American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, at this very moment, is essentially running around his company with a lighter and gas, begging to destroy the whole thing. I know I’m being excessive here, but it’s getting to the point where the CEO of the fairly well established fashion label is pretty much begging to be booted from his position. Not only is Charney attacking his own CFO and holding creepy photo shoots in his basement involving nudity and young girls, on top of being caught hiring copious amounts of illegals, but he’s now decided to try to uphold the company image- by making store employees taking pictures of themselves, using which Charney will fire anyone not upholding the “image”.
I don’t even know what to say about this fiasco. Part of me wants to say this was expected- I’ve heard plenty of strange stories from doing fashion writing, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that Charney is so absolutely loopy. The problem is, Dov Charney understood what fundamentally was a great marketing idea, and he undoubtedly does a good job at maintaining the “image”, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that he has no idea how to run a swinging successful business, and he’s apparently refusing to discard his more distasteful side for the more professional image he needs to maintain to keep his company afloat.
In any case, it may be interesting to see if American Apparel weathers this storm. Given the absolute plethora of bad press popping out about the company, I imagine it is going to have a hard time maintaining more businesslike investors. I sincerely doubt it will cut into their profit margin in any significant way (hipster kids don’t really give a crap about such things, and may get some sort of an odd thrill out of it), but I imagine American Apparel is going to have a hard time surviving.
Tags: american apparel, business, fashion, finance
