From a Cashmere Sweater to a 600M-Plus-Euro Golf and Lifestyle Brand

It all started with a cashmere sweater.

Today, Peter Millar may be best known for its golf and upscale lifestyle apparel, but when the company was founded in Raleigh, N.C., in 2001 by Chris Knott, Greg Oakley and Chet Sikorski, it started with a single product.

That sweater, offered in a rainbow of colors such as maize, fuchsia, coral and mint, soon attracted a following, allowing the founders to create other, complementary products.

Their collection caught the attention of Scott Mahoney, the company’s current chief executive officer, who grew up in Memphis and attended the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, but had relocated north to work at Polo Ralph Lauren.

“One night I was working at Ralph Lauren and left a meeting with the United States Golf Association out in New Jersey,” he recalled. “I was driving back to Connecticut, where you have a lot of windshield time to think about things, and thought, I should reach out to these guys and see about buying the company.”

He immediately knew that his partner should be Sea Island, a Georgia-based resort operator that was also Peter Millar’s biggest customer at the time.

“I actually called Greg and went down to meet with the three founders in North Carolina, then went from there to Sea Island to pitch them on the idea.”

The company was all in, agreeing to buy a majority stake in Peter Millar. Mahoney personally acquired a 25 percent position and left Ralph Lauren to join Peter Millar as CEO. That was in 2005.

Building a Brand

“So many companies talk about lifestyle brands and it’s kind of an overused expression, but having the partnership with Sea Island allowed us to create a whole lifestyle around Peter Millar,” Mahoney said. “We launched shoes and swimwear and these seaside knits that became the foundation of the brand.”

The goal back then was to “develop a nice $50 million to $75 million company, employ some people, have a great lifestyle and make some money,” Mahoney said. “We clearly have far surpassed that.”

While things were going well for Peter Millar, the same couldn’t be said for Sea Island. “When the real estate crisis hit, Sea Island had to make some choices, so they sold their interest, and we went through a sale process,” he said. Winona Capital bought Sea Island’s interest in 2009.

The Chicago-based private equity firm turned out to be “incredible partners,” Mahoney said. “So many private equity groups try to churn and burn you. What was wonderful about Winona was the partners there had operating experience and they knew what it was to have working capital and run a business. Ever since the beginning, we haven’t done things to make money. We do it the right way, and that was also their philosophy. It wasn’t about trying to grind margin out of products and take stuff out. It was really consistent with where we are today: make great products and give great value. That’s really served us well.”

But all good things come to an end and when Winona wanted to recoup its investment, it sold Peter Millar to Compagnie Financiere Richemont in 2012 after the brand caught the eye of Richemont chairman Johann Rupert, an avid golfer.

Once again, the company found a supportive parent. “The owners we’ve had in Richemont have been phenomenal. They’re incredibly supportive of the brand. They lend help where needed and leave us alone where needed. We’ve had the good fortune of incredible growth pretty much every year, and certainly since Richemont bought us, and, it’s funny, you find people are pretty happy when you’re getting the growth that we’re getting.”

Richemont, which owns brands ranging from Cartier and Chloe to Van Cleef & Arpels and Azzedine Alaia, does not break out sales for the division and only noted that in the last fiscal year, Peter Millar “maintained solid momentum.”

That’s also the reason Mahoney has remained at the helm for more than 20 years. “They have to like you and appreciate what you offer. So with the growth that we’ve had with the company and the culture we’ve created, it goes both ways.”

By the time it joined Richemont, Peter Millar had become firmly entrenched in the golf world. “So many companies start out with great ideas, but they don’t know how to get it sold,” he said. “Peter Millar was always lucky to have a great sales team, and that sales team had great connections through the golf world, so that became an avenue for the distribution of products.”

Among the most popular were the mercerized lisle polo shirts made from Egyptian long-staple cotton.

Over the years the collection has expanded significantly and Mahoney said today, Peter Millar is positioned as the premier brand in the better golf world. Even so, golf products, which fall under the Crown Sport brand, represent a little less than half of the company’s overall sales.

More Than Golfwear

In addition to Crown Sport, the brand offers lifestyle collections under the Crown, Crown Crafted and Women’s division. The new Pursuit high-end performance line is a subset of Crown Crafted.

Mahoney said all of the subbrands are successful and “serve different needs and purposes. We want to be able to dress somebody every day of the week, whether they’re going to a board meeting, the office, out to dinner with friends on Friday night, a soccer game on Saturday, to the beach or the golf course. It’s really about finding the need for where in their life the product fits,” he said.

As a result, the collection is carried at green grass shops as well as retailers such as Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and highly respected specialty stores such as Mitchells, Richards, Darien Sport Shop and Oak Hall.

