If you”™re wondering why Michael Kaplan shifted his focus from venture capital to plus-size women”™s fashion, you could say it”™s in his genes.
Lining the walls of his new Fashion to Figure store at the Cross County Shopping Center in Yonkers are mirrors stenciled with hot-pink quotes from his late great-grandmother Lana Bryant. Quotes like “Never ask women to conform their figures to fashion, but rather bring fashion to the figure.”
It was in the early 1900s that Lana Bryant founded Lane Bryant, a retailer of plus-size, fashionable women”™s apparel. The business was managed by family members until 1982, when the stores were purchased by The Limited Inc. Charming Shoppes Inc. then acquired the stores in 2001.
Founded in 2004, Fashion to Figure is, in essence, Bryant”™s great-grandsons Michael and brother Nicholas Kaplan”™s fresh take on the family business.
“We”™re now kind of living in the post-Oprah days with positive stereotypes and, thankfully, women”™s body image,” said Michael Kaplan, a Brown University and Harvard Business School graduate. “It”™s not so stereotypically one-dimensional. The plus-sized woman now wants what every woman gets.”
Nicholas Kaplan, chief operating officer, manages the company from a practical standpoint, ensuring best practices, while Michael Kaplan, CEO, handles investments and scouts out sites.
“We”™ve looked at lots of different locations in White Plains, Central Avenue, upstate New York and Orange and Rockland counties,” Michael Kaplan said.
The Yonkers store brings the Fashion to Figure portfolio to eight ”“ there is a location at the Palisades Center in West Nyack.
Kaplan said the magic of the formula is in the trendy fashion and in the psychology of his customer. “There are 60 million American women who wear above a size 12 and who spend $30 billion or more a year on plus-size apparel,” he said. “We think we can operate hundreds of stores and we really, ambitiously would like to.”
In 1998 in grad school, a 25-year-old Michael Kaplan designed a business plan as an academic exercise that ended up getting funded by a plus-size retailer. He then went on to work as a financial analyst for Lazard Frères and “learned that companies need a financial backer and that companies need access to capital to grow.”
It was his time at RRE Ventures, a technology venture capital firm in New York City, where he witnessed what it took to start and sustain a business.
“It was really my passion for wanting to reconnect with my family”™s work that drove me into this,” he said. “There”™s no direct experience from my background that drove me here as much as a great market opportunity and a passion for what my family did.”
The Yonkers store is bright and pulsates with pop music. There are stylists on the floor and a comfortable seating area for the tagalong husband or child.
“The psychographics of our customer is someone who feels really great about herself and who wants fashion and who enjoys that confidence we give them,” Kaplan said. “And one of the things we try to do at Fashion to Figure is really relate that story of my great-grandmother ”“ she was a widow, an immigrant, a single mom who beat the odds and lived the American dream.”
