"You'd never make it in this neighborhood," he says, leading me out.
The actual neighborhood of Delprince's youth, on Buffalo's West Side, was an enclave of Italian American immigrants, most of them members of two-parent families, and many of the households -- including Delprince's -- on public assistance. During the past two decades, the area has metamorphosed into a rich mix of Hispanics, African Americans, Native Americans, Italians, and even Bosnian refugees. The city's East Side, where Eastern European immigrants conceived grandiose works of ecclesiastic architecture before moving to neighboring suburbs like West Seneca and Cheektowaga, is inhabited largely by African Americans.
In the heart of the East Side, where Kensington and Bailey avenues intersect, Delprince opened his third outlet, in 1997. John Burke, who was then a counselor with the Small Business Development Center at Buffalo State College, worked with Delprince at the time. "Have you done any market research?" Burke remembers asking. "No," Delprince replied, "but I don't need to." He then dragged Burke to the street corner. While Burke looked on, Delprince stopped pedestrians to solicit their opinions. "Hey, hey, I'm thinking of opening a store here," he shouted. Five out of five of his random sampling approved of the location -- pointing out, for instance, that it was right on the North-South bus route. But they also seemed to recognize Delprince. "What they said confirmed his theory, but it was also the way they said it: 'You gotta be up at Ken-Bailey, 'cause that's where the action is,' " recalls Burke, who joined Lifestyle and served as chief financial officer and "semi all-purpose adviser" before retiring, in February. "Meanwhile, I'm thinking to myself, 'This guy knows everybody on the East Side of Buffalo.' " The store, Delprince proudly notes, has the highest sales per square foot of all his outlets.
It doesn't always look that way. Popping in to the Ken-Bailey store one February morning, Delprince finds only a handful of shoppers poking around among the jeans sets and the cargo pants. That's not unusual, says the CEO, since his core customers -- African American males between the ages of 17 and 35 -- tend to shop later in the day. A baggy-jeaned shopper is planted in the middle of the 3,000-square-foot store, yakking away on his cell phone. As soon as his two friends make their purchases, they all rush out. "Your friend's on a mission, right?" Delprince says jovially, as they whiz past him. When it comes to crime, Delprince seems to believe, unfamiliarity breeds attempt. "I make it a point to act like I know them when I don't know them, because that's the welcome feeling we want to give them," he explains. "They're not going to some suburban mall where somebody is looking at them like thugs."
Delprince depends on employees and off-duty cops, paid by local businesses to patrol the neighborhood, to help identify the "players" among his customers. He makes sure the professional thieves "know that we know who they are," he says. Not that Lifestyle never gets hit. Last summer thieves made off with $30,000 worth of clothes from the company's warehouse, and Delprince worked closely with the police to find the culprits. "We wanted them to know they shouldn't mess with Delprince," he says. "On the street, everybody knows the places not to steal from. The neighborhood buzzes." He also makes sure to create a stir when he catches an employee stealing, having the accused hauled off in handcuffs.
"I make it a point to act like I know customers when I don't know them, because that's the welcome feeling we want to give them," says Chris Delprince.
Security is a natural concern for Lifestyle because about 85% of Delprince's customers pay in cash, forking over as much as $2,000 at a time. Lifestyle Street Gear is very much, as Sean "Puffy" Combs would put it, "all about the Benjamins." Puff Daddy also happens to produce Sean John, one of the hottest urban clothing brands. Other big sellers for Delprince include lines from Phat Farm (owner Russell Simmons cofounded influential Def Jam Records), Johnny Blaze, South Pole, Uspolo, and FUBU. The names of fly brands, emblazoned on green street signs, actually fly overhead at the stores. Boss Jeans, Delprince fears, may soon lose its altitude. "It's on its way out," he predicts.
How does he know? Wearing a soft leather jacket and a green sweater, Delprince seems unlikely to model the clothes he sells, including polyester shirts imprinted with kung-fu fighters or Asian letters carefully "engineered" so that their images remain intact even after buttoning. And although Delprince credits rap singers with setting the trends -- hip-hop being, for those scrubs who aren't down with it, the culture surrounding rap -- he has trouble naming any. In a valiant attempt he stumbles over the second -- and last -- name he throws out, censoring himself by concluding that syrupy diva Mariah Carey is "really more of an R& B singer." He promises to dig up examples, though, by sampling the pages of Vibe and The Source, the rap magazines his customers treat like "little Bibles."
Delprince won't fake it; in the spirit of rap, he's committed to keeping it real. So he is not ashamed to admit that he decides what to stock mostly by talking to other people and scouring trade shows. In part, that's because he knows he's got a surefire bond with his customers, having demonstrated such a "good sense of the market that it's been difficult for him to make mistakes," according to Dearth, the vice-president of merchandise. Delprince explains that he shares a language with his clientele. "I speak street," he says. "I can talk the jive." He can, but he doesn't overdo it. It's less convincing when Burke, 67, a former strategic planner at General Electric, repeatedly refers to "the hood" as he's discussing store location.
"He always blended in with the ghetto real good," confirms James Barclay, who was a customer in the late 1970s, when Delprince -- who'd begun hawking "deals on wheels" from the trunk of his Dodge Aries -- upgraded to a hole-infested van. "He was outspoken, and he gave us a good deal." The way Barclay remembers it, Delprince would come bounding around the street corner shouting, "Hey, you guys like bargains?" Or he'd park in the middle of a residential street, start knocking on doors, and yell, "I've got a big sale out here." That was a "herd sale," as Delprince dubbed it, because once he got one person to emerge, the entire block followed.
