President & CEO of Lipsey’s and Haspel
Hometown: Baton Rouge
Age: 48
If you want to chat with Laurie Aronson about one of the two massive brands she leads, you’d better make sure you know which time zone she’s in first.
With much of her team on the ground in New York City, but her office and 95 employees located in her Baton Rouge headquarters, she finds frequent traveling a necessity.
Though she doesn’t get much sleep, Aronson wouldn’t trade an extra hour of rest for an inch of the growth Lipsey’s and Haspel have made in the past few years.
• Aronson manages and directs both of her family businesses: Lipsey’s, America’s leading wholesale firearm distributor, and Haspel, the men’s clothing label credited with the invention of the seersucker suit. Her father Richard Lipsey founded Lipsey’s, and Haspel was founded in 1909 by her grandfather, Joseph Haspel, Jr.
• She revamped Haspel’s brand when she took over in 2012 by bringing it back in-house, integrating sportswear into the line and pushing the products into high-end retailers like Nordstrom.
• She landed Haspel pieces on the pages of publications like GQ, Esquire and The Wall Street Journal and the backs of celebrities such as Bryan Cranston and Paul Rudd with the help of her NYC-based public relationships team.
• She set her five-year revenue goal at $50 million.
Her plans for 2016:
“[Haspel] will definitely be expanding our product offerings. … As we get into 2016, we’re taking that next step into categories that we have not had our hands in in the past. We’re very excited about these categories, and we’ve got a couple of collaborations that we’re doing. One of them is a denim company called Raleigh denim, and we’re making a very cool seersucker jean that we will have for spring 2016. The other is a jewelry collaboration with Mignon Faget out of New Orleans that will launch in the spring and be sold in the Mignon Faget stores as well as online.”
“Laurie knows product. When I present ideas or a collection to her, she’s got an instinct about what will succeed or be interesting. She also gives me enough autonomy to try new ideas and follow my instincts.”
—Sam Shipley, Haspel’s designer
