I shop everywhere from Maxfield to antique stores. I love Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood, and I love vintage. Golyester has the best selection of mint things and dead stock. I collect 1940s to 1970s platform shoes, and that’s where I got a few of my best ones.
I’ve had my run-ins with department stores, like Harrods, which stopped selling fur coats, but I found some there with fur trim, which is just as disgusting. Foie gras production is appalling – there’s no excuse for selling it.
And so if your competitors aren’t growing, if there isn’t a competitive reason to grow, and you want focus and discipline to add customers to existing stores, you adjust your strategy.
I hear all the big department stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s in the U.S. playing hard hip-hop records to the shoppers, like Rick Ross at his gnarliest. That’s amazing. It makes me think grime can do a similar thing.
Ginza! Where I’ve done two Chanel towers and Louis Vuitton and Dior stores. I just feel at home there.
There are a lot of bars and shoe stores in my early books.
Our international success started out first because we became the No. 1 casual wear brand in our home market of Japan. Then, we set up stores in the world’s major fashion centers of New York, Paris and London.
I like buying drones, hover boards, 360-degree cameras and fabulous cars. I am a little bit like a boy. I also spend a lot on books. I am a voracious reader, and I love vintage stores and first editions.
This is my hobby: growing stores, adding stores. It’s fun.
I tell everybody there are only three things that we do. We build sales at the store level, we build profits at the store level, and we build more stores. The first two things go in tandem, of course. It’s pretty tough to build profits without sales.
As I was finding my musical style, I found my personal style as well, and moving from Germany to L.A. was part of that, raiding the secondhand stores in L.A. trying out different beauty themes, finding my love for huge lashes and big, long hair extensions.
When we were kids, my favorite thing was coming to upstate New York where my family is from and hanging out with my grandparents’ friends pre-Internet and them asking if we had stores or ‘Do you have TV in Alaska?’
Research on the Internet, research what people say about the vintage stores, look online to see if customer service is good because that’s really important. Also to see online what other customers say.
It seems the world of book publishing is constantly changing. Whether it was the rise of chain stores or their decline, or the digital revolution… fortunately, we have been able not only to adapt but to thrive.
I’m really trying to respond to the foods that are in the stores and just pulling the things that are the very best and cook what looks beautiful and is seasonal. That’s the way to go. I love going to the grocery store and the market. None of it’s drudgery for me. Washing dishes is the drudgery.
Fashion brands looking for explosive growth go the wholesale route, to get their products into stores, but then they end up relying on those sales.
One of my obsession is animals. I’m into dog rescues. It drives me crazy when people go to pet stores and buy dogs. There are so many dogs that need a good home. And this sounds crazy, but I really believe they know what is happening and are appreciative, and I just think they make for the best pets.
Behind every small business, there’s a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores – these didn’t come out of nowhere.
It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer.
When we first started the company, I didn’t have any thoughts of franchising. We just had company-owned stores.
I grew up horseback riding. That was my passion. I didn’t start shopping until about 16 or 17, when I could drive myself to stores and explore on my own.
In Mexico, a network of government-operated rural convenience stores is offering banking services to rural communities.
Stores can be indifferent to something new.
I don’t fret much about the natural life spans of shoe companies. If stores don’t do the right things, they cease to exist, and that doesn’t trouble me at all.
‘Commonwealth’ is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.
