Did you know that Lauren Stokes has left Lauren James Enterprises Inc., the Fayetteville women’s clothing company she founded?
A few months ago, Stokes and her husband, Lance, who was once the COO, decided it was time to leave, she said in a video titled “Why I left Lauren James,” which was posted on YouTube last month.
As we have reported, Lauren James was being sued by First Security Bank of Searcy over a $330,000 loan default when the company was sold last year to the newly formed LJ Apparel LLC. LJ Apparel was created last year as a Nevada corporation.
LJ Apparel continued to operate the company as Lauren James and kept Lauren Stokes as CEO. But she wasn’t happy, according to her video.
She said that she realized how hard it is for founders to stay on with companies that they created “when they no longer have the ability to make all the executive decisions.” Stokes said she was working twice as hard “for something that wasn’t mine anymore.”
She made a “hard decision” to leave the company she had founded as a 20-something and grew quickly. While the first few years in business were “some of the best years of my life,” continued growth required more money.
“It takes a lot of money to grow so fast,” she said. People don’t realize that the faster a company grows the more money it needs, she told her followers on YouTube.
Stokes didn’t mention the litigation in her video. Instead, she said she found someone who wanted to buy the company. “Lance and I had been working so much,” she said, and they decided to sell so they could spend more time with their young children.
Stokes has often told a story of the founding of the company that included drawing dress designs to pass the time while pregnant and on doctor-ordered bed rest. After her son was born in 2013, Lance Stokes suggested she leave a nursing career for fashion design. So she did.
But, as Arkansas Business reported in January 2018, settled lawsuits told a more complicated version of the company’s founding.
A lawsuit filed in April 2014 by Lance Stokes’ former business partner, Chelsea McShane of Fayetteville, accused him of breach of fiduciary duty, saying he shared her clothing designs with his wife, who was also named as a defendant. Lance Stokes denied the allegations, and the case reached a confidential settlement in July 2016.
Beach Town
In another YouTube video, Lauren Stokes announced that she and family were leaving Fayetteville and moving to a beach town in Florida.
In August, the Stokeses sold their 4,000-SF home, built in 2016, for $639,000, according to the Washington County assessor’s office.
The buyer was JHMC Property Investments LLC of Santa Fe Springs, California.
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