Work record / Capital / Jason Scott

Jason Scott: he was asking for too little money

Jason Scott's luxury menswear brand had a locked $7 million raise and no model built from the doors up. When we built one, the money ran out in year three.

The seat

I was the go-to-market and capital-raise advisor, working alongside Prince Capital. The introduction came in October 2025, and the real work ran from April to July 2026. We worked out of Common Ground, with Prince Capital handling the mechanics of the raise. The brand is based in New York.

What I was brought in to decide

Jason Scott is a luxury menswear label from an established New York designer, whose pieces have appeared on a magazine cover and on pro athletes. He built the relationships with the Italian mills and the made-to-order factories himself, on trips to Italy. With the mills he worked out how the yarns get knit, which lets wool, cashmere and silk do the job of a technical fabric.

Common Ground met him in October 2025, introduced for an investor conversation, since he was looking for capital. Three things were very strong: the market segment he was targeting, his brand relationships, and the materials and the product. One was very weak, and that was the way the brand showed up: identity, deck and collateral. By early July 2026 the raise stood locked at $7 million. It was a single round, sized to the cash trough implied by the plan's own targets, and nobody had modeled the business door by door.

The financial modeling behind the raise was weak, and the projections contradicted one another. His five-year projection ran far beyond a hundred million dollars of revenue. It assumed margins that no luxury house has ever achieved, retail stores that cost nothing to build, and customers who became cheaper to acquire as the brand got bigger. The paperwork lagged the story too. Outside counsel still had the entity and intellectual-property questions, and no cap table had been matched to signed documents. The revenue figure was too big and the capital figure too small for one shared reason: neither had been built up from the unit.

What we did

• Our job at Common Ground was the go-to-market plan and the analysis underneath the raise. The mechanics of the raise stayed with Prince Capital, the licensed placement advisor.
• We went through the deck, the brand identity book and the term sheet as an investor would in hour one. Then, inside 24 hours of seeing the collection, we wrote a 78-page investor memo. The designer engaged with the substance that same day.
• We tore down the investor deck and drew a wireframe for the rebuild, so the materials would stop competing with the product. The designer kept the look without a visible mark on purpose, and that was his call to make.
• We changed the business plan at launch, putting trunk shows first and wholesale after. A trunk show sells direct to the customer, with no markdown and nothing owed to you later, in a room of precisely the buyers you want. That turned the first season into a proof event and not a wholesale bet. A store-credit return policy came with it, plus a scorecard whose gates were written before the first show.
• We built the buy plan from the unit up, 29 sheets, and not one number in it was inherited. It covers ten chassis and every colorway, plus 193 accounts spread across eight channels. Each door is tagged with a tier, a launch year and payment terms, and everything runs through the profit and loss to arrive at when cash moves and how much capital is needed. A June walkthrough with the designer settled three things: the new returns policy, a contingency of sweaters only for the first two years, and a November launch window.
• Every input got a label for how well we knew it. It was either documented, an industry standard, or a placeholder. We also tied year-one revenue out four independent ways. That way a careful reader could check the model without having to take our word for it.
• I put the finding up front. The memo and the call both opened with what the cash-flow tab said about the raise, and I kept the model open so the designer could push back on any cell.

Results

• The raise as locked could not cover even the peak burn. With $7 million in the bank the cash line dropped below zero in year three. We then built the need as an auditable bridge: peak burn, an operating reserve for six months, a deposit to the factory covering the next six months of orders, and a contingency. Added up, the capital need was $12.09 million.
• In year five the model's base case sat just under $25 million in revenue. The designer's own projection was several times higher. One build from the unit up corrected both numbers together.
• In July the engagement paused over price and scope. The relationship held. Discovery Land communities are hosting trunk shows through Common Ground's referral, which is the channel the model was built around.
• A private aviation company that we introduced has since placed a purchase order.
• As of September 2026 he has raised roughly $800,000 toward a $1,000,000 first round, which is still open. A second round is planned for $8 million to $12 million, which is the band the model produced.

The lesson

A capital number borrowed from someone else's plan is not a real number. Rebuild it from the doors up and let it disagree with the plan.

Public record

• Jason Scott

Questions about Jason Scott, answered

Firm record

Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Jason Scott on the Common Ground wiki.

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