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DAVID A. BAXENDALE: Managing Director
KEMP P. BATTLE: Managing Director
JIM R. ALEXANDER: Managing Director
HENRY REATH: Director
KARIN L. GALLOWAY: Vice President
CRAIG L. BATTLE: Managing Director
Craig Battle, the founder of Tucker Capital Corporation, has spent over 30 years in the investment banking business advising corporations on strategic financial issues, capital raising, acquisitions and divestitures.
In 1989, he led Tucker into an alliance with the leading consumer catalog consultant, Jim Alexander, and created Tucker Alexander to provide Strategic Advice and M&A services to the consumer catalog industry.
Since inception, Tucker Alexander has advised some of the industry’s most prominent companies, such as Blair Corporation, Disney, Williams-Sonoma, Playboy Enterprises, dELiA*s, Saks, Brooks Brothers and Coldwater Creek. Craig is a frequent speaker at Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Conferences, has spoken at the New England Mail Order Association (NEMOA) and has been a guest lecturer, on several occasions, at New York University’s Leonard Stern Graduate School of Business.
Prior to founding Tucker Capital, Craig was a Senior Vice President at the investment banking firm of Warburg Paribas Becker/A.G. Becker in NYC and was a group head responsible for financing large industrial projects.
Earlier in his career, he was a Managing Director at Wm. Sword & Company, an investment bank which was created by Morgan Stanley principals. At Sword, Craig was responsible for advising large companies on merger and acquisition matters and managed over $300 MM of financings for several large institutional clients.
He began his career as a Senior Lending Officer at the Fidelity Bank in Philadelphia, lending to middle market companies in the Northeast. He earned his BA at St. Lawrence University and graduated from The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Management Program.
Craig is on the board of Gopher Sport, The Rocky Mount Cord Company and Rankin Automation. He is a runner and avid fly fisherman and plays ice hockey during the winter months.DAVID A. BAXENDALE: Managing Director
David Baxendale has been engaged in managing acquisitions, divestitures and financial and strategic advisory activities for more than three decades. For the past ten years he has been a key strategic advisor and principal architect of Torstar Corporation’s education initiative. Torstar built, through acquisitions and internal initiatives, the 4th largest supplementary education company in the United States. David has been a frequent speaker at education industry tradeshows since 1993.David joined Tucker in 1985 after seven years as Managing Director of Tower Hall, Inc., a New York based investment banking firm. While at Tower Hall, David was a specialist in LBOs and management buyouts. He began his business career with Johnson & Johnson where he was Director of Strategic Planning responsible for implementing new strategic planning initiatives in J&J’s North American operations. Later he founded, and was named Vice President and Director of Johnson & Johnson’s venture capital subsidiary, the J&J Development Corporation. In this capacity David oversaw investments in a large number of emerging medical technology enterprises. He earned his AB in economics from Harvard College magna cum laude and his MBA from Harvard Business School.
David’s interests include classical music (he has served on the Board of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra since 1998) as well as the preservation of historical properties and open spaces where he has served as an advisor to the Vermont-based Landmark Trust-USA for the past several years.
KEMP P. BATTLE: Managing Director
With extensive strategic advisory and investment banking
experience serving media and publishing companies, Kemp
has developed a particular expertise working with
for-profit companies in developing mission focus as well
as with not-for-profit companies determined to acquire
greater business discipline. He has been a key architect
in the launch of new strategic business initiatives for
not-for-profit organizations as diverse as the Academy
of American Poets, Children’s Television Workshop
(Sesame Workshop), The National Geographic Society,
National Geographic Maps, National Geographic School
Publishing, and Public Radio International.
Prior to joining Tucker in 1988, Kemp was Managing
Director of the International Capital Markets Group for
Republic National Bank of New York. He began with
Republic in London as a Eurobond dealer for Republic’s
UK subsidiary. In 1988, Kemp co-founded Collector’s
Reprints, Inc., a hard cover specialty publisher, and
currently serves as a director. He was Chairman of the
Board of Direct Medical Knowledge in San Francisco until
its sale in 1999 to WebMD. Kemp is currently a director
of ALL Species, an international collaboration of
scientists to catalog the world’s species, GenomeWeb, a
news and information provider to the genomics industry,
Birds of North America, a joint venture between the
Cornell Labs and the American Ornithologist’s Union
and
The Academy of American Poets. He was an advisory member
of the Association of Educational Publishers.
