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Corporate proxy battles are usually fought behind the scenes in boardrooms with sparse details buried in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
But Shelley Broader, the new president and CEO of Chico's FAS, is taking her company's board battle to a new public medium for such debates: online video.
The Fort Myers-based women's retailer has been under attack from one of its shareholders, Barington Capital Group, for not being aggressive enough to turn the business around.
Barington complained that the stock of Chico's has lagged its peers and the market indexes and has urged shareholders to vote in two of its proposed directors at the annual meeting July 21.
Chico's responded to Barington's critiques in rebuttals via press releases and in its corporate filings. But Broader recently took it one step further by appealing to shareholders for the company's slate of directors in a video posted on the investor page of the company's website at chicosfas.com.
“We expect to achieve cost savings between $65 million and $85 million annually in total from all of these initiatives,” Broader says in the video. “Clearly, positive change is underway at Chico's FAS.”
Broader didn't spare Barington in the video, which Chico's says owns 1.4% of its stock. “We believe that replacing any of your board's superior nominees with anyone of Barington's less qualified candidates would jeopardize our progress,” she says.
One point Barington and Chico's might agree on is that fighting these kinds of board battles isn't cheap. To date, Chico's has spent $3.1 million on the proxy solicitation that it says is expected to cost $5.9 million.
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