Tommyhilfiger Set up His First Fashion Business at the Age of 18 Bringing Big

TommyHilfiger set up his first fashion business at the age of 18 bringing big

City styles to Elmira his home town in upstate New York the business grew

rapidly but by the age of 25 Hilfiger filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy

protection and moved to New York City to try his luck there he met moment more

Johnny an Indian businessman who encouraged Tommy to set up a label under

his own name to launch the brand

he'll figure and more Johnny conceived of a bold advertising campaign comparing

Tommyhilfiger to fashion Giants

Calvinkleinralphlauren and perryellis it got all of seventh Avenue

talking and soon he'll figure store was teeming with customers and the newest

American fashion ground was born but a true American dream does not come

without its challenges

after a few years he'll figure had to seek out new financial partners and

found them in the form of Silas child and Lauren stroll to encourage Tommy to

think big and think global in 1992

tommyhilfiger became the first fashion company to go public on the new york

stock exchange leading to a decade of hyper growth and over 2 billion dollars

in annual sales but soon the brand found itself

overexposed and over distributed in 2006 the company was taken private by a pass

which saw potential for the brand in Europe a new premium positioning

strategy worked and was soon implemented globally in 2010

the restructured business was acquired by PVH with global retail sales of 6.7billion dollars

Tommy Hilfiger is now focused on securing the future of the brand

he has worked so hard to build today at the brand showroom in London thebusiness of fashion goes inside Tommy Hilfiger's American dream

hello Tommy nice to be with you today thank you for sitting down with me andthe business of fashion

I wanted to spend some time talking about your career it's been 30 years now

since you launched your business

so let's go back yeah to Elmira New York where you grew up and where you set upyour first fashion business

I i was curious to hear about kind of what motivated a young man living in a

small upstate New York town

what motivated used to think that fashion or you're starting a fashion

Distance even back then was the right path for you

I think it it was by mistake

In a way yeah because i had no idea that I was ever going to the fashion business

Yeahi was too small to play on the basketball team to school too small and

frail to play on the football team and in the mid to late sixties

I became obsessed with music yeah The Beatles came to America the Rolling

Stones the who led zeppelin Hendrix and all of the sort of super groups of theTime were very influential

There was a fashion music revolution taking place with Woodstock and I wanted

To get be very much a part of that scene so because I couldn't really play an instrument

I decided to look like a rockstar right and I had long hair more bell-bottoms

and cool clothes and most of this students at my school

we're dressing in preppy clothes and very normal sort of classics but theyall wanted to look like me that because it was like you know sort of a rebellion

against parents because parents hated long hair

they hated seeing like Maude hippie type clothing on their children and at that

time I i decided to take one hundred fifty dollars i'd save working nights in

a gas station by 20 pairs of jeans from the streets of New York City

bell bottom jeans and sell them to my friends

ok so i opened a shop called people's place

ok painted a black and played music burned incense and candles and sold cool

really cool clothes but this is like way before the internet and way before kind

of mass media I mean how did you

because I've never been to elmira obviously but like how did you kind of

figure out what was cool and like translate that into this thisretailstore

it was all about what the musicians were wearing ok that was cool seeing jimi

hendrix and seeing the Stones and the Beatles in the who and all of these

groups address in such incredible ways i really wanted to be part of that wholeworld

so I wanted to feature that type of clothing in my stores

yeah so I searched New York City for the type of clothing iiii needed to put

in my stores and I would go to like obscure boutiques and the lower east

side and before soho is so hole and the east village and I would find reallycool items

sometimes vintage items and bring them back up to Elmira New York which is acollege town

ok and I sold them to like cool young people right

but along the way I was thinking wait

I think if I were to add a pocket or embellish these jeans or change the

design I would have a better product

ok so I started designing I'm

don't write and having these items made for my store and then stores

subsequently people loved what i was doing and what I was doing that it was

it was so much fun

I thought like what designing clothes is something that that I never thought of

you are trained as a fashion no natural

so how did you how did you teach yourself basically how to design and and

going to put together a garment and there's a lot of technical you know

skill that goes into designing I knew coming up with the ideas and sketching

them was my forte that that was fun that was inspiring was interesting and I knew

