Tommy Hilfiger started his first fashion business at age 18 in his hometown of Elmira, New York. After filing for bankruptcy at age 25, he moved to New York City to try launching a label under his own name. He met businessman Johnny Mohan, who encouraged Hilfiger to conceive a bold advertising campaign comparing his brand to fashion giants like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. This controversial campaign garnered significant attention and success for the brand. However, a few years later Hilfiger had to seek new financial partners when Mohan encountered his own financial problems, finding them in Silas Chou and Lauren Stroll who encouraged global expansion of the brand.

1. 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
Calvinklein ralph lauren 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
tommy hilfiger 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

2. 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

3. 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 this
retailstore
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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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 tommy hilfiger 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

8. 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

9. 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 calvinklein ralph laurenperryellis we sort of
have this
preppy casual cool line showed him i said i'd really like to do

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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
own financial problems except how did how did that happen and
what was the
impact on your business
wellmr. Rana came to me one day and he said look I've got the
license for
coca-cola close and I said coca-cola clothes and what it would
do red
t-shirts are you talking he said no not good i mean i get a coca-
cola close it's
the biggest name in the world
we could do a lot with it in his glory event a bit built business
was slowing
down and my business was tiny but starting to grow
he said I need you to design it for me so I said all
what am I going to do I don't even have enough to design
enough time in the day
to do my own but it was paying him back for all he has done for
me
exactly so I i did I designed it and i decided to design it the way

13. i would
design cool casual sportswear put the coca-cola label on and it
exploded
it took off it was 250 million dollar business in 18 months
wow it was it was enormous
but like any quick trend it hit the wall and started falling down
so he was
running into financial problems from the gloriavanderbilt fall
off and and the
coca-cola downfall
while still funding my business so basically i had to find new
financing
he and I went to Hong Kong I want to banks and I went to Wall
Street I talk
to everybody
nonono we don't find its fashion brands to miss ready
I mean I goldmansachsmerrill lynch ever
the one really took meetings but no so i had to make a trip to
Hong Kong to go to
the factories to see how I could possibly get my merchandise to
ship to
the stores and I walked into self ocean network company and I
met a man by the
name of Silas child mhm now Silas child had been shopping at
my store on Rodeo
Drive in Beverly Hills and bought clothes for himself and he
said I like
your clothes
I said great I need some I need some help financially because i
don't have
the money to pay for the sweaters are making with you and I
have orders from
the stores and I'm trying to find it My partner or financing and
I'm having a
difficult time and he said let's go partners
I go partners with you and I said on the spot on the spot

14. so I said well I have a partner now Johnny
it wasn't his murjani and we have to probably buy him out so he
had put him
on the phone
put him on the phone and we bought me Johnny out
silence became my backer Joel Horowitz became the CEO and
partner and Lord
stroll
who is silent partner became the other partner
so it's four of us but Silas said you have to put your name into
the company
you are no longer going to own your name entirely
I said well what he wait my name is my only asset that's all I
have
yeah and I worked really hard and building my name and he said
look do you
want to be a small part of an elephant or large part of a pea
I said maybe small part of a an elephant
he said to put your name in we're going to invest
we have a great team in place and we're going to grow the
business
the rest is history right we built it from 25 million 250 million
to one
hundred million - 500 million to a billion to two billion
and it just still growing today but without having Silas child
learns stroll
injohor what's that wouldn't have happened right
they were a great team and we're still very close today we all
had an amazing
journey together and we were fortunate enough to expand it to
Europe early find
a guy by the name of Fred gearing who was a superstar CEO
and although we had
some bumps of as a result of over distribution and too many
logos and you
know what let's talk about that for a minute because that was

15. that's actually
one of the things I want to talk about because I feel like it's
really topical
at the moment I mean one of the things you're reading now
about you know other
American fashion businesses that are you know publicly traded
business is your
business eventually went public in 1992 I believe you know and
as soon as the
business goes public there's pressure for it to us grow and you
know at some
point you tap into this you know fast growing urban trend of her
oversized
clothes and you know the business is growing and growing and
growing but then
again like things can change very quickly in fashion I mean this
is why so
many investors are you know reticent or scared of the fashion
industry because
of the risk
trends come in and trends go out that's right can you talk about
you know the
risks and of overexposure especially in the context of
businesses that are
facing that today
you know what what happened first of all and what did you
learn from that
welli started the company with a collection designed for myself
and I was
over my hippie stage
no more long hair and no more long hair no more bell-bottoms
but I went back to my preppy roots because I I dress
you know we were pretty preppy growing up but I hated the
preppy clothes
because they were boring if it was terrible
they were stiff people who were preppy clothes were not cool

16. so I decided to redesign all the classics
I took the button down shirt the chino pant the publisher all this
is and
redesigned everything to suit my needs which at the time were
very casual but I
wanted them to be cool and meaningful and have thought into
the design so i
added detail
I washed them I made them oversized i created a couple of
logos
I really redesigned the classics that I thought would be relevant
for young
people of the time so they were preppy classics and they really
took off
but then in the early nineties all of the street kids started
wearing my
clothes and I done these athletic inspired jerseys with big logos
because
I wanted to become more sporty
so I took authentic hockey jerseys football jerseys basketball
jerseys and
did patches and logos and really big bold statements and they
sold like crazy
and Snoop Dogg went on Saturday Night Live wearing one of
them in the next
monday morning
they sold out of the stores and so all of a sudden this thing
started
multiplying like crazy and we couldn't supply the demand we
were we were always
selling out and we did the carpenter pants and we did
lots of red white and blue t-shirts and sweatshirts and sweaters
and it was like
the trend of the early nineties for young people all over and
really worn by
a lot of hip hop Kidz street kids skaters