“We sell 300 to 400 of the best specialty stores in the country,” he said. But Peter Millar is able to seamlessly juggle selling both majors as well as independents. “We try to be very sensitive with distribution,” he said. “In bigger cities you can have multiple distribution points but in smaller towns we try to pay attention. We turn a lot of people down and I don’t think many wholesalers do that.”

Direct-to-consumer is also a key area for the company.

“We have an incredible e-commerce team,” Mahoney said. “I put our website up against anyone in the world. It’s not just the products we offer, there’s so much more beyond that. The technology behind it and the brains behind the operations are incredible.”

Peter Millar has a robust retail division as well. There are currently 24 stores in the U.S., a handful of which are operated with local partners, although the company is moving away from that model and will ultimately bring all the stores in house.

“We’re incredibly selective in where we go,” he said. “We wait for the right spot, the right location. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, retail stores are just a marketing expense.’ Well, they’re not for us. Every retail store we have makes money. We believe in them. They’re all beautifully merchandised, and the staff represents what we represent. They’re kind, courteous, caring.”

The first two stores opened in resort communities: Southampton, N.Y., and Palm Beach, Fla., and they were “incredibly successful,” Mahoney said. “We have a store on Madison Avenue. We have a store in Chicago. We have a store in Atlanta. We have a store in Houston. We have two in Dallas. We’re in Birmingham, Ala., Tampa, the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. One of the beautiful things with the retail businesses is you’re able to see from e-commerce where your hot buttons are, where people are shopping.”

Mahoney said the company will open its first mall store in Short Hills, N.J., in October, and there are new stores in Tyson’s Galleria in McLean, Va., as well as the historic Plaza del Lago center in Wilmette, Ill. A Naples, Fla., unit is also slated for later this year.

Mahoney believes there “a good opportunity for more runway in the retail space” going forward.

“For so long, the product offering was very Southern in nature,” he said. “It felt kind of preppy South. But as the products evolved in the last 10 or 12 years, we have a much broader offering that appeals to more geographies.”

He pointed in particular to the Pursuit as an example. “It’s a modern interpretation of what we do. We’re incredibly excited about what it’s going to offer.”

Potential in Womenswear, Overseas

Another growth opportunity is womenswear. Although the category only accounts for around 10 percent of sales, Mahoney said the company has a “great design team” working on it. The offering is centered around golf right now but it’s “morphing into a little more. The golf world trusts us and it’s the foundation of our company, but our lead designer was a salesperson in a great women’s store in town here, and she’s done a phenomenal job expanding and diversifying the product offering.”

International expansion is also in the cards, Mahoney said.

Peter Millar is sold at many of the most prestigious golf clubs around the world, but next summer, he revealed, the brand will open its first international store on Bond Street in London. “It will be a sizable store that’ll really display our lifestyle,” he said, adding that it will offer tailored clothing as well as other products beyond golfwear.

“That’s going to be the first foray into what we do in the U.S. where we’ve been so successful. I think that’s going to be a great window to what we can do internationally,” Mahoney said.

The company will give the store “a chance to breathe and check the success,” he added, and 24 to 36 months after that will consider further store expansion outside U.S. borders.

Until then the focus overseas will continue to be wholesale. Peter Millar is sold today in Korea, China, Japan and all throughout Europe. “We have quite large distribution across the globe,” he said. “We do the best where Americans travel and know the brand. But when London opens and gets going, I think we’ll start to see a little bit of a different channel direction.”

In addition to the Peter Millar brand, Mahoney oversees G/Fore, the golf and fashion brand founded by Mossimo Giannulli, the designer best known for starting the Mossimo brand in 1986. It was purchased in 2018 and operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Peter Millar.

Mahoney said the decision to buy G/Fore came about because he saw a void in the market that the brand could fill. “We’re able to use our operational expertise in running it, whether from a production, distribution or financial standpoint,” he said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to leverage a different business that does not compete at all with Peter Millar.”

Although G/Fore ultimately reports into him, Mahoney said it has its own CEO, Scott Ruerup, and its own team.

Having a strong team is perhaps the key to Peter Millar’s success over the years. He pointed to the company’s former chief financial officer, who is now running the international business; Jason Cater, chief creative officer who is “an insane talent,” and Matt Moyer, who runs the retail and e-commerce business as examples.

“The team goes on and on,” he said. “The depth we have kind of shocks me.”

But as big as Peter Millar has gotten — “we’ve got robots running operations in our distribution center,” he said — he insists that it strives to continue to act like a small company. “We still care about every single sale. If someone calls wanting one shirt, we’re going to take the order,” Mahoney said. “The minute someone starts stepping over small orders is when it’s time for them to go.”

Mahoney himself still handwrites thank-you letters that are dropped into random e-commerce customer’s packages; the team still puts mints into every order, and uses orange or light blue paper for its bills to stand out from its competitors.

