Timmy Hilniger or Tommy Hilfiger?
I’m going to go back to talking about business because those Kenyan politicians are out of their minds and if I keep paying attention to them, I’m going end up losing my mind as well.
Anyway, I don’t know why the personal biography of Tommy Hilfiger (the fashion designer) seems to fascinate me. I found myself reading a biographical account of him this weekend and I think he used a couple of ingredients to get to the top. What ingredients are those? bullshit, luck and straight up cojones (spanish for “balls”). And perhaps, these are important tools that we could all use in our lives to get ahead (you gotta fake it till you make it, right?).
Let me get to the crux of the story: Tommy Hilfiger is not a fashion designer. He has never been nor will he ever be one. So, how did he manage to start a billion dollar fashion empire, you ask? Well, he did have natural business acumen and when his first business venture failed, he switched to bullshitting; got lucky along the way and the rest as they say, is history.
This is how he began (quoting from a New York Magazine profile of Hilfiger):
“Tommy’s first big fashion epiphany occurred in 1969. To finance a summer away from home, Hilfiger took a sales job at a hippie clothing store on Cape Cod. The former preppy returned home from vacation decked out in sandals and bell-bottoms. His hair had grown out, rock-star-style — sort of Prince Valiant meets Brian Jones. He listened to Hendrix and Stones eight-tracks. He dropped acid. His parents were, to use Hilfiger’s own words, “freaked.” He was 17.
What happened next has become part of garmento folklore. Realizing that Elmira was a fashion wasteland, full of teenagers like himself who craved mod clothes but couldn’t find them, Hilfiger and two high-school buddies pooled their life savings ($50 apiece) and went into the jeans business. Hilfiger drove his rusted ’59 VW Bug to Ithaca and scrounged up ten pairs of bell-bottoms. The initial inventory sold out in a day.
Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, Hilfiger made the 250-mile trip to New York, where he stuffed his Bug with 600 pairs of jumbo-legged jeans, which he purchased for $3.50, and flipped them in Elmira for $5.88. In a week, all 600 pairs were snapped up.
Eventually the three high-school seniors decided to become retailers themselves. On December 1, 1969, they opened a store called People’s Place in downtown Elmira. It conformed to the typical trippy-jean-boutique template (head shop downstairs, Day-Glo and incense all around) and became an instant hit with Elmira’s high-school crowd. “I couldn’t wait for three to bolt from school and open the store,” recalls Hilfiger. At the end of their senior year, the three partners were doing almost $1 million in volume and pulling down $60,000 salaries”.
These three high school partners eventually went bankrupt at age 23 {Isn’t that’s the perfect age to fail? you’ll still have plenty of time left to try again}. Anyway, after going broke, Hilfiger moved to New York City and reinvented himself, by himself. Tommy Hilfiger, the jean reseller, turned into Tommy Hilfiger, the fashion designer. He started hustling for freelance work while he waiting and hope that his big break would come up (this is the bullshit part; Hilfiger was not a designer); The lucky part came in when he met an Indian entrepreneur called Mohan Murjani, whose family happened to own a textile company. The indian was looking for a young designer to launch a new men’s sportswear line. Hilfiger told him he could do it and Murjani knew better than to use an Indian name on his new sportswear line, so he decided to call it “Tommy Hilfiger”. Murjani invested most of the money into developing this new line and Hilfiger, for agreeing to use his name and provide some input into the designs, got a percentage of the company.
As I’m reading this story, I kept thinking to myself what balls this guy had:- just tell people you can do something {even if you have doubts or absolutely no training!} and then figure out how to get the work done later.
Do you think you can get away with that today? Is business still the same or have times changed?
Do you have to live in a city like New York or London, where you’re more likely to bump into the right people or can you swing this b.s. even if you are based in Nairobi?
Oh..and the “Timmy Hilniger” name was given to him by Spike Lee who wanted to make fun of rap musicians embrace of Hilfigers fashions.
that article was on top!!!keep up the skewed views