In the language of private equity, most firms live on a clock. A fund closes, a five-year timer starts, and every business inside it is eventually dressed up for sale. Ames Watson, a holding company tucked into an office park in Columbia, Maryland, decided to ignore the clock entirely. It buys consumer brands with its own capital and, in its own telling, plans to keep them for decades. The result is a portfolio you have almost certainly walked past in a mall - Lids, Claire's, South Moon Under - run by a company whose name you have probably never heard.
Founded in 2017 by Lawrence Berger and Tom Ripley, Ames Watson describes itself as a permanent-capital vehicle. That is a technical way of saying it does not answer to outside limited partners waiting for an exit. Berger, formerly managing director and chief investment officer at Blackstreet Capital, and Ripley, who founded Severn Partners, built the firm to do something specific: buy businesses that are underperforming, out of favor, or stuck at an inflection point, then fix them and hold on.
01 / THE MODELA mini-Berkshire for consumer brands
Berger does not shy away from the comparison. "We're structured much like a mini-Berkshire Hathaway, acquiring businesses, improving their operations and profitability," he has said. The logic is Buffett-plain: buy a company that generates cash, run it better, and pour the cash flow into the next acquisition. Because Ames Watson invests its own committed capital rather than a fund with a maturity date, it never has to sell a good business at a bad time.
That structure changes which deals the firm can even consider. A carve-out from a distressed parent, a retailer emerging from bankruptcy, a brand that needs three years of patient repair before it turns - these are hard for a traditional fund to underwrite and easy for a permanent holder to take on. It also changes the sales pitch to sellers. Ames Watson markets itself as bringing "more than capital," pairing money with an in-house bench of operators.
02 / THE PROOFThe Lids turnaround
The clearest evidence for the thesis is Lids. In 2018, Genesco sold its Hat World/Lids business to a joint venture between Ames Watson and Fanatics; the Ames Watson-led acquisition closed at roughly $100 million - about 40 percent below what the chain had fetched in 2014. "It was an iconic brand that was underperforming," Berger said. "We saw an opportunity to modernize the business and restore its cultural relevance."
What followed was an operating project rather than a financial one. The firm rebuilt training and labor models, leaned into exclusive product - Berger has said about 70 percent of what Lids sells is exclusive to the retailer - and expanded customization, from patches to hat shaping. Store count grew from roughly 800 to around 1,200. In 2024, Fanatics became the majority owner of Lids Holdings, but the turnaround remains the firm's calling card.
03 / THE PORTFOLIOBrands you have seen, an owner you have not
The firm's first acquisition was Fanzz, a Salt Lake City fan-apparel retailer - a small deal that seeded what is now a portfolio spanning sports, retail, footwear, and specialty consumer goods. In 2022 it added boutique chain South Moon Under with plans for national expansion. In 2023 it joined a roughly $250 million investor group - alongside Fanatics, Jay-Z, Meek Mill, and Maverick Carter - to buy heritage jersey brand Mitchell & Ness, and led a funding round for footwear label Margaux. In 2024 it took the lead on Champion's U.S. collegiate and teamwear business.
04 / THE BETRescuing Claire's
The most public test of the model arrived in 2025. Claire's, the pierced-ears rite of passage for a generation of tweens, was heading toward liquidation after a Chapter 11 filing. Ames Watson stepped in with a roughly $140 million deal to take over its North American operations, keeping a majority of its mall stores open and preserving thousands of jobs. The plan the firm has described - refreshed merchandising, upgraded piercing stations, new store concepts - reads like the Lids playbook applied to a different aisle of the mall.
05 / THE EDGEOperators, not just a deal team
Ames Watson's differentiator is less a spreadsheet than a roster. Its Strategic Resources Group is an in-house team of operating partners covering marketing, e-commerce, finance, and operations that plugs directly into portfolio companies. When the business you just bought is a tough retail turnaround, the real moat is having people who have run one before. That bench is what lets the firm buy the kinds of businesses - carve-outs, special situations, brands in transition - that scare off buyers who only bring money.
The scale sits behind a deliberately small front door. The holding company itself runs on roughly 32 employees, even as its brands employ tens of thousands and generate more than $2 billion in combined revenue. In 2022 the firm raised $250 million through a term loan to keep buying, and in 2025 it named Melissa Hahn its chief financial officer, formalizing the finance function of a company that has grown far faster than its headcount suggests.
06 / THE MARKETBuying what everyone else is selling
Ames Watson sits in a crowded but distinct corner of the market. Brand-holding companies like Authentic Brands Group and WHP Global, and retail-focused private equity firms like Sycamore Partners, all compete for similar assets. What separates Ames Watson is the permanence of its capital and its appetite for physical, brick-and-mortar retail at a moment when the prevailing narrative says that sector is finished. When a category is written off, its assets get cheap - and a patient, operator-heavy buyer can build a $2 billion portfolio out of other people's pessimism.
Whether the Claire's bet pays off will take years to judge, which is precisely the point of a firm built to wait. For now, Ames Watson keeps doing the unglamorous thing: buying the stores you grew up with, one turnaround at a time.