J. Crew's move overseas also comes amid tougher competition

j crew online executives are currently in Asia and Europe scouting out retail space and negotiating rents, he said. Stores in Hong Kong and London will launch first and will take at least a year to open once the company finds a location. The 68-year-old CEO said he has also been traveling abroad, visiting competitors to evaluate pricing and quality. J. Crew's move overseas also comes amid tougher competition from foreign retailers expanding in the U.S. Last October, Fast Retailing Co.'s 9983.TO -0.91% Uniqlo opened a 90,000-square-foot flagship store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue as a kickoff to broader expansion in the U.S.Mr. Drexler says tapping foreign markets, both online and through retail, will help spur growth. J. Crew's sales have increased in each of the past eight years, but the company still remains a relatively small player in terms of store count and revenue. In 2011, the retailer posted nearly $1.9 billion in revenue on a base of 266 retail stores and 96 outlets. Last March, Mr. Drexler took the company private with TPG Capital and Leonard Green & Partners LP.a little novelty to freshen it up,” finishes an employee. Yes, precisely. Employees not only complete each other’s sentences, and sometimes their boss’s j crew dress 2012 sentences; they also dress alike, in stripes, sandals, and neutrals daubed with bursts of color. Both the groupspeak and groupdress suggest that Lyons has, at least in an operational sense, trained her employees to think like her. “Let’s put a sparkly shoe with this,” she says, holding a white cotton dress flush against her body. “It’ll make the dress more of an idea as opposed to …” The thought goes unfinished. In addition to speaking in fragments, Lyons tends to evaluate clothing in abstract rather than visual terms—items need to be “engaging” or “elevated”—and she speaks in a collage of overlapping sentences. The same aesthetic extends to her office, which is a scrapbook in three dimensions: skirts, Sharpies, drawings, Lucian Freud and Egon Schiele books, a Céline bag, a sweating Starbucks iced coffee, and an entire wall of magazine cutouts and notes from the artist Tom Sachs. It's impossible not to like Lyons, the 43-year-old president and executive creative director of J Crew, the woman who has turned around perception – and profits – of the once-staid American brand. She stands at more than 6ft tall and when we meet is dressed in faded jeans and a j crew shorts printed blouse. She's warm, funny and self-deprecating, all qualities that belie her fancy title. But her 12th-floor Manhattan office is an immediate giveaway of her success, with its large windows, huge Eero Saarinen oval marble meeting table and vintage Eames chairs. "Wait until you see my new office!" she gushes. "I'm moving up to the 15th floor next month – higher ceilings, bigger windows – and the views are incredible!" Please visit www.jcrewoutletonline.com read more relation news.