Bag Man: The Story Behind the Improbable Rise of Coach
Lew Frankfort
Harvard Business Review Press (October 2025)

A life and career driven by “magic and logic”

First off, I want to say how very much I enjoyed the pleasure of  Lew Franfort’s company as I tagged along with him during his entertaining as well as informative reconstruction of his life thus far. Most of it has been spent during his career with Coach.

Here’s some brief background information from Wikipedia. Coach was founded in 1941, as a family-run workshop in a loft in Manhattan. In 1946, Miles Cahn and his wife Lilian joined the company and, by 1950, Cahn had taken it over. During the early years, Cahn noticed the distinctive properties and qualities of the leather used to make baseball gloves. With wear and use, the leather in a glove became softer and suppler. Attempting to mimic this process, Cahn developed another  process to make the leather stronger, softer, and more flexible. Since the leather absorbed dye very well, this process also created a richer, deeper color. The Cahns bought the company through a leveraged buyout in 1961.

In 1979, Lew Frankfort joined the company as vice-president of business development. During this time, Coach was making $6 million in sales, and products were being distributed through the domestic wholesale channel, primarily in the northeastern markets. In 1981 the company opened its first directly operated retail location in midtown-Manhattan.

In 1985, the Cahns sold Coach Leatherware to Sara Lee Corporation for a reported $30 million, having decided to “devote more time to their growing goat farm and cheese production business called Coach Farm” in Gallatinville, New York, which they began in 1983. Frankfort succeeded Cahn as president.

Sara Lee structured Coach under its Hanes Group branch of subsidiaries of brands. In early 1986, the company opened new boutiques in Macy’s stores in New York City and San Francisco.

Additional Coach stores were under construction, and similar boutiques were to be opened in other major department stores later that year. By November 1986, the company was operating 12 stores, along with nearly 50 boutiques within larger department stores.

Sara Lee Corporation divested itself of Coach first, by selling 19.5% of its shares of Coach at its IPO in October 2000, followed in April 2001, with the distribution of their remaining shares to Sara Lee’s stockholders through an exchange offer.

In 1996, Lew Frankfort was named chairman and CEO of Coach. He had been involved with Coach for more than 30 years. He was named chairman and CEO in 1995, and in 2014 became executive chairman. During 2000, he oversaw Coach’s transition to a publicly traded company listed on the NYSE and in 2011, became the first American issuer to list on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. Frankfurt retired from the comany in 2014.

At that time, its annual sales were about $5-billion and it had about 1,000 stores.

There you have some basic background information about both Frankfort and Coach.

These are among the passages of greatest interest and value me:

o Introduction: “The Elements of Magic and Logic” (Pages 3-5)
o Growing up in the Bronx (11-15)
o Government service and political activity (21-33)
o Joining Coach (39-41)
o The sale of Coach to Sarah Lee (61-68)

o The scrappy and strategic hero (72-79)
o The ccustomer-centric company (93-103)
o The challenges of brandbuilding, extensions, and acquisitions (109-119)
o Lew discovers his “best destiny” (126-132
o Creating an ecosystem of merchandising excllence (157-164)

o Coach’s IPO (176-187)
o Betting Coach’s “farm” on multiple markets and high-quality products (192-201)
o One of Frankfort’s two “dark periods,” the one when coping with prostate cancer (201-207)
o Expanding/extending the Coach brand globally (211-219
o Lew Frankfort’s Legacy (260-268)

There are some valuable insights to be be learned from what happened (and why) and what didn’t (and why not) to both Coach and Frankfurt. As I worked my way through the material, I was again reminded of an observation by Danny Kahneman: “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats: they can do it, but they’d prefer not to.” Lew Frankfort’s insights will be of special value to those within an organizational culture in need of high-impact leadership at all levels and in all areas of operation.

More specifically in areas that include effective communication/cooperation, decision-making, identifying and solving the right problem, identifying and answering the right question, and meanwhile,  co-creating “magic” with highly developed logic.

This is a must-read for all executives as well as for those who aspire to become one. This would also be an excellent holiday gift for those now preparing for a career in business, whatever its size and nature may prove to be.