Elyce Arons Opens Up About Her Best Friend, Business Partner And ‘Chosen Family' Kate Spade: ‘She's One In A Million'

Forbes

11 hours ago

Elyce Arons and Kate Spade
To the world, she was the chic designer Kate Spade. To Elyce Arons, she was Katy Brosnahan, who she met when both were students at the University of Kansas.
In full transparency, KU is also my alma mater, and Arons and I immediately bond over GSP/Corbin, the all-female dorms that she and a young Brosnahan lived in during their first year in college. (I lived in co-ed Ellsworth, but visited friends and sorority sisters across campus there all the time.) Brosnahan was a Kappa; Arons a Chi O. Arons asks me what sorority I was in when we catch up via Zoom. 'Alpha Gam,' I tell her, feeling as though, after reading her new memoir, I've known her for years. After all, Arons—speaking to me in front of several design samples for her latest company, Frances Valentine—may be in New York City now and me in Florida, but we're, at our core, just two girls from Kansas. (Only one of us has won the Kansan of the Year Award in 2025, though, and, spoiler alert—it ain't me.)
Arons' memoir about her friendship and business partnership with Spade, We Might Just Make It After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade, comes out June 17, just days after the seventh anniversary of Spade's death in 2018. 'I didn't plan for it to come out in a particular time,' Arons says. 'It just happened.'
The book jacket for "We Might Just Make It After All: My Best Friendship with Kate Spade" by Elyce ... More Arons.
'I really thought about writing the book because so many folks have written about her death and how she died and not focused on the life she lived and who she really was—because she was a very private person,' Arons says, alluding to Spade's death by suicide. (Another area Arons and I bond over, though this one unfortunate—I, too, lost someone close to me in the exact same manner Spade died. It's a club neither Arons nor myself want to be in, or focus on, for that matter.) 'A lot of people didn't get to know her intimately. But I hope to give a peek into this funny, gracious, wonderful, charismatic person I knew so well—because she's one in a million. She really was. And I felt lucky that she was my friend.'
It's taken time for Arons to be in an emotional place to put pen to paper on her decades-long friendship with Spade. 'After we lost her, it was a really difficult period,' she says. 'And I'm a little worried that I'm starting to forget things now, and I wanted to put 'em all down on paper.'
Elyce Arons says she wanted to capture her decades-long friendship with Kate Spade not only for ... More others to enjoy, but to preserve her memories of their special bond.
'If I don't do it now, when am I going to do it?' she adds. 'My brain's not going to be any fresher two years from now or five years from now than it is today.' She had the help of calendars she'd kept all the way back to the 1980s, and spiral notebooks and the memories of friends. 'It is very cathartic walking back that far and looking at that—all those things,' she says.
And so she did. The book's title is a play off of The Mary Tyler Moore theme song—Arons smiles as she suffers through my rendition of it, singing 'we're gonna make it after allllll'—and both Spade and Arons were gigantic fans of Moore's. Just three weeks before Arons and I spoke, she was introduced to Dr. Robert Levine, Moore's husband, who invited Arons to come out to the farm they once shared and see Moore's clothes in her closet, which remain there after her death in 2017. It was amazing, Arons tells me; she even tried on some of Moore's clothes. When I ask Arons what Spade—who we call Katy throughout the conversation—would have thought of this, it's a reminder of all that Spade is missing, and all that's missing that she's no longer here. 'She would've loved it,' Arons says. For what it's worth, I say, that serendipitous moment feels like what I'm calling a 'Katy wink.'
The first word that comes to mind when Arons thinks of Spade? 'So funny,' she tells me. 'She remained funny her whole life.'
Elyce Arons and Kate Spade
'We were very unlikely to be friends, and something just clicked right at the beginning,' Arons says. 'We liked a lot of the same things, and we found the same things really funny, and we were constantly playing pranks on each other. So a lot of people would be like, 'You guys are sick. I can't believe you do that to each other.''
They also bonded at KU over vintage shopping, and both eventually transferred to Arizona State University and, after college, ended up in New York City. Through it all, 'she totally remained the same person,' Arons says. 'And one of the things about her, she was one of the most gracious people you'd ever want to meet. She wanted to make everybody feel comfortable all the time. If somebody spilled something in her house, she was like, 'Oh, don't worry.' She never allowed anyone to feel bad or out of place anywhere. And it was a gift of hers.'
Another gift, it turned out, was business. Back in the day, the two women talked about opening a vintage store together. They even talked about opening a travel agency together. But, Arons says, they had no money to do either. Arons always wanted to live in New York City, but her best friend 'could have stayed in Arizona, she could have moved to California, she could have gone to Chicago—and all of those things were on the table,' Arons tells me of Brosnahan's life immediately post-college. 'So it was lucky for me that when she came back through from her Europe trip that she only had $5 in her pocket, because it forced her to come to my apartment and then end up staying.'
Eventually work took Arons out of New York City, but an idea from Katy to start a handbag line (after seeing the lack of chic American-designed bags on the marketplace while she was working at Mademoiselle) brought Arons back to the Big Apple. It was Andy Spade, by now Kate's partner, who encouraged her to start the company. When they asked Arons to join them, she had no idea how she could quit her job and uproot based on an idea alone. 'But I also really believed in Katy's idea, and believe me, at the beginning, I said, 'Handbags—what do we know about handbags?'' Arons says. 'And she said, 'Well, I know what's not available that I really want.'' She found the white space: a bag that wasn't outrageously expensive yet was also not insultingly cheap; a bag somewhere in the middle 'that is chic and that works for everybody—and it just doesn't exist out there right now,' Arons recalls Spade telling her. So Arons said yes and, along with Kate and Andy and Pamela Bell, co-founded a company that came to define a generation. And while it wasn't always easy—and that can't be overstated—the brand Kate Spade found success because it was 'something different, something unique in the market, and doing it really well and not sacrificing on quality,' Arons says. 'I think it's having the right product at the right time, and I think being an authentic person or people really matters.'
