The former CEO of J.Crew says he approached Amazon about buying the company

AP

J.Crew has struggled in recent years.

• The former CEO of J.Crew, Mickey Drexler, told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times' DealBook conference that he approached Amazon about a possible acquisition.
• The deal did not go through, obviously.
• Drexler also said that the company was close to a deal with Uniqlo.

Mickey Drexler has a few regrets in his time of business. One of them, as he told Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times' Dealbook conference on Thursday, is that he never sold J.Crew when he had the opportunity.

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Drexler, the current chairman and former CEO of J.Crew, told Sorkin that he approached Amazon about acquiring the company before he stepped down earlier this year. The deal did not go through, and J.Crew has continued on its own.

He told Sorkin that Amazon "should have" bought J.Crew, however, as it would have "acquired a machine of style and taste in fashion."

"We're content, in a sense," Drexler said.

He added that Target and Walmart, which purchased menswear retailer Bonobos earlier this year, also could have purchased the brand.

Though the deal never happened, Drexler also said that he would not enter an agreement to sell J.Crew's products on Amazon. He said the e-commerce giant would "own" the customer in that case, and it could potentially take the best-selling items to turn into Amazon private-label goods.

J.Crew was close to a deal with Uniqlo in 2014, which also fell through after J.Crew rejected a price that Drexler described as "fair."