Sears names new CEO for Lands’ End
Sears Holdings Corp. has named Lands’ End executive vice president of merchandising David McCreight to replace CEO Mindy Meads, who left last week, the retailer said.
The change at the top of Lands’ End, which Sears, Roebuck and Co. acquired in 2002 for $1.9 billion, comes at time when industry experts have been questioning the ability of Sears to fold the Lands’ End brand into its corporate strategy – a challenge made even tougher after discount retailer Kmart Corp. acquired Sears, Roebuck last year to form Sears Holdings.
“Sears is still trying to figure out what to do with Lands’ End,” says Ulysses Yannas, a stock analyst at Buckman Buckman & Reid in New York. “Lands’ End has never managed to mesh with the client base of Sears, and if Sears can’t cope with Lands’ End, Kmart never will.”
Sears did not say why Meads left or what she planned to do next. But industry analysts have said Meads opposed mixing the relatively high-end Lands’ End brand with the mass-merchant and discount environments of Sears and Kmart.
Earlier this year, Sears chairman Edward S. Lampert denied rumors that Sears was looking to sell Lands’ End.
But how well Lands’ End fares under the new Sears Holdings corporate structure won’t be known for months, Yannas says. “We’ll be able to tell with this year’s Christmas season,” he says.
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