that I would never be able to cut a pattern and so these garments together

right

I would make a mess out of them right so I hired local people to work for me and

I guided them and as I was doing that I was thinking I should build my own brand

and it was my dream at that time the seventies to build my own brand but I

didn't really know exactly how to do it and at one point in time is it

I'm just doing it so i moved to new york city i sold my stores that way before

you get into that there is that the stores grew very quickly

very well they grew very quickly I opened Jean boutiques on college

campuses throughout New York State right on the cornell campus

cortlandalbarn Corning New York like George New York we opened a lot ofstores

I a couple of high school friends or partners and we over expanded and we had

a bankruptcy which was like a master's degree in business for me because I

realized we knew nothing about business and at that point in time I figured that

in order to build a brand and to become successful

you really should understand business right so I taught myself business and i

toiled over reading a balance sheet and looking at the bank statements and

really doing primitive math trying to figure out

how to become profitable and I figured out that you know you have to sell more

than your spending and it was quite simple and I had at the end but it was

it was difficult for me to grasp this idea of having to be a designer in a

businessman right but I had no choice right

so I force myself into it so then you know you moved to new york city after

having this like humbling thing and I imagine that's like a really difficult

thing to go through

and you're designing as a freelancer and your kind of working with some of these

big 7th Avenue brands tell me about that experience and what whatwhat that was

like oh it was very difficult to get a job without having going to design

school so I basically knocked on doors and showed people my work and beg people

to to hire me and this jeans company called Jordache I had one gene that was

like the gene in 1979 and I convinced them that they should do a wholecollection

I said look okay in order to expand your business you need a whole collection

I can design a collection for you so I did and they paid me but then they firedme.

why did they fire you they said we don't need a collection we have one gene that

is the basis of our entire company in our entire brand we really don't need it

so we don't eat so i went to another company called Bonjour jeans sort about

seventies designer Jean vehicle and the same thing happened

I went to work for them i designed a collection form that they didn't even

want to look at it they said now we know what we have two or three genes that

are

really the basis of the business we don't need anything else

so I met an Indian gentleman by the name of the Moon bag and he told me at a

factory in india and i said what i would love to go to India and i would love to

design clothing and indeed because I think fabrics are really cool

and I've seen other brands do that so he said well why don't you come to my

factory

so I went to Bombay first time first time which was an eye-opener

yeah it was incredible I fell in love with India Indian people the culture and

I spent a lot of time there

designing my first real collection under my own name which is really not my own

name

I named Tommy Hill so then I was fortunate enough to meet another Indian

gentleman called Mohammed Johnny

yes and Mohan at the time had gloriavanderbilt which is a big big jeans

company and he saw something in me I think that was maybe unusual

he saw that I was really driven to become successful but at the same time

hehe thought that it shouldn't be called Tommy Hill

it shouldn't be called 20th century should be called Tommy he'll figure and

I said are you sure you want to call tommyhilfiger because if if we call it

Tommy Hilfiger do people really know how to pronounce that name and he said Tommy

do you think people know how to pronounce East something wrong and I

said now that it's a very good point and he said so what would you design and i

sworei would ease on for myself

so we created tell me he'll figure in 1985

so that was 30 years 30 years ago and that was really the beginning of all of

this

we are where we sit today how do you know mr. Moore johnny was the right

business partner it's you know it's something that a lot of designers think

about as their businesses are growing obviously you know some things don't

change in fashion and whenever you know money men see a talent you know they can

go on Proposition them and one of the questions I get asked a lot by young

designers is like how do we know who the right investor or the right partner is

what was it about mr. more Johnny that that made you feel like okay this is

this is a good one

so when I met mohan it was like we'd known each other for years

and he felt the same way and by the way we both feel the same way today we're

both very close and connected but when we met each other it was just like a

meeting of the minds and we knew that we would do well together

so when he offered me the opportunity to have my own brand with him

I jumped at it and then I went to the Calvin Klein people and tell them that I

was not going to take the job because I was going in to business for myself

right but that was a hard thing to do because getting a Calvin Klein job was

like a major dream right

and I was quite enamored with calvin and the company they were the company at the