Mahoney then told a story of one of the company’s first employees, Allen Rowe, who now runs the distribution center. “This is a bit like the old Nordstrom tire story where someone returned a tire to Nordstrom, and they took it back, and they don’t sell tires. He was at the office on Christmas Eve day, we were closed, but he picked up the customer service line. It was a customer of ours in Columbia, S.C., who needed a sweater for Christmas Day. Allen went to the warehouse, got the sweater, drove to Raleigh-Durham Airport, put it on a FedEx plane and they got it that night.”

Mahoney said he takes his relationships with employees seriously, having lunch with the teams and conducting surveys to find out “what people need and what we can do better,” he said. “Of course there are layers, but we don’t have layers in leadership. That’s the way we run our business.”

Beyond employees, there are other faces that have become synonymous with Peter Millar, namely its ambassadors. Those include PGA Tour golfers Sam Burns, Cameron Young, Ryan Gerard and Justin Rose as well as its newest addition, NFL star Christian McCaffrey.

“We have an incredible licensing business with the NFL, colleges and Major League Baseball,” Mahoney said. “But NFL is quite a big deal. We started a relationship with Christian McCaffrey, who is one of the finest athletes in the NFL, but also one of the finest gentlemen. He had an affinity for Peter Millar so it was just so natural, and we’re incredibly excited to have him on board.”

Going forward, Peter Millar will continue to expand its reach beyond golf with its marketing efforts. “We’re constantly looking at the evolution of the brand, whether that resides in music or sports or culinary,” he said. “We have a lot of different fans of the brand, and I think that’s the starting point. We’re not going to pursue people where it’s fake. I think it’s got to feel natural. We’ve done some things with Thomas Keller in the past, just because we love him and he loved us, and I think that’s the foundation for the decisions we’ll make going forward.”

Peter Millar also had a partnership with Omni Hotels & Resorts where it created suites at two properties in Carlsbad, Calif., and Frisco, Texas.

“The PGA of America just moved their offices to Frisco and they came to us and wanted to do a Peter Millar room in the hotel,” Mahoney said. “So Jason Cater and the design team put together the storyboards and made a special room in there. And then in Raleigh, they’re building a new hotel downtown, and we’re going to do a coffee shop in there using a local coffee maker. These are just little things that are kind of natural. We’ll see where they take us, but we’re open to a lot of different ideas.”

Looking ahead, Mahoney said the team will continue to stay focused as the company grows. “We’ve never set goals to say we want to be a $50 million, $100 million, $1 billion or $10 billion company,” he said. “That’s not the way we operate. We make great products and provide great value, and the business continues to grow. There are still a lot of people out there who don’t know who Peter Millar is, and I think by different marketing, like the Christian McCaffrey relationship, it will open more eyes to the brand. We don’t have any grand crystal ball to say we’re going to do this, and it’s going to explode. We’re just going to keep doing great things, and open more people’s eyes to what we do.”

An Attractive Acquisition

The acquisition of Peter Millar in September 2012 was a small, but significant one for Richemont.

The luxury goods giant purchased Peter Millar from Winona Capital Management in a private transaction. According to sources, the company’s valuation was at least 11 to 12 times annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

The sale resulted in a combined payday of $110 million to $120 million for Winona Capital and its then owners, which included Scott Mahoney. At the time, the company’s annual revenues had grown to about $70 million as the brand expanded its reach beyond golf and into men’s and women’s lifestyle offerings.

The brand was seen as a “Tory Burch” for the men’s market, although it was smaller, with prices at the lower end of the luxury scale, and styling that isn’t too fashion-forward.

Although Richemont, and its founder and chairman Johann Rupert, rarely comment on the rationale for acquiring brands, it’s clear why Peter Millar was, and remains, so attractive.

Not only is it a steady earner, but it is also big with the high-end golf crowd.

Rupert is a lifelong golfer, and the founder and nonexecutive president of the South African Golf Development Board, a nonprofit organization that introduces golf to children from underprivileged and marginalized communities in South Africa.

He is also behind the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, which marks its 25th anniversary in October. The championship is an annual event on the professional golf circuit and takes place on the historic Old Course at St Andrews in Scotland.

Sources said Rupert followed the 2012 sale of Peter Millar closely, and was keen to add the brand to the Richemont portfolio.

Richemont placed the company into its “Other” division, which currently includes Alaïa, Chloé, Dunhill, Delvaux and Purdey, and then let Peter Millar’s management get on with its work.

And the team has delivered. Peter Millar has been growing consistently over the past 14 years, and in fiscal 2023 notched revenues in excess of 600 million euros, and continues to grow. 

Because it focuses on high-end golf and lifestyle classics, and is not tethered to fashion’s seasonal cycles, it has been one of the few soft luxury companies in the Richemont portfolio to show steady growth year-over-year.

— With contributions from Samantha Conti (London)