rowing Blazers alone.
Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers are the originals, still enormous and still the reference, and Ralph in particular has rediscovered its own archive and begun selling it back to the ALD customer with a perfectly straight face. When the originator gets the joke, the parodist is in trouble.
Tracksmith is not prep, but it deserves a place on this list because it does what Rowing Blazers only pretended to do: sell an actual athletic subculture its own artifacts, made well and without irony. It is the honest version of the proposition, and the amateur runner buys it for the same reasons the Rowing Blazers customer tells himself he buys a rugby.
The women’s set
Burch’s thesis for the acquisition was women’s, and on paper he is precisely the right owner to hold it. Tory Burch was the prep fantasy for women, scaled into a business worth well over a billion dollars, and C. Wonder was the same fantasy at a lower price point, which died in three years. Rowing Blazers is his third pass at the same customer, and the women’s competitive set it walks into is considerably harder than the men’s, because the women’s customer has a hundred more options and far less patience for a brand whose heritage is a men’s boat club.
Tory Burch is the parent’s own reference point and therefore the ceiling. Tunics, flats, the double-T, and now a credible designer brand under Tory’s own direction; a Rowing Blazers women’s line will be compared to it inside the firm before it is ever compared to anything outside.
Staud, also in the Burch portfolio, owns the going-out dress and the bag under Sarah Staudinger, and if Burch is splitting women’s attention between his companies, Staud has the momentum.
Sézane is the French direct brand that captured the American preppy-adjacent woman by showing her a Parisian version of herself, and its stores are full of exactly the customer Rowing Blazers hopes to reach with a Paddington sweater.
Ganni proved, from Copenhagen, that irony in women’s fashion could be made commercially durable at scale, which is both an encouragement and a bar.
La Ligne is stripes as a brand, founded by former Vogue editors, and it owns the Breton and the rugby stripe in women’s at a premium, which is the exact territory a Rowing Blazers women’s line would need to claim.
Doen takes the California, romantic, sisters-founded customer whose cottage-prep instinct overlaps with the one that sells the Diana sweater.
Alex Mill, Mickey Drexler’s post-J.Crew project with his son, is the most direct like-for-like competitor to a Rowing Blazers women’s business that actually works, because it does the relaxed Ivy thing for both sexes with Drexler’s merchandising instincts behind it.
Tuckernuck quietly built a nine-figure business selling preppy women’s clothing to the mid-Atlantic and the Southeast without a trace of irony, and if Burch wants to know what the straight version of his thesis is worth, it is already trading.
Hill House Home proved with the Nap Dress that a single silhouette and a coastal-grandmother attitude could build a real company among women who were never going to shop a men’s boat-club brand.
Sporty & Rich is Emily Oberg’s women’s-led answer to ALD and the most direct competitor for the post-streetwear woman who wants a crest on a crewneck; it also took the health-club version of prep and turned it into a lifestyle.
J.Crew women’s, under Olympia Gayot, is mass-market and credible again, and the dynamic is the same as on the men’s side: the statement piece versus the wardrobe.
That is the field, and Rowing Blazers women’s enters it with a men’s heritage, a licensed bear, one famous sweater, and no founder.
The soul of the brand
The genesis of this memo was a conversation with a menswear critic, highly visible in the trade and somewhat anonymous by his own design, who has spent years documenting this category with more rigor than most of the press that covers it. We did not agree on everything. We agreed on this: with the loss of Jack and David, the brand lost its soul.
That phrase gets used loosely in fashion, so I want to be precise about what it means here, because it is not a sentiment. It is an operating observation. A brand’s soul is the tacit knowledge that cannot be written into a brand book no matter how thick the book becomes. It is the founder knowing that a rugby shirt needs the rubber buttons and the twill collar and the one-inch stripe because he wore the real ones at Oxford and remembers how the wrong ones felt. It is the co-founder with forty years at Perry Ellis and Sonia Rykiel knowing which Portuguese mill will hold the color and which one will drift after the third wash. It is the two of them at an In-N-Out writing Seiko and Tudor and Gucci on a napkin and being right about all three. None of that transfers in a stock purchase agreement; it walks out with the people. And not even Claude can duplicate the peak of those efforts.
I don’t know how to explain the rest of it in a way that survives a spreadsheet, so I will explain it the way I experience it. I have long been an operator in this industry, and I knew, the way you know things on the floor, that Rowing Blazers was printed on selected Portuguese blanks. That was never the criticism; every brand in the category starts from a blank, and the only question that matters is whether the idea sinks into the cloth or sits on top of it. For a long time it sank in. The stripe felt like it belonged to the shirt. The crest felt as though it had been earned by a club that may not have existed but that you would have joined if it had. You could feel the hand of someone who had worn the thing before he sold it to you.
Now the print feels like the ink stops atop the fabric. Nothing feels a part of it any longer. The rugby is still a good rugby and the Seiko is still a good Seiko, but the thing that bound them to each other, the sense that one person’s taste was running through every SKU on the site, has been replaced by a merchandising calendar. The bear is there because the license was available. The Diana sweater is there because the SKU sells. The archive sale is there because the inventory is heavy. Each of those decisions is defensible on its own, and together they are the sound of a brand being managed instead of made.
The buyer gets the trademark, the customer file, the supplier list, and the Shopify store. The buyer does not get the reason.
This is what I meant by soul, and it is what every operator who has ever sold a company knows in the quiet part of his heart.
The Burch question
None of this means that Rowing Blazers fails. Burch has built more apparel businesses than almost anyone alive, and he bought this one because he saw a version of it that could scale, which is not the version Jack built. Burch’s version is the one in which the crest becomes a logo, the women’s line becomes the engine, the licensed characters become a permanent gifting business, and the stores multiply in the ZIP codes where Tory Burch already performs. That is a coherent plan. It is, more or less, the Tory Burch plan with a boat on it.
The risk is the one that killed C. Wonder: prep without a point of view is just color. The customer who made Rowing Blazers a cult was buying a point of view, and the customer Burch needs in order to scale is buying color, and those are not the same person. The first is already drifting toward Drake’s, toward J. Press, toward Noah, and toward the founder’s own next act, while the second has not quite arrived yet and will, when she does, have Sézane and Tuckernuck and Alex Mill open in the other tabs. I made a version of this argument in the DTC Menswear Brief on steady brands versus cool brands, once upon a time: the cool brand earns the press and the strategic interest, and the steady brand earns the margin, and very few companies manage to be both for long.
So here it is. If contrived fashion becomes en vogue by any chance, if the culture swings back toward the cheerful, logo-forward, knowingly artificial prep of the mid-2000s, then Rowing Blazers will become the brand that Burch envisioned, because it has the name, the crest, the colors, and the distribution plan for exactly that moment, and Burch has already lived through one such cycle and knows how to sell into it. If instead the culture keeps moving the other way, toward the quiet, well-made, founder-run, slightly obsessive version of menswear that Drake’s and Sid Mashburn and now J. Press represent, then Rowing Blazers becomes the licensed character of its own category: recognizable, friendly, and available at a discount by the weekend.
The customer will decide, as the customer always does. And the man who understands that customer better than anyone is at J. Press now, showing his first collection to a room full of people in navy blazers and, one assumes, sketching on the next napkin that may, itself, become the next founder-led brand.
Research and Analysis by Web Smith
2PM covers the convergence of commerce, media, and the industrial base that underwrites both. Related reading: The New Prep, Regarding H.E.N.R.Y., and Memo: In Good Fashion.
