Jerri Hoffmann was 15 when the cute boy she’d met over the summer invited her to a school dance. She knew what she wanted to wear: a navy-and-black plaid set like the ones she’d studied in the pages of Seventeen and Glamour. There was no budget for it, so she made it herself.
Using a McCall’s pattern and sewing skills learned from her mother, Doris, Jerri stitched the outfit together, working around school, homework and the rhythms of a crowded home. The jacket was finished. The skirt was close. The finicky waistband, though, would take too long. On the night of the dance, she zipped the skirt and pulled on a sweater, leaving it untucked to hide the raw edge.
Nobody noticed. But they noticed her. Her date was David Hoffmann, future founder of the Hoffmann Family of Companies conglomerate and her husband of nearly 55 years. “I fell in love with her through fashion,” he says. David still remembers what she wore when they first met that summer: dark nylons, a crisp white blouse, a brown leather-looking skirt. He says she was the first in their town to wear a mod, convertible trench—the kind with a zip-off hem that shifted from long to short. “Everybody always thought she dressed to the nines,” he says. “But it wasn’t because she spent a lot of money on it. She’s always had a flair for it.” To this day, he swears, there isn’t a single outing where she doesn’t receive a compliment. The comments land on the clothes, but what people respond to is Jerri’s presence.
Photography by Omar Cruz
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A foundational force in the Hoffmann Family of Companies, Jerri is now helming her first venture—not as a reinvention but as a continuation. Her honed instincts around taste, operational rigor and attentiveness are now operating in plain view.
Now, after five decades shaping outcomes from the inside, she’s drawing on a lifetime of taste and accumulated judgment to create something of her own. Launching a boutique brand isn’t about reinvention; she’s not bored or seeking belated recognition. It’s a matter of timing. The conditions have aligned for her instincts around fashion, people and place to serve as the blueprint, rather than a cultivating force.
Back in April 2022, on opening day of The Augusta Clothing Company, in Missouri, 10 minutes from where she and David grew up, she heard someone call her name. She recognized the voices but didn’t expect to see her parents, who were by then confined to home care. They couldn’t walk up from the car but had come to witness the moment. Her father passed away a year later; her mother 18 months after that. “How lucky were we to have them for so long?” she reflects.
She thinks about her father-in-law, who died suddenly from an aneurysm at 61, just as he was starting to open up about his service as a front-line soldier in World War II. The questions she wished she’d asked never got answered.
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jerri hoffman naples augusta clothing
After launching a pilot location in her native Missouri in 2022, Jerri is opening the Naples flagship this month. Three times the size of the original, the Fifth Avenue South store sets the course for a nationwide expansion.
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At 74, Jerri is opening her Naples flagship on Fifth Avenue South, a space three times the size of the Missouri store. With 2,400 square feet of retail space, it establishes a new Hoffmann presence in the downtown corridor. Plans are underway for an Aspen location. David talks about 100 stores. “He doesn’t let us do anything small,” she says. Not that she’d want to, either. “I wish I had a little more runway,” she adds—not mournfully, but with clarity. Time is one thing you can’t buy.
By 25, Jerri had been married to David for five years. She’d earned a teaching degree, lasted a year in the classroom, then moved into retail. Working at The Limited, as the chain began its national ascent, she helped open store No. 41 and was on the corporate leadership track. “The person I reported to ended up becoming president of the company,” she says. David’s career was accelerating, too. The couple wanted a family and decided there wasn’t room for two high-pressure roles. “I know it’s done, but it wasn’t for us,” she says. “It wasn’t good for our marriage.”
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About 95% of her wardrobe is made up of brands stocked at The Augusta Clothing Company. “[Fashion] shows an outward conviction of what you represent,” she says.
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She got Jim Rennert’s Think Big sculpture for David. “He doesn’t let us do anything small,” Jerri says. Together since high school, the pair balance each other in life and business. He charges forward, she minds the details.
She stepped back, folding her ambitions into a shared enterprise, one that would grow far beyond what either of them imagined. David built a powerhouse recruiting firm and used it to launch the Hoffmanns’ sprawling family portfolio, which focuses on acquiring and stewarding existing businesses. Jerri held the center. When the 2008 financial crisis hit and the recruiting business stalled, David remembers her steadiness: “It’s just money.” When they began flipping homes, she learned to wallpaper, source materials and apply finishes. She’d travel with him for talent searches and later business acquisitions, where trust often matters more than spreadsheets. David describes her as the counterweight to his forward drive, the one who softened his edges and humanized deals. “People got comfortable with us as a business and as a family, and me as an executive because of her,” he says. He insists the company wouldn’t have become what it is without her. She insists she was peripheral, a fly on the wall. “Dave was the one out there taking risks every day,” she reasons.
The idea for The Augusta Clothing Company started, as many Hoffmann projects do, with a place. But unlike most of their ventures, this one wasn’t about refining an existing framework. It would be built from the ground up, shaped by Jerri. They’d been investing in the shop’s namesake town, restoring vineyards and historic buildings to shape a renowned wine-country destination. They needed retail. “Why don’t you do a dress store?” David suggested. She’d always wanted to.
