TSM Capital Invests in Rachel Roy

TSM Capital, one of the new breed of fashion investment groups, has made a second investment. It just bought 22 percent of Rachel Roy, the line started by the wife of music producer turned film producer turned clothing magnate, Damon Dash.

Rachel Roy

TSM, which was started by former Bloomingdale's Chairman Marvin Traub, Aslaug Magnusdottir of Baugur and Mortimer Singer, a consultant who has worked with Traub in the past, bought a 22 percent stake in Matthew Williamson. Manusdottir now sits on the board of both companies. I find the trajectory of Roy's line interesting. She began it first as a collection for Rocawear and then took it solo as a contemporary line, but recently has repositioned it as a young designer line to sit along the likes of 3.1 Philip Lim -- with 40 percent higher prices. She told WWD at the time, ""I am sick of the jeans and beaded tanks. I've really never understood that kind of dressing; it just isn't me."

It's not a move that many brands could pull off easily. Now she and TSM are talking of starting a lower-priced diffusion line. Probably with prices still slightly higher than the point where she began.

Part of the success of Roy must be the fact that she has some of the celebrity associations, thanks to her marriage to Dash. But she was working in fashion when they met, albeit as a stylist. As People magazine said late last year:

It's no great secret, so let's just say it: Rachel Roy got her big break in fashion from her husband, Damon Dash, cofounder of Rocawear clothing. Before the couple started dating in 1998, Roy had worked in retail sales, as a personal shopper and making clothes for a handful of clients with the help of a dry cleaner's seamstress. But within two years of meeting Dash, Roy had become creative director for Rocawear's women's and girls' lines. Still, she insists that she was well on her way even without Dash's help. "It may have taken a lot longer," she admits, "but I would have figured something out."

Dash is no longer Roy's C.E.O. And that may have helped secure the deal with TSM. She now has Marianne Tesler, the former President of Givenchy, in that role.

(Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images)