St. John Knits Appoints Board Members

St. John Knits Inc. appointed three new board members on Friday to help evaluate an offer from the company’s founders to buy the Irvine-based upscale clothier for $490 million and then take the company private. The new directors are attorney Robert Davis, a former president and chief operating officer of St. John Knits; Mark R. Goldston, chairman and chief executive of the Goldston Group, a Los Angeles-based strategic advisory firm, and Daniel Thomas Reiner, a private investor who was founder and chief executive of Optical Devices Inc. a high-technology manufacturer of computer monitor filters. The three directors will serve on a special committee that will consider an offer this week by the Gray family to purchase company shares it doesn’t already own for $28 a share. Chief Executive Robert Gray and his wife, Marie, who founded St. John, and their daughter Kelly, the company’s president, currently own about 13% of the company. The appointments expand the number of directors on the board from six to nine.