After Katy Will Frances Valentine Find Its Footing?

IT’S SUCH A HAPPY PLACE TO COME,” says Elyce Arons, in a preppy-bright striped blouse, a tidy clatter of beaded bracelets jangling on her wrist. We’re in the double-height offices of the two-year-old handbag-and-shoe brand Frances Valentine—she’s the company’s CEO and one of its partners—overlooking Bryant Park.

- Carl Swanson

Her partner in the company, Katy Brosnahan, known to the world as Kate Spade, took her own life on June 5. They’d known each other since they were 18-year-old college freshmen, shared clothes and dreams and triumphs, started and sold their company Kate Spade New York together, then both took a break to raise their families before deciding to start another company—this one, as much as anything, because they wanted to make the sorts of shoes and bags they just couldn’t find when they weren’t making them themselves.

Spade’s death was incomprehensible on a personal level for Arons. “Every day, I wake up, it’s still shocking,” she says. As she grieved the loss of her friend, she was also left with the question of how to honor Spade’s legacy in the business they started together. The tasteful room where we’re standing is haunted by the same joy that infused all of Spade’s creations and the memories of the years they shared as friends and collaborators. A many-armed David Weeks light fixture fills the headspace above us, and a Georg Baselitz painting hangs over the vintage mantelpiece. “It took us a year, believe it or not, to build the space out,” she says, smiling, perhaps at the idea that they thought they had all the time in the world. “Andy is incredibly particular about things being just so.”