Dov Charney Quotes
Dov Charney Quotes
I think I was just born overcharged…I was such a crazy kid in elementary school I was almost kicked out.
My friends were selling these great bootleg t-shirts in front of the Forum. I was going to prep school in the States at the time and the t-shirts there were a bit different, better for the silk-screening process. So I started buying t-shirts at K-mart and bringing them to Canada in garbage bags on the train.
They took me down to Station 10, which doesn’t exist anymore, and after a couple of hours of me yelling, ‘Monsieur, monsieur!’ they let me out and gave me back my cash and my shirts. So what did I do? Headed straight for the Cock ‘n Bull to try and unload the rest of them.
I was barley 18. So that was the beginning and I guess because I lost money I felt compelled to keep hustling.
I called up a guy I trust and asked, ‘Who's the best out there at organizing a factory?’ He said Marty. So I called him on a Saturday and said, ‘Dude, my name's Dov and I need help.’ He started Monday; that’s the way I operate.
It’s sickening money, man. We're minting money.
It’s t-shirts that look good, t-shirts that feel good, and t-shirts that are made in a non-exploitative setting.
We designed the rate in such a way that the average person should be able to make $100 a day, that’s our target.
We want to pay more than the prevailing wages in Los Angeles, because we want to have the happiest work force we can have.
I have the highest-paid apparel workers in the world.
What I’m going to prove, and I’m going to embarrass the entire fucking establishment, is that sweatshops are more expensive in the end than vertically integrated manufacturing in Canada or the U.S. You see, those prisons in China are inefficient and the opportunity cost of offshore production is huge, because you can’t respond to market demands as quickly.
Look, I’m not that ethical, but you don’t have to be the most ethical person to know that slavery was wrong.
What I’m talking about is the exploitation of human potential instead of the exploitation of humanity. I’m saying you don’t have to fuck the Third World up the ass, or the shareholders, or the consumers, or the Canadian and American workers, to do business.
Commerce is the key driver toward societal change. If everyone that produces the goods the world consumes starts concerning themselves with sustainable, low-impact practices, the world will change.
If you’re Enron, and everyone is getting fucked up the ass, you’re doing something wrong. You’re not a good entrepreneur, you’re just a fucking Soprano parasite.
There’s the relaxed fit generation and then there’s the next generation.
We like sexy at American Apparel.
We don’t have branding on the shirts. It’s not a status symbol.
I can’t wear any brand on my body - I just freak out. I mean, if I’m with a girl who’s wearing a Christian Dior necklace, I can’t even fuck her. And then there are those girls - like every girl I seem to find - who has one those Louis Vuitton bags. C’mon, it’s fucking false tribalism.
It’s like a sexy girl who keeps telling you she’s sexy. It’s nauseating.
We plan to continue to behave in a contrarian matter. This creative environment is what got us to this point. We certainly aren’t going to stop doing it now after we created a highly profitable company.
I think for a designer to be in his underwear when he's designing underwear is quite common. And I'm in my underwear in my office all the time.
I frequently drop my pants to show people my new product.
I've made mistakes. There are bumps in the road to what I'm doing. I should tone down? So I don't get in trouble? It's fascism. You're asking me to succumb to tyranny.
Passion. That’s it. When you believe in what you’re doing, that’s it.
I think I was a born hustler. I like the hustle. I like selling a product that people love. It’s nice when a girl tries on a bra or a tie-dye t-shirt, and it’s, ‘Ooh, I love it.’
I started bringing like 5,000, 10,000 t-shirts at a time, on a U-Haul truck in the summer, and I developed a kind of importing business, from the United States to Canada. That’s why it’s called American Apparel.
I knew I could do it differently, and I knew I could turn it around. And I knew there was a solution and there was no way, that kind of passion or can-do spirit; I said there’s no way I'm stopping now.
When you believe in what you’re doing, that’s the first thing. And you have to be resilient, because people are going to try to knock you down.
Anything we want to do, we can do. If we can dream it, it can be done.
As a result of this system, we’re able to compete with China and kick ass the American way. It's less expensive, for me, the way we do business, to manufacture here in the United States. There's a high cost to going offshore.
If you're working with a supplier in China, you've got to work months in advance. If you're working with your own factory, you can wake up one morning and say, ‘Hey, let's make 10,000 tank tops today.’
Let's get something small – maybe a moped! Get a kid to just ride it from store to store. Some kids get off on that – living off exhaust! A customer could wait while this yahoo gets on his bike and gets his ass over here.
You know the face of your worker ... engineers and designers and finance people and knitters and dyers and chemists can come together in one location and say, ‘How can we do this better?’ You can produce products more efficiently than they can be made on an outsource basis.
Give me the chance of going to Harvard or being there when Google started and I want to be there making $3 an hour sweeping their floors. Or Apple when Steve Jobs started it. Maybe I'm delusional but that's what I think American Apparel is.
I make more money than my competition who pays 50 cents an hour because of the efficiencies of dealing with someone face to face and paying them a fair wage.
I think it's really low brow to take advantage of labor cost inequalities to sustain your business. I know how to use communications, technology, and distribution systems to deliver t-shirts to the public without damaging the lives of my workers.
The beautiful thing about free trade is it creates an environment of competition where there's a marketplace of ideas. And you know, one guy could go offshore and pull things in from China. Another guy could automate here in the United States. And may the best man win. Maybe both men will win.
I want to be remembered as one of the great CEOs of our time and of my generation. And I think that I'm gonna make them proud. That's my plan.
