Brooks Brothers returned to profitability in under two years after its acquisition, turning a bankrupt 200-year-old clothing label into one of retail's most cited turnaround cases. Brand CEO Ken Ohashi credits the result to a single discipline: rebuilding positioning around what customers actually do, not what the corporate archive reveres.

Ohashi shared the playbook on the latest episode of Adweek's "Adspeak" podcast alongside Marisa Thalberg, EVP and chief customer and marketing officer at Catalyst Brands, the retail platform that owns both Brooks Brothers and Eddie Bauer. The two executives used the hour to map what it takes to keep legacy brands culturally relevant without falling back on nostalgia.

Ohashi oversees both labels. He steered Brooks Brothers through bankruptcy and acquisition and into profitability in less than two years. He now runs Eddie Bauer alongside it, where the team has begun repositioning the brand away from technical outdoor gear and into lifestyle categories. The shift runs on what they called an "off the mountain" framework.

What does "off the mountain" mean?

The phrase names Eddie Bauer's pivot from mountaineering kit into everyday apparel, accessories and lifestyle categories. Thalberg and Ohashi framed it as a way to widen the addressable audience without sacrificing the brand's outdoor credibility. Marketing around the repositioning relied on cultural amplifiers, they said, including carefully chosen high-profile talent, rather than mass-market campaigns.

The approach sits inside a broader rule both executives repeated: small, trusted creative teams outperform committees. Long planning decks, they argued, dilute the bold decisions heritage brands need to escape years of decline.

Why listen to customers instead of the archive?

Both executives pointed to mining actual customer behavior as the fastest route to momentum. Purchase data, in their telling, often surfaces product lines and categories the brand itself had quietly walked away from. Brooks Brothers' post-bankruptcy assortment rebuild drew on this playbook, with Ohashi and his team restocking around what repeat buyers were actually ordering, not the historic hero products the company once centered.

The conversation also surfaced a non-obvious audience principle: avoid talking down to middle-America consumers. Speaking with respect, they argued, builds trust faster than premium-coded language. That stance now shapes marketing at both labels.

What is the CEO-CMO dynamic?

Thalberg holds the chief customer and marketing officer role at Catalyst Brands, the parent of both Brooks Brothers and Eddie Bauer. She and Ohashi used the conversation to argue that a CEO and a marketing leader should build their relationship early, before any turnaround becomes urgent. The pair credited that prior trust with the speed of decisions inside both businesses.

The episode lands as more heritage retailers weigh their own reinventions. Brooks Brothers' profitability came in less than two years; Eddie Bauer's lifestyle pivot now sits inside a longer timeline measured in product cycles, wholesale accounts and store remodels. Catalyst Brands, the platform that owns both labels, gives the two executives a single venue to prove the playbook at scale. The next datapoint is whether the lifestyle repositioning holds through its first full year on the sales floor.