Cherryflava

A new kind of CEO

Posted on 13. Sep, 2005 by Cassandra in Uncategorized

Meet Dov Charney….Dov, like the soap but without the ‘e’. He’s the founder and CEO of American Apparel, the clothing manufacturer that’s showing the finger to the big Chinese clothing corporates, and winning.

He’s like Richard Branson with a foul mouth…and if you’ve never heard of him or American Apparel…he might be able to teach you something about how to win in business.

Much of American Apparel’s success in projecting an image of cool must
be attributed to a branding image originating with Charney’s wild,
wacky, hypersexual persona and extending out to the highly targeted
advertisements–provocative low-fi snapshot photographs of men and
mostly women in various states of undress, in some cases wearing only,
say, American Apparel socks. The ads, which appear exclusively on urban
billboards or in small-circulation hipster magazines like Vice and
Index, are often compared with a controversial Calvin Klein ad campaign
of the ’90s. But unlike Klein’s ads, which were highly styled setups
shot by top photographers, these are authentic snapshots photographed
by everyone from Charney to, literally, the summer interns. They
feature not models but regular people–employees, friends, Dov himself
(his bare ass is the star of one), and especially girls Dov meets on
the street.

"We’re a fantasy," he says, chuckling. "American Apparel is make-believe. We can do whatever the f– we want."

Read the rest of the article (Dov Charney, Like it or not) here. [via]

Is Dov and the American Apparel brand going to change the way business is run? Maybe…or maybe not, but we don’t really think that question would make him give a shit.