Shaking up Oaktree - Derek Tucker, president of Oaktree men's clothing chain

Black Enterprise, Oct, 1993 by Marjorie Whigham-Desir

Derek Tucker walked into an Oaktree clothing store at the Galleria Mall in St. Louis on a Saturday afternoon last December and found his sales team swamped with holiday shoppers. A consummate salesman himself, Tucker was not about to let a sale slip by. "He took off his jacket put it behind the counter and just started helping out," recalls assistant store manager John Brickler, incredulously.

It was classic Tucker, who got his start in the retail business racking up sales on the selling floor at the age of 17. Now president of the Oaktree menswear stores, the 36-year-old Tucker still knows how to make a sale. Last year, the mall-based chain sold an estimated $185 million." I love making it happen at the store level," he says." I never want to lose sight of what my customers are thinking and doing, or what they want even today."

That innate awareness of what finicky, fashion-conscious customers want has propelled Tucker through the ranks of Edison Brothers Stores Inc. (EBS), Oaktree's $1.5-billion parent company and one of the largest specialty retail concerns in the country. Early on, Tucker developed a reputation as a stellar seller who had his finger on the pulse of the latest apparel trends.

During his 18 years at EBS, Tucker has transferred his skills as a salesclerk and store manager into those of a top-flight merchandiser and buyer. Over the past decade, Tucker has deftly spotted a range of trends - from parachute pants to the Miami Vice look to hip-hop street fashions - and cashed in on them.

As president tucker has engineered the growth of Oaktree from 213 stores to a coast-to-coast chain with 310 outlets now branching into Puerto Rico and Mexico. His approach: create or interpret a fashion trend for the menswear market, and then merchandise it in a slick, high-tech atmosphere at a good price.

But a slow-growth economy, the lack of a clear fashion trend in menswear and a sluggish demand for highly stylized clothes have resulted in three years of lackluster performance for Oaktree. Now Tucker faces his biggest challenge: maintaining Oaktree's share of the $9-billion men's apparel market in a soft retail environment crammed with competition. To do so, he must increase sales by finding the right mix of merchandise to redefine and create a demand for the Oaktree Look of the |90s, a signature style that now fluctuates somewhere between pseudo-Armani dresswear and casual rapper-chic.

A Knack For Fashion

The San Francisco-born Tucker has always had an eye for fashion. Even as a junior high school student, Tucker knew he wanted to get into the rag trade. "On the first day of school, It was always a big deal to wear a certain thing, but I never wanted to wear what everyone else was wearing," he recalls. "I always hooked mine up a little differently." Nowadays, Tucker favors designer suits for work and T-shirts and jeans on weekends.

His interest in clothes and a desire to pursue fashion as a career led the former high school football defensive captain to forgo a four-year athletic scholarship to the Ivy League's Dartmouth University. He enrolled instead at Skyline College, a local two-year junior college in San Bruno. He graduated with an associate's degree in fashion merchandising, the business program for those drawn to a retail career. "Derek knew where he wanted to go," says Rosemary Leach, director of fashion merchandising at Skyline. "He always seemed to have a plan for himself and he knew that he wanted to be a buyer by age 25."

Tucker got the rest of his training on-the-job, working for EBS while attending college. Hired as a part-time salesperson for two weeks during the 1974 Christmas season at a Jeans West store in the San Francisco area, Tucker rang up $1,000 worth of merchandise for just one customer. That January, when all other holiday help was laid off, Tucker had landed a full-time gig.

His climb up the EBS hierarchy, which grooms its senior officers from the store level up, has been on fast-forward ever since. Over the next 12 years, Tucker's strong business results paired with good management skills rocketed him from store manager at 19, to buyer at 25, and then president at 32.

"The first time I met him, he had fire in his eyes and a flair for fashion," says Wes Hornsby, assistant vice president and buyer for JW/Jeans West. "He understood what was going on in the streets. You've got to know what the customer wants to do good business, and Derek had it."

That "it" caught the attention of Willard Fonarow, the now retired godfather of EBS merchandising, who brought Tucker into management at the EBS buying office in St. Louis.

A Natural At Spotting Big Trends

Tucker came to Oaktree as a merchandiser in 1980, when the division was targeted to men who wanted stylish, inexpensive suits and dress shirts. Tucker, however, identified a market niche that wasn't being offered in menswear: a coordinated line of casual blazers, pants and shirts in a range of colors and styles that could be found at any Oaktree store throughout the country. "I thought we could capitalize on sportswear. It was hotter, funkier and more fashion-forward," he says. The strategy worked, boosting sales and repositioning the chain in the contemporary men's retail market.