Unified Commerce Buys Greats from Steven Madden

Unified Commerce Group — the direct-to-consumer operator that already rolled up Spiritual Gangster and Frank And Oak — is ready to move faster. 

The New York firm said on Thursday that it bought the assets of the premium, born-in-Brooklyn sneaker brand Greats Inc. from Steve Madden, which itself bought the business in 2019. As part of the deal, Madden will take a stake in the Unified business. 

Unified also made a strategic investment in Utah-based womenswear retailer Böhme, which was founded by Vivien and Fernanda Böhme and has 14 stores across Utah, Idaho, Montana and Arizona.

The quick pace — Unified has now done three deals in six months including Spiritual Gangster — signals a new phase for the company. 

Chief executive officer Dustin Jones, the veteran of Fung Retailing Group and Macy’s who founded Unified with Greg Freihofner in 2019, said in an interview that the idea was to always take a “crawl, walk, run” approach.

Unified is now moving from crawl to walk and Jones seems ready to run soon.

The company, which now has more than 30 stores and more than 200 wholesale partners, bases its brands around a hub that provides operational, tech and other support. 

It’s an approach designed to get stronger as more brands join — and Jones is very much on the hunt, having set up the business to snatch up DTC companies that need a new corporate context to thrive. 

“We incubated the hub with Frank and Oak, we incubated it with Spiritual Gangster, and we’re now increasingly expanding the scope of the hub,” Jones said. “That’s what we will do with all the brands we acquire in the future. It’s proven to lower their costs and it’s proven to accelerate their growth. The playbook has become pretty clear for us on that.”

While the DTC world Greats helped pioneer once saw scores of companies secure funding to help disrupt some part of the market, keeping the lights on now is much more of a grind for players that are still independent. 

Unified could offer something of a refuge. 

“As a founder you really get to clean up your cap table, you get to incentivize yourself,” Jones said. “Whether you grow three times or one time, the platform is your currency and then the resources that are available to you — whether it’s the backend, the front end, the sales cycle end — those resources are incrementally much stronger than what you’re able to do yourself.”

Jones said the Unified team is also starting to get some crucial experience that can be put to work on future investments. 

“In retail, much of success and failure is based on solving for the right problems first, not your ability to solve problems,” he said. “It’s solving for the right ones in the right priority. That’s where the pattern recognition that we’re developing is becoming so useful because we’re seeing these things [while we evaluate potential deals], and we’re saying, ‘Hey, that’s important, but we don’t need to solve that today.’ You might think that’s not as important as it is, but that’s actually number one.” 

And Unified also a new big backer to help it on its way.

Edward Rosenfeld, chairman and CEO of Steven Madden, said, “We have known Dustin and his team for a number of years, and are very confident that Greats will find a strong strategic fit with the fast-growing portfolio of brands at UCG.”