California Apparel News

Steve Birkhold resigned as chief executive officer from Bebe Stores Inc. after spending 18-months trying to turn the mall-based contemporary retailer around, according to a company statement released June 12.

The San Francisco area–headquartered Bebe also announced that Jim Wiggett will serve as an interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent replacement for Birkhold. Wiggett is the chief executive officer of Jackson Hole Group, which runs offices in San Francisco and New York. Before starting that company in 2002, Wiggett served as an executive vice president for the Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton (LVMH) Retail Group, according to the Jackson Hole website. One of Jackson Hole’s areas of expertise is consulting on transforming businesses and advising CEOs on a wide range of organizational and human-resources issues.

Manny Mashouf, Bebe’s founder and chairman of the board of directors, noted that the retailer was looking for new perspectives. “We are excited to welcome Jim to the team. Jim is a highly accomplished executive, with proven leadership capabilities, retail and merchandising expertise and a wealth of strategic business knowledge, and we look forward to his insights into the strategic direction of the company. We would like to thank Steve for his contributions as CEO and we wish him well in his future endeavors,” Mashouf said in a company statement.

Bebe suffered a crisis of confidence when Birkhold sold 140,980 shares of the retailer’s stock in the open market on May 29. Media reports noted that the company’s stock plummeted to a 52-week low during the first week of June.

The stock drama has been the most recent in a series of crises at the company. In February, a Reuters story reported that Bebe was exploring a sale and going private. Bebe and its reported partner in this endeavor, Guggenheim Securities, did not comment for the story.

Birkhold was hired in January 2013 to manage a turnaround for the company. He hired a number of new executives, and, in September 2013, he launched a campaign to boost the sex appeal of Bebe’s merchandise, noting that the store’s sex appeal is its greatest strength. But the company continued to suffer financially. For its third quarter of fiscal 2014, which was reported May 8, same-store sales decreased 5.7 percent and net sales declined 17.2 percent to $93.5 million from $112.9 million in the same time in the previous year. Bebe runs a fleet of 226 stores across the U.S., Canada, Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands.