For more than 150 years, the Brown family has controlled Brown-Forman, the company behind Jack Daniel’s. But that control is under real pressure right now, and some of the family’s own members are responsible.
The company’s stock has dropped 60% over five years as Americans drink less whiskey. Merger talks with France’s Pernod Ricard collapsed this spring, and crosstown rival Sazerac followed with an unsolicited $15 billion hostile takeover bid in May, according to the Wall Street Journal. The board rejected it.
Then came the letter. A few days before the family’s annual July picnic, heirs W.L. Lyons Brown III and his brother Stuart sent a scathing seven-page missive to more than 130 relatives, accusing the board of keeping shareholders in the dark and “rewarding failure.” One line compared Jack Daniel’s expanding flavor lineup to Baskin-Robbins. “Brown-Forman’s stock price has fallen from the mid-$70s per share to the mid-$20s per share over the past three years, eliminating billions of dollars of generational wealth,” the letter read. Three days after it went out, CEO Lawson Whiting told the board he’d step down.
The brothers are outsiders in their family. They never joined Wolf Pen Branch, which controls 60% of Brown-Forman’s voting shares and coordinates how the family votes as a bloc. They argued the board should have taken Sazerac’s offer more seriously instead of pursuing the failed Pernod Ricard deal. Wolf Pen disagreed, publicly rejecting the Sazerac bid and saying it doesn’t align with the family’s vision for the company’s future.
For more than 150 years, the Brown family has controlled Brown-Forman, the company behind Jack Daniel’s. But that control is under real pressure right now, and some of the family’s own members are responsible.
The company’s stock has dropped 60% over five years as Americans drink less whiskey. Merger talks with France’s Pernod Ricard collapsed this spring, and crosstown rival Sazerac followed with an unsolicited $15 billion hostile takeover bid in May, according to the Wall Street Journal. The board rejected it.
Then came the letter. A few days before the family’s annual July picnic, heirs W.L. Lyons Brown III and his brother Stuart sent a scathing seven-page missive to more than 130 relatives, accusing the board of keeping shareholders in the dark and “rewarding failure.” One line compared Jack Daniel’s expanding flavor lineup to Baskin-Robbins. “Brown-Forman’s stock price has fallen from the mid-$70s per share to the mid-$20s per share over the past three years, eliminating billions of dollars of generational wealth,” the letter read. Three days after it went out, CEO Lawson Whiting told the board he’d step down.
The brothers are outsiders in their family. They never joined Wolf Pen Branch, which controls 60% of Brown-Forman’s voting shares and coordinates how the family votes as a bloc. They argued the board should have taken Sazerac’s offer more seriously instead of pursuing the failed Pernod Ricard deal. Wolf Pen disagreed, publicly rejecting the Sazerac bid and saying it doesn’t align with the family’s vision for the company’s future.