Kemp began his career in publishing as an editor and
later manager of subsidiary rights for Doubleday &
Company, Inc. He is the author of three books: Great
American Folklore, Hearts of Fire and The Flame Keepers,
a story of Stalag 17 published in 2004. He is an
occasional correspondent to NBC’s The Today Show for
pieces about American history. Kemp earned his AB from
Harvard College cum laude.
JIM R. ALEXANDER: Managing Director
Jim Alexander has over 35 years experience in the retail/mail order industries. Since 1980, he has been President of his own consulting firm, providing merchandise, marketing and financial analysis to high-ticket, name-brand consumer catalog companies. He has worked with over 100 mail order companies and analyzed in excess of 1,500 individual catalog efforts. His for-profit clients have included Tiffany & Company, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, Williams-Sonoma, Garnet Hill, Pendleton Woolen Mills, Gorsuch Ltd., Coach Leatherware, Brooks Brothers, Title 9 Sports, Orvis and F.A.O Schwarz. His not-for-profit clients have included Smithsonian, Colonial Williamsburg, MOMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Winterthur Museum. In 1989, he co-founded Tucker Alexander, an investment banking alliance focused on providing strategic advice and merger/acquisition services to the consumer catalog industry.
Jim has been a member of the Direct Marketing Association since 1981 and has served over 15 years on the Catalog Council Operating Committee. He is a frequent industry speaker at Direct Marketing Association (DMA) conventions, various regional catalog club events and also at the industry’s Annual Catalog Conferences.
Prior to starting his own firm, Jim was General Manager of Dunham’s of Maine, Merchandise Manager for Carroll Reed, Inc., and held several operating and merchandising positions with Dayton Hudson (now Target). He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and holds an MBA from Michigan State University.
Jim is a member of the board of Directors of Coldwater Creek (NASDAQ symbol: CWTR), serving on the Nominating & Governance and Audit Committees and chairing the Compensation Committee. He enjoys saltwater fishing, restoring his colonial house in the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut and collecting late 18th and early 19th century American furniture and decorative arts.
HENRY REATH: Director
Henry Reath served as President and Publisher of the Doubleday Publishing Company where he worked with such bestselling authors as Stephen King, Gay Talese, and Bill Cosby until its sale to Bertelsmann in 1986. During his ten year career at Doubleday he also served as VP Marketing Director of the $200MM Book Club division.
Early career assignments at HarperCollins and WNET/Ch13, led to a position as the Marketing Manager for Doubleday's struggling Doubleday Book Club. Henry’s gift for marketing transformed the struggling club from a breakeven operation to the most powerful, profitable marketer of women's fiction in the country, consistently delivering EBIT in the $10-15MM range.
In 1987 he founded Collectors Reprints, a publisher of direct-marketed book programs concentrating on facsimiles of rare and out of print literary works. He has worked over the past two years with Tucker Capital’s strategic advisory group on a variety of assignments where his focus has been the analysis of marketing and performance data of direct mail companies. From 1996 to 2000 he served as strategic advisor to the Knowledge Environment Collaborative, an Internet joint venture of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Island Press, and the Stanford University Libraries, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
A graduate of Princeton University (BA, Philosophy), Henry is the chair of the board of Island Press/Center for Resource Economics, a non-profit, environmental publisher in Washington, DC, and served as President of The Academy of American Poets in New York City, the largest literary arts organization in the country.
KARIN L. GALLOWAY:
Vice President
Karin was promoted to Vice President in 2004. Her responsibilities include new business development, evaluation of acquisition programs, catalog industry analysis, preparation of offering memorandums, industry presentations and transaction due diligence. She also compiles and analyzes the data for the quarterly publication of MultiChannel Merchant’s Catalog and E-Commerce Transactions.
Prior to joining Tucker Capital Corporation in 1999 as the Chief Information Officer, she was the Chief Operating Officer for Intact Communications, Inc., an international tradeshow marketing firm. Karin's expertise included global sourcing, logistics and cost/price estimation and she was instrumental in acquiring clients like Airbus Industries, Bristol Myers Squibb, Roadtec, FMC Corporation, and The Food Group among others.
In the early 1990s, Karin managed the Business and Finance Department of a high volume, luxury European automobile dealership outside Philadelphia. Her negotiation skills resulted in preferred product supply and into favorable loan and lease agreement terms from leading financial institutions nationwide.
Previously she was a Sales Engineer with Bickley Furnaces, Inc. in Philadelphia where she spearheaded the marketing of imported industrial furnaces.
Karin is fluent in the German and English languages and received her BS from the Technische Hochschule in Koblenz, Germany.