Dov Charney Quotes
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America doesn’t need another faceless, institutional apparel company. They need an apparel company that gets it and does it right.
I think I was just born overcharged…I was such a crazy kid in elementary school I was almost kicked out.
My friends were selling these great bootleg t-shirts in front of the Forum. I was going to prep school in the States at the time and the t-shirts there were a bit different, better for the silk-screening process. So I started buying t-shirts at K-mart and bringing them to Canada in garbage bags on the train.
They took me down to Station 10, which doesn’t exist anymore, and after a couple of hours of me yelling, ‘Monsieur, monsieur!’ they let me out and gave me back my cash and my shirts. So what did I do? Headed straight for the Cock ‘n Bull to try and unload the rest of them.
I was barley 18. So that was the beginning and I guess because I lost money I felt compelled to keep hustling.
I called up a guy I trust and asked, ‘Who's the best out there at organizing a factory?’ He said Marty. So I called him on a Saturday and said, ‘Dude, my name's Dov and I need help.’ He started Monday; that’s the way I operate.
It’s sickening money, man. We're minting money.
It’s t-shirts that look good, t-shirts that feel good, and t-shirts that are made in a non-exploitative setting.
We designed the rate in such a way that the average person should be able to make $100 a day, that’s our target.
We want to pay more than the prevailing wages in Los Angeles, because we want to have the happiest work force we can have.
I have the highest-paid apparel workers in the world.
What I’m going to prove, and I’m going to embarrass the entire fucking establishment, is that sweatshops are more expensive in the end than vertically integrated manufacturing in Canada or the U.S. You see, those prisons in China are inefficient and the opportunity cost of offshore production is huge, because you can’t respond to market demands as quickly.
Look, I’m not that ethical, but you don’t have to be the most ethical person to know that slavery was wrong.
What I’m talking about is the exploitation of human potential instead of the exploitation of humanity. I’m saying you don’t have to fuck the Third World up the ass, or the shareholders, or the consumers, or the Canadian and American workers, to do business.
Commerce is the key driver toward societal change. If everyone that produces the goods the world consumes starts concerning themselves with sustainable, low-impact practices, the world will change.
If you’re Enron, and everyone is getting fucked up the ass, you’re doing something wrong. You’re not a good entrepreneur, you’re just a fucking Soprano parasite.
There’s the relaxed fit generation and then there’s the next generation.
We like sexy at American Apparel.
We don’t have branding on the shirts. It’s not a status symbol.
I can’t wear any brand on my body - I just freak out. I mean, if I’m with a girl who’s wearing a Christian Dior necklace, I can’t even fuck her. And then there are those girls - like every girl I seem to find - who has one those Louis Vuitton bags. C’mon, it’s fucking false tribalism.
It’s like a sexy girl who keeps telling you she’s sexy. It’s nauseating.
We plan to continue to behave in a contrarian matter. This creative environment is what got us to this point. We certainly aren’t going to stop doing it now after we created a highly profitable company.
I think for a designer to be in his underwear when he's designing underwear is quite common. And I'm in my underwear in my office all the time.
I frequently drop my pants to show people my new product.
I've made mistakes. There are bumps in the road to what I'm doing. I should tone down? So I don't get in trouble? It's fascism. You're asking me to succumb to tyranny.
Passion. That’s it. When you believe in what you’re doing, that’s it.
I think I was a born hustler. I like the hustle. I like selling a product that people love. It’s nice when a girl tries on a bra or a tie-dye t-shirt, and it’s, ‘Ooh, I love it.’
I started bringing like 5,000, 10,000 t-shirts at a time, on a U-Haul truck in the summer, and I developed a kind of importing business, from the United States to Canada. That’s why it’s called American Apparel.
I knew I could do it differently, and I knew I could turn it around. And I knew there was a solution and there was no way, that kind of passion or can-do spirit; I said there’s no way I'm stopping now.
When you believe in what you’re doing, that’s the first thing. And you have to be resilient, because people are going to try to knock you down.
Anything we want to do, we can do. If we can dream it, it can be done.
As a result of this system, we’re able to compete with China and kick ass the American way. It's less expensive, for me, the way we do business, to manufacture here in the United States. There's a high cost to going offshore.
If you're working with a supplier in China, you've got to work months in advance. If you're working with your own factory, you can wake up one morning and say, ‘Hey, let's make 10,000 tank tops today.’
Let's get something small – maybe a moped! Get a kid to just ride it from store to store. Some kids get off on that – living off exhaust! A customer could wait while this yahoo gets on his bike and gets his ass over here.
You know the face of your worker ... engineers and designers and finance people and knitters and dyers and chemists can come together in one location and say, ‘How can we do this better?’ You can produce products more efficiently than they can be made on an outsource basis.
Give me the chance of going to Harvard or being there when Google started and I want to be there making $3 an hour sweeping their floors. Or Apple when Steve Jobs started it. Maybe I'm delusional but that's what I think American Apparel is.
I make more money than my competition who pays 50 cents an hour because of the efficiencies of dealing with someone face to face and paying them a fair wage.
I think it's really low brow to take advantage of labor cost inequalities to sustain your business. I know how to use communications, technology, and distribution systems to deliver t-shirts to the public without damaging the lives of my workers.
The beautiful thing about free trade is it creates an environment of competition where there's a marketplace of ideas. And you know, one guy could go offshore and pull things in from China. Another guy could automate here in the United States. And may the best man win. Maybe both men will win.
I want to be remembered as one of the great CEOs of our time and of my generation. And I think that I'm gonna make them proud. That's my plan.
Dov Charney Quotes
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