“Your vision is very important. You should know whom you’re selling to, what your marketing and advertising says about you, and whom it’s speaking to,” says Lauren. “Me personally, I don’t try to please everyone. I understand who I am selling to and I work towards that vision all the time.”
Having grown up in a traditional Jewish family, Lauren’s mother wanted her son to grow up to be one thing and one thing only: a rabbi. Lauren never took an interest in his mother’s wishes, instead deciding to follow his own passion. And still today, despite all of the success Lauren has achieved, despite becoming one of the best-selling designers of all time, and despite having given away millions of dollars to charity, Lauren’s mother is unsatisfied. She still wishes he had become a rabbi.
There are some people you can never please, Lauren has learned, and it is not worth his effort to try. Doing so would not only make him unhappy, but it would cost him time and energy on the path to achieving his own goals. Whether it was his mother, his employer or anyone else, Lauren made sure to stick to his guns and do whatever it was he wanted to do.
Such was the case in the late 1960s, when Lauren first began designing his own ties. It was a conservative time, fashion wise that is, and Lauren knew he was pushing the boundaries by creating wide ties and were often flashy and always expensive. But, he was happy to try anyway.
His first stop was Bloomingdales. Lauren knew that landing an account with Bloomingdales would take his business to the next level. But executives at Bloomingdales were less than thrilled with his neckwear collection. They said they would agree to sell Lauren’s ties on two conditions. First, they wanted Lauren to make his ties narrower. To Lauren, that meant completely altering their design, the very thing that made them unique to all the other ties out there, and he would have none of that.
Their second condition was that Lauren remove his own name from the ties’ labels and replace it with a Bloomingdales tag. Lauren was not about to make that change and give up credit for his products. With that, he was forced to look for other buyers.
But it was not long before Bloomingdales’ competitors took an interest in Lauren. A number of other stores agreed to stock his ties – as they were – and soon, sales were booming. Lauren had the last laugh when Bloomingdales returned to him to ask for a second chance.
Today, Lauren continues to be his own best customer, and is not afraid to let everyone know it. “I’m totally involved with all of my products,” he says. “Everything I make is my message and for years my goal has been to make the things I love.” If Lauren wants a suit with a sharper silhouette for his next gala event, he will design it and put it into his next collection. Lauren designs for himself; he designs clothes that he would actually like to wear, and he does not let anyone else tell him what to do.
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