Jerri’s first answer was no. It was mid-COVID. She was managing a dozen restoration projects. Some buildings were near collapse. Plus, she told him, “I’m not 60.” But age doesn’t hold much weight for the Hoffmanns, and the conditions that once made “not now” sensible had shifted. The children were grown. The family business was steady. She also knew that if they were opening a boutique, she wanted to be the one doing it. Fashion, retail—those were her lanes.
She’d been working them since childhood, when she’d sew much of her own clothes. She’d babysit, work at her father’s jewelry store and save up from shifts at Dairy Queen to buy indulgences like The Villager by Thom Hird. Fashion was utility first, then artistry—but always worth getting right. “It shows an outward conviction of what you represent,” she says.
Photography by Omar Cruz
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A note from David’s high school typing class serves as her bookmark.
Over the years, her appreciation for the craft sharpened. In the 1990s, she hosted designers from houses like David Yurman, Etro and Brioni for dinners at the family’s stately Chicago home. Later, she toured Dior and Chanel’s Paris archives, studying the hidden mechanics that give couture its authority. The access expanded her fluency, but her approach remains grounded.
When we meet at the Port Royal home she and David moved into last year, she answers the door, running behind from a call about the store build-out. There’s no staff around, no choreography. She directs us upstairs to her closet, lined with pieces from Derek Lam 10 Crosby, Cinq à Sept and Oliphant—95% of her wardrobe is composed of labels Augusta Clothing stocks. Some Chanel and Cucinelli are mixed in without hierarchy. There’s one gown, a strapless black-and-ivory silk she’ll wear with a moto jacket for a note of irreverence.
When Jerri decided to move forward with the boutique, she had the fashion eye and the capitalist discipline, but had to learn the workings of contemporary retail from scratch. Missouri was the pilot, the “first pancake.” Naples is where she aims to establish a formula that can expand nationally without losing the personal touch that gives brick-and-mortar its edge.
Photography by Omar Cruz
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She got Jim Rennert’s Think Big sculpture for David. “He doesn’t let us do anything small,” Jerri says. Together since high school, the pair balance each other in life and business. He charges forward, she minds the details. Detail:
The store bridges the gap between fast fashion and prestige labels. Jerri designed the Naples space as a backdrop, with painted brick, pecky cypress and lacquered cabinetry. Store manager Andrea Pereira, who has worked at Hermès, Gucci and Hugo Boss, brings high-luxury service to the approachable edit. She first met Jerri at a Naples Botanical Garden event at Waterside Shops. In a room full of polished, intentional dressing, Jerri stood out with her black, high-waisted linen palazzo pants, a fitted white bodysuit and shrug, and a wide-brimmed hat. Andrea didn’t expect to be remembered when she reached out after hearing about the Naples store. “Of course, I remember you,” Jerri said, warmly.
Those qualities—elegance without effort, presence without performance—are the throughline of the boutique. Jerri gets eyes on everything, course-correcting what doesn’t meet her standards. “It’s a high bar,” she says. She approaches leadership the way she did raising a family: model the standard, make expectations clear, never ask others to do what you won’t.
Her instincts trace to her Missouri upbringing. Jerri’s tempo slows when she talks about her great-grandmother (simply Grandma to her), the German ancestors who came here in the 1800s and the centuries-old vineyards threatened by St. Louis sprawl. As the Hoffmanns’ original vision for the town waned, David has considered walking away. “She won’t let me,” he says. “She’s in love with the history of the place.”
Photography by Omar Cruz
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Today, Jerri’s life feels whole. Two of her three children now run the family company, she has 13 grandkids, projects spanning decades and a partnership that’s held for 55 years. Now, there’s a brand to carry her sensibility and legacy forward.
Her attachment is visceral: “It’s the earth, the smell of everything. It’s home.” She keeps pieces of the past close. In her Naples closet, a framed photograph of Grandma Adelaide sits next to a tiny crystal basket the avid antiquer collected. “My Grandma was my anchor,” Jerri says. Adelaide raised Jerri’s mother after her own son lost his wife in childbirth and himself to drinking. “She took care of people—that’s what she did.”
Jerri pulls out a gift from one of her daughters-in-law, a necklace engraved with a Tree of Life. “It’s because I’m the grandmother,” she explains. Jerri’s life is full: three children, 13 grandchildren, dozens of businesses, a marriage that holds—all rooted in her. What she wants now is to open Naples, solidify the formula. To build something her grandchildren could inherit if they choose. “We’re all about family business,” she says.
Jerri feels the urgency to get it right. David’s instinct has always been ‘go, go, go.’ Hers has been to apply the brakes. She’s still teaching herself to let go. For her, this isn’t about recognition but continuity. The Augusta Clothing Company carries her taste, her touch and her ancestral home’s name outward. The timing is right.