The two women worked together on both Kate Spade and, later, Frances Valentine.
Spade and Arons weren't just best friends, but they were sisters—and an entirely other layer was added becoming business partners. While Spade's name was on the bags, Arons was as involved in the brand as anybody. When they hired a team—which grew to about 350 at their corporate office and about 20 retail stores—'I mean, you had to be talented, but probably the most important thing was you had to be polite,' Arons says. 'And we really stuck to it, because you're at work all day long. You're sitting next to people and you should have fun with them. You should enjoy each other's company and you should be respected. And the people we brought in, I have to say, it really makes a difference. We had a blast. We'd have parties for our team all the time, and the bigger we got, the bigger the parties got. It was so much fun. I loved those days. I ran into one of our former senior managers who had come as a younger man and kind of risen in the ranks while he was there. And he looked at me and he said, 'None of us ever knew what we had until we left.''
If you're thinking that Spade and Arons' friendship and business partnership was perfect—think again. 'I've never fought harder or more with any person in my life than with her,' Arons tells me. Their friendship was 'one that you're never going to lose, no matter what you say, no matter the venom that comes out of your mouth and the anger that you have at that one moment. I'm not a person who can stay mad. Katy could stay mad. And that was one difference between us, because I would feel guilty and horrible two seconds after I hang up the phone. The guilt just overtakes me. And so I'd always walk by [and say], 'I'm so sorry,' but she, on the other hand, would just not answer my calls. And then it was torment for me for hours until she called me back.'
More than being friends, 'I'd probably say we were sisters more than anything else,' adding that they were 'chosen family.'
'It was such a close friendship that I think a lot of people in life don't get to experience what I got to experience, and I'm so grateful,' Arons says.
Elyce Arons
After the brand's formation in 1993, in those early days they exclusively sold handbags, but eventually expanded to sell clothing, jewelry, shoes, eyewear, fragrances, stationary and more. By 2006, Spade sold the remainder of her shares in the business to Neiman Marcus Group, who in turn sold the label that year to Liz Claiborne Inc. for $124 million. (The company was later purchased by Coach, Inc. in May 2017.) Both Spade and Arons' identities were tied up 'with this business that we had created for so long, and then all of a sudden, nothing,' Arons tells me. While both Spade and Arons were focused at the time on raising kids, 'We both really missed fashion, and we missed creating things and we missed working,' Arons says. 'I had never not worked a day in my life.'
Elyce Arons met Katy Brosnahan, as she was then known, as freshmen at the University of Kansas.
Eventually, in 2016, they launched a new collection of luxury handbags and footwear under the brand name Frances Valentine. Being out of the business for those years in between stepping away from Kate Spade and launching Frances Valentine saw a huge shift in the industry for Spade and Arons—e-commerce took over from retail and influencers took over from editors and 'the whole landscape had shifted,' Arons says. 'You don't realize how things changed so quickly.' Social media barely existed when Spade and Arons left Kate Spade. 'So when we started, there were so many things we had to learn,' Arons says. 'But we were doing well, things were just starting to happen. And that's when we lost Katy.'
'I didn't really know whether we should move forward or not,' Arons says about running Frances Valentine in the aftermath of Spade's death. 'But I thought about it. I talked to the team and, really for her legacy's sake and for her family and for the team that we had built there, and I thought Katy would want us to do it. So we kept the company going.'
Elyce Arons still runs Frances Valentine, which she founded with Spade.
The company is now 26 employees strong at the corporate office in addition to its retail stores, so it has 'a little bit over 100 total,' Arons tells me. She is co-founder, CEO 'and janitor,' she laughs, adding that she felt like after Spade's death 'I had to stay really strong, because I not only had to run the company alone when I was used to having someone side-by-side with me who I really trusted, [but] I had to recruit investors and bring more money into the company at the same time and design everything without her,' she says. 'And one of those things alone would've been enough. But having to do all of those things—and thank God we've got such an amazing team of people here, we all banded together and got things done—but I think the thing that I've learned the most is really to appreciate and value the relationships you have with people. And don't take any of 'em for granted.'
Elyce Arons is telling her story seven years after Kate Spade's sudden passing.
In We Might Just Make It After All, Arons details the morning she got the news that Spade had died. Spade's assistant called her 'and told me to make sure I was sitting down,' Arons writes. 'Then he told me that Katy had taken her own life. I didn't believe him at first. When he finally got through to me, I let out a cry of distress from a grief so deep that I barely remember what happened next.' Arons details in the book a live, on-camera interview where she was asked 'If you could ask Kate one question, what would it be?' Arons' sense of humor shines as she writes, 'As I was sitting there with the live cameras trained on me, the question that popped into my head was: 'Where's my pink skirt?' She'd borrowed it months ago. Of course I didn't say that on live television. My answer was 'I would have asked her, 'Why?''
Many moons ago, Spade wrote Arons a letter about their rock solid bond as friends turned sisters. She sobbed when she initially read it, and when she reads it now, she still sobs. Of their friendship of 35 years—so beautifully detailed in the book—'I've been really lucky.'
Of her life—even the rough spots like losing Spade nearly eight years ago to the day—she adds, 'I've had all these different chapters that are completely different. I mean, I was a single woman having cocktails and partying and smoking cigarettes. And then the next chapter I was a mom on the school board playing tennis and taking cooking classes. I had multitudes. I've had a magical life, and it's all been amazing.'