17. that's going around yeah there they are the urban crowd and we
started designing
into it and chasing the trend ourselves and I think that was a big
mistake
because trends come and go we know that and they become
almost addictive
if you're selling a lot of certain merchandise because you don't
want to
stop
mhm but i think that it was a great lesson and getting back to
our preppy
roots was it was incredible thing because it put us back to the
DNA of the
brand and pushed us forward again
how much how much of that pressure to grow do you think came
from being public
one hundred percent because every quarter we had to show the
markets that
we were growing and we had such phenomenal growth in the
beginning they
expected that growth to continue and the minute it didn't
continue
they were off the brand and I think that's happening - maybe
someone else
for tonight right yeah no I mean that's happening to visit but
you know coach
and Michael Corey and other businesses are facing the same
thing is it you go
really quickly for several years and then all of a sudden you
know you're
everywhere and all some people don't aren't as interested in you
anymore
so what you did was you you retrenched everything that's we
pulled everything
back to talk about that that part of the story and why that was
the right

18. strategy
ok early on Silas and Lawrence said that
let's plant some seeds in Europe mmm
so we opened a store in London and we hired Fred gearing who
had worked with
Silas and lawrence early on I me earlier than that when they
were the polo ralph
lauren European licensees and Fred took over the tommy
hilfiger brand and he
grew it steadily with a positioning a premium positioning was
very thoughtful
and where he opened stores was very thoughtful in the
distribution so we had
this incredible philosophy and strategy going on in Europe with
great
slow growth and one day when we were in a dilemma trying to
figure out what the
hell to do with the brand because the stores were marking it
down in the way
cool any hour
abercrombie had come around polos business was was taking a
lot of our
business back the gap was hot banana was hot and all of a
sudden that the
landscape was changing
so what do we do what do we do and friends who want you look
what I'm doing
in Europe
what he was doing in Europe was he was celebrating the DNA
of the brand which
was preppy all-american premium sports were so we decided to
take a page out of
that book and apply it to the US business
interesting that you have to take the lessons from Europe and
apply them to
America but you know it really did seem to you know help

19. reposition the whole
brand
it did have there came a certain point though when you know
the business was
still public and then again you decided to take a private right
I feel like this is a whole business case in like every type of
structure of
potential structure you can have for a company so you went
from being a small
private company that went public the face and problems brought
it back in
start expanding in Europe and then you took the business
private with a pax
yeah instant and that was a really critical part of the
story because it removes some of this public market pressure
that's right and
it was part of the the kind of European story as well let's let's
fast forward
to today now because you know that you know the businesses in
a very different
position today it's now doing over there are six billion dollars in
retail sales
and I read value at retail you have multiple collections at
different tiers
and you are now you know in a way kind of you know not
actively involved with
the business every single day but you're playing a very
directional role to help
this entire global business work
how is your role in the business changed from the beginning
when you were the
scrappy entrepreneur to Tibet to the position you're in today
what we have incredible teams in the world
we have great leadership and we have a very I was a solid
structure so it
allows me to be a visionary and give direction to the brand from

20. a creative
standpoint the clothes the collections the fashion shows the
advertising the
marketing the collaborations the stores the design of the stores
the cool factor
and I mean I couldn't be happier because it allows me the time
to do this
whereas before i was juggling a lot but now that we have PVH
as a partner and or
is it the the owner and they handle really the the business end of
the
business
it allows me to do I think what I'm probably best at anyway
and in terms of the way you think about your business as it goes
forward I mean
you've hit this 30 year milestone you
what do you what do you hope for what you might as well as
you as you think
about the business going forward I mean it now seems like a no
it's in a really
solid place after lots of taught twists and turns the ups and
downs and
different partners and different market positioning and what
what what's your
what's your vision now as the visionary
well first of all I i I'm I'm always afraid of becoming too
complacent and
I'm always talking to our people about never being satisfied
with today
looking ahead and looking at how we could always evolve and
become better at
everything we do and never patting ourselves on the back side
of where
we're great
I like to say there are a lot of great people around a lot of
competition

21. there's a lot of competition we have to always strive to work
harder to be
better and as a perfectionist I find a lot of fault with a lot of
things but
you know those are the details that always need fine-tuning but
going
forward I would like to think that we would continue to grow
and evolve as a
light a global lifestyle brand with premium positioning which i
think is a
sweet spot in in the world of positioning
expand our women's business or women's accessory business
continue to elevate
the brand continue to be innovative in advertising and
marketing embrace social
media and digital as we have continued to surprise the consumer
with new ideas
but always back it up with the best product you can possibly
offer at the
the best value
one last question for you tell me which is really i mean you
talked about your
career as being kind of the equivalent of a masters in business
yeah and you know one of the things i talked to a lot of young
designers and
creatives about its understanding that fashion is a business yeah
do you do you think fashion designers need to understand
business and and if
so why if if not why not
meanwhile how important is that business side I think it's
important for
designers to understand the business end of the business as
much as possible
because without having that understanding they will never
understand
the necessity of the business being healthy because you have to

22. make clothes
that actually sell and that become profitable and that become
wearable
otherwise why being in the business I mean we're not doing
school projects
we're making clothes that we want people to wear and at the
same time in order to
continue to do all the things we do the fashion shows the
advertising the
showrooms the stores and doing all of the fun things
it takes a lot of funding and it takes a lot of profit
so you need money to sustain your creativity we do we do
and I think that if you look at LVMH look at a lot of the big
players they're
very financially driven to allow the creativity to exist
well it was a pleasure fingering your story and learning from
your twists and
turns
thank you grand - congratulations on your 30th
anniversary thank you all right thank you