Dov Charney, Like It or Not

The founder of red-hot American Apparel has the simplest possible business strategy: He does and says exactly what he wants to.

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This is not your typical CEO story. But then this is most definitely not your typical CEO. I refer to the shirtless man, the scrawny, square-shouldered dude with the hairy chest talking to his mom on a cell phone while circling a picnic table in New York City's Washington Square Park. Periodically he stops to eat chicken and mashed potatoes from a plastic deli tray parked next to a woman studying Spanish. It is his first and probably only meal of the day.

The CEO--who actually answers to the title senior partner--is probably five-eight and might top 140 pounds if his pockets were full of change. With a tangle of brown hair and muttonchop sideburns that meander across his face until they meet his mustache, forming a seamless band of hair from nose to nape, the 36-year-old proprietor of one of the hottest brands in fashion bears a strong resemblance to a young Gabe Kotter with a whiff of Vincent Gallo. He is also commonly said to look like a 1970s pornographer, and that is the sort of comparison that makes him very, very happy.

He is Dov Charney--T-shirt salesman, tastemaker, ladies' man, pied piper, bon vivant.

He is the founder of American Apparel and he is proudly Canadian.

Today, on the first genuinely hot day of an otherwise mild start to summer in New York City, Charney is giddy, which by all accounts is the norm. A tightly wound dervish of energy, he sits down, then quickly stands back up and strolls off to get some private time with his mom, returning a few minutes later to say, "She's such a Jewish mother. She still treats me like I'm 15."

"Look at this traffic!" he says, taking in the legions of students, tourists, and random New Yorkers crowding the streets around the park, just a few hundred yards from his company's flagship store on Broadway. "I bet we set a record today!"

Charney is in town, rather than in American Apparel's Los Angeles headquarters--a massive pink factory adorned with billowing "Legalize LA" and "Industrial Revolution" banners--for a couple of reasons. One, as he will tell anyone who asks, is that "if you are in the T-shirt business and you're not in New York in the spring, you are an idiot." Thus, he journeys east for a month or two. This trip, though, has another, larger purpose. Charney is tinkering with his seven New York retail stores, laying the groundwork for up to 10 more. This is but part of a bold plan to open the 100th store worldwide by next summer--there are currently 57 American Apparel stores, 29 of them in the United States--and an even bolder plan to have 1,000 shops by 2008. All this from a company that had not one retail store as recently as October 2003.

"We're going everywhere," Charney says. It takes him just four months to open his stores, plain white boxes that the meticulously managed American Apparel image machine calls "community centers." A big smile pushes those hirsute cheeks up under one of the many sets of giant aviator sunglasses that almost always adorn his face.

"I should fall on my face soon and then I'll slow down," he says. "But for now, it's on."

So what is this American Apparel? A company of basics built upon a foundation of simple, plain-colored T-shirts. Tees were the first items Charney produced when he set up shop in 1997 and still account for the lion's share of the business--but the line is spreading like a rash. Today American Apparel makes socks, underwear, sweatshirts, jackets, dresses, tank tops, polo shirts, baby clothes, dog clothes, and, as of this summer, swimwear. The clothes have no logos, no ornamentation, not a single flourish or bauble; differentiation comes from an array of colors that now includes fluorescents and from slim and sexy cuts that attract young buyers and allow the simple cotton garments to serve as something larger--core elements of a fashionable wardrobe.

Charney, a Jew from Montreal imbued with what he calls "the Yiddish hustle," has forever been obsessed with T-shirts. As a teenager, he recognized that Canadians were missing out on the higher-quality, better-fitting Hanes T-shirts sold south of the border. So he'd make bus or train trips to nearby U.S. towns, stock up, return home with shirts, and sell them at a premium. At Tufts University in Boston, he kept on selling, then quit school and fell in with a guy who proposed they make T-shirts for wholesale. That venture was the seed of American Apparel. Charney knew he could develop the ultimate T-shirt, having picked up an unnatural fascination with quality and cut, two things that the major industry players (which still tend to view the item as a disposable basic) largely ignored.

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