time and in the early eighties and I thought I will really learn a lot from

Kelvin in the company and then someday start my own but when this opportunity

came about

I couldn't refuse it so we went into business in 1985

there's a story that and it's now almost like fashion lore about this hangman

advertisement his campaign that you put up you can you tell us a little bit

about how that happened it was shortly after you set up the business with mr.

Moore Johnny's right and you know it really put you on the map i think

yeah well it was very interesting because we were in our first year of

business and we were talking about doing some sort of advertising and we didn't

have a lot of money to do it and certainly we were so knew he wasn't

going to fund a big advertising campaign

so I was thinking we should take these incredible young cool models out to the

Hamptons on the beach and photograph them in my cool casual clothes and I had

it all sort of worked out in my mind that there would be on sand dunes and

there would be

barefoot and the shirts untucked and just you know this really cool vibe and

Johnny came into my office my studio one day he said look I met this advertising

guy by the name of George Louis

yeah we need a meeting with him he's coming in this afternoon so I met George

Louis and George lowest big guy and he said

so tell me about this company and I said well where you know really going to

compete against calvinkleinralphlaurenperryellis we sort of have this

preppy casual cool line showed him i said i'd really like to do an

advertising campaign with models on the beach and he said no no you can't do

that

that's what would you do he said give me 24 hours right

so he came back in 24 hours with these big boards and he showed me pictures of

Calvin Ralph

perryellis with X is grown through them and said these guys are done now it's

tommyhilfiger I said that there's no way you can you can't do that

I would never do that and he said okay well I've got another idea

so you brought the other idea out then the other idea was comparing me to the

other designers or comparing the other designers to me and you would have to

fill in the blanks of their names so i said i can't do that either

that's you know obnoxious and I just can't I can't do that i want to go back

to the photographing the models on the beach and he said I've got another board

to show you

so we pulled out another board and it was photographs of the Armani campaign

the John Franco for a campaign the versace campaign the Kelvin campaign the

ralphs campaign with the names taken off the ads this one Bruce Weber was

shooting a lot of these campaigns and they all look this and they all look the

same he said you could put anyone's name on anyone

and this is what Calvin was using horses in his ad ads and Ralph of course was

polo by Ralph Lauren so that that there were there were so many similarities and

I said now you're right

that and he said look it would take you

millions of dollars and many many years to become known

so if you're if you want your name to become known

we should do something unique and do something out of the box

I was shaking because i thought this this is going to ruin me because

mohanraj owners say no we have to do this will be a great idea to do and the

joel Horowitz said that we should do it

we should do it so I was torn finally I agreed to do the hangman campaign and

when it launched

I was really nervous and the next day with the first and only day I thought of

leaving the business right

because it caused such a stir with fashion people and people basically

trashing me and becoming so incensed

it was all over the news all over the newspapers all over the telco shins

who does he think he is he couldn't hold a candle to these guys they've been in

business many years he never went to design school doesn't know but people

came into my store in columbus avenue

they came into Bloomingdale's Macy's sex and all the other stores and the clothes

started selling so it worked it worked and I take my hat off to George Louis

and Mohammad Johnny for I think first George for creating the campaign and

mohan and Joel for coercing me into doing it

so ultimately I mean it was your decision that was a pretty ballsy

decision it was it was a frightening decision

and after all of the fashion flock decided they should bury me in the sand

I decided that I had to just work very hard to create clothes that would be

relevant

so I really focused hard on every detail

so the business starts to perform super well you've made this like pretty bold

communications move you have all of seventh Avenue watching you now

some of them whose feathers are ruffled the retailers are interested because

people are talking about your brand but again you run into some challenges right

and as a every journey has challenges and you know mr. Moore johnny has his