What it is
Jason Scott is a luxury menswear brand from an established New York designer whose work had already been on a magazine cover and on professional athletes. The Italian mills and made-to-order factories behind the line are his relationships, built on his own trips to Italy, where he worked with the mills on how the yarns are knit so that wool, cashmere and silk could do the work of a technical fabric.
He was introduced to Common Ground in October 2025 for an investor conversation, looking for capital. What was very strong was the market segment he was going after, his brand relationships, and the materials and the product. What was very poor was the way the brand was shown: the identity, the deck and the collateral. By early July 2026 the raise was locked at $7 million, a single round sized to the cash trough on the plan's own targets, and no model had been built from the doors up.
The financial modeling under the raise was poor and the projections conflicted with each other. His five-year projection ran well past a hundred million dollars in revenue at margins no luxury house has ever run, with a retail build-out that cost nothing and customers who got cheaper to acquire as the brand grew. The paper had not caught up with the story either: the entity and intellectual-property questions sat with outside counsel, and no cap table had yet been reconciled to signed documents. The revenue number was too big and the capital number was too small, for the same reason: neither had been built from the unit up.
What Common Ground did
- Common Ground took the go-to-market plan and the analytical core of the raise. Prince Capital, the licensed placement advisor, held the raise mechanics.
- Read the deck, the brand identity book and the term sheet the way an investor would in the first hour, and produced a 78-page investor memo inside 24 hours of seeing the collection. The designer engaged with the substance the same day.
- Tore down the investor deck and built a wireframe for the rebuild, so the materials stopped competing with the product. The designer kept the markless look on purpose, which was his call to make.
- Changed the business plan at the launch: trunk shows first, before wholesale. A trunk show is direct retail with no markdown and no receivable, in a room full of the exact customer, so the first season became a proof event instead of a wholesale bet. A store-credit return policy and a scorecard with gates written before the first show came with it.
- Built a 29-sheet buy plan from the unit up with no inherited number in it: ten chassis, every colorway and a library of 193 accounts across eight channels, each door tagged with a tier, a launch year and payment terms, rolled through the profit and loss to cash timing and a capital need. A June walkthrough with the designer confirmed the new returns policy, a sweater-only contingency for the first two years and a November launch window.
- Classed every input by how well it was known (documented, industry standard or placeholder) and tied year-one revenue four independent ways, so a careful reader could check the model instead of trusting it.
- Led with the finding. What the cash-flow tab said about the raise went first in the memo and on the call, with the model open so the designer could argue with any cell.
Results
- The raise as locked did not cover the peak burn alone. Run with $7 million in the bank, the cash line crossed below zero in the third year. Built as an auditable bridge of peak burn, a six-month operating reserve, the factory deposit on the next six months of orders and a contingency, the capital need came to $12.09 million.
- The model's base case came out just under $25 million in year-five revenue, against the designer's own projection of several times that. One build from the unit up corrected both numbers at once.
- The engagement paused in July over price and scope. The relationship held: the Discovery Land communities are hosting trunk shows by Common Ground's referral, the channel the model was built around.
- A private aviation company, where Common Ground made the introduction, has placed a purchase order.
- By September 2026 he had raised about $800,000 of a $1,000,000 first round, not yet closed, with the next round planned at $8 million to $12 million, the band the model computed.
External links
- Public data room: Jason Scott: he was not asking for enough money data room
Public record
At a glance
| Project type | Capital raise strategy and financial modeling |
|---|---|
| Industry | Luxury apparel and consumer brands |
| Seat | Go-to-market and capital-raise advisor, with Prince Capital |
| Ran through | Common Ground; raise mechanics through Prince Capital |
| Dates | Introduced October 2025; the work April to July 2026 |
| Duration | Four months of work, after an October 2025 introduction |
| Location | New York |
| Public data room | Jason Scott: he was not asking for enough money data room |
| Related pages | Common Ground, Prince Capital |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |