YouSaid · the spoken record

Kenneth Cole

lines on the record: 111
first: 2020-11-16
most recent: 2020-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know. I think if the brand can have a role today, if it can make an impact, and it has a reason to exist tomorrow, then so be it. The world is very fragile and people don't buy brands today. I don't believe. I think people recognize today that they are their own brands and every day they wake up and they curate their own brands on their social media. And they don't just curate the content. They also curate the audience. And I'm just an accessory. However long it does, then that's a privilege and it's something I'll forever be grateful for. We have to earn the right to exist. I think after 30 some ideas, I've earned the right to be considered, but every day we have to earn the right to be chosen. And that's all we can do”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am. I still say I'm a shoe dog. That's an expression people in the shoe in the shoe industry say, and I embrace it still.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my father used to say to me that the harder I work, the luckier I get. But I don't think it's just brute working hard. I think it's also having a sense of what people want and putting yourself in their shoes. And I work hard. I'm very emotionally vested in what I do. And I love it. And I guess the time comes that I don't. It'll be harder to keep it going.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mental health providers. And then we now set out to create this narrative. So it's an inspiring journey that I've embarked upon and it's become a big part of what I'm doing and an impact, I think, and a privilege that I have to be able to have such extraordinary organizations and individuals who've agreed to collaborate to hold hands and to work together on this.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sorry, nationalized for mental illness. They're the largest grassroots mental health service provider in the country. So they say to us, will you help us with an anti-stigma campaign like you did with HIV? And that stigma for mental health is as bad today as it was with HIV 20 years ago. So we work on a whole new narrative. I asked five psychiatrists just out of curiosity for a definition of depression, and I got five different answers. And the reality is none of them are empowering. Every one of them are diminishing. So how do people talk about their circumstances and you wonder why two-thirds of the people with mental health issues are in the shadows because they don't have a narrative they can resort to? So let's create that and let's build the community so we go out and we reach out to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, bring change to mind, brain and behavior institute, child mind, crisis text line, Jed Foundation, Mental Health America, every one of them says we're all in. We built this massive coalition.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, today post COVID, I think it's five out of four people. I think it's mostly your pets. I think it's just so overwhelmed us. And I don't think people have a clue how devastating this is going to be for extensive periods of time. But so we as a company were... Working with Nami at the edge of how this came back. My daughter, also Amanda, kind of encouraged this, and it's something that's very important to her. Nami has an initiative on astigma-free companies, as we always look to do.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know I don't think I do, and I don't think I did. I shouldn't say I don't think I did. It wasn't what kind of set me off down this path, but so many people in my life are living and struggling with this every day. And then I came to realize maybe I am as well in different ways. I've been in a perpetual fog since COVID happened. WHO says that one in four people will live with mental health conditions in their lifetime. We say it's four and four. We say it's everybody because if it isn't you, it's somebody you love. It's somebody in your family, in your community, or in the workplace, but we're all living with it.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is very slow. And we're better off than most because a lot of our business models built on contractual relationships and licenses. So there's some level of assured income. But this isn't sustainable. We need to partner with our licensees, and we do. And this shoe business struggles to a degree is how do you vary boys as much of your business as you can so you don't have all this massive overhead. Fortunately, we had closed stores, and fortunately we had made other decisions as well too to become a little bit leaner. And our goal is to become as agile, relevant, and profitable. Those are the kind of the three boxes we look to check. And we're trying to stay a step ahead.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're trying to make the perfect mask. It doesn't just look good. It has six layers of protection. It is temperature control. It's waterproof. So that is a kind of getting on of our resources put behind that right now.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something that does everything for you, that checks all the boxes that today, post-COVID, I talk about a PC, what's the PC world, which is post-coronavirus, and what are going to be our expectations and what's our appetite? I don't think there is a closet anywhere that today isn't full. So we have to give you a reason to make room in your closet, which is in and of itself. And it's very attribute driven. Right now, I'm very focused on the most important new accessory, which is one that nobody has in their closet right now and everybody knows they need. And even if they have it, they know it could be better. It's the mask”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal was to In my mind, I wanted it to be me. I wanted it to be, I wanted to want everyone of a shoes and wasn't aware of one of those shoes. And I wanted it to be my wife and people who I think have great taste. And so was it realistic? Was it a little aspirational? Did I go a little far too fast? Maybe. But I still always believe in aiming higher, knowing that even if you come up with a short, you're in a better place than you were.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The goal is to, I don't think people buy price. Bright value, and people learn a long time ago, you pay a dollar for something you never wear, you pay too much. So, how do you create a product that looks good, that's comfortable, that look and feel good today as well as tonight? And that's the challenge, and that's what we try to do every day.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, it has brand implications. But right now, we're running and operating the shoe business ourselves. Everything else until we were operating the clothing businesses too until recently, and then we licensed them out. But right now we're running shoes.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what we wanted to do is to, you can have a label, and that could be a lot of products that have your name on it, but if you can have a brand, you have to deliver a consistent point of view at every point of execution. And that's the hardest part about doing it, especially over as many years as we've been doing it. And so we're on a lot of different products today. We license the brand in 20 some odd products. And I've been a licensor for 25 years. And it's probably something we do relatively well. I think the brand definitely is diluted in the process at some level because you have to everyday make very difficult decisions and every single business decision has financial implications.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm assuming all the risk. Yes, that's correct. Which is comforting truthfully at some level because when you're driving somebody else's car, you drive more carefully because it's somebody else's car. You can be hair more reckless, it's your own, not that that's, or you can take more risks, you can explore kind of new paths that others might not otherwise.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think they do, but also what changed in that period of time is the internet. You know, the outstores were a way to bring value to the customer, but the internet does it effortlessly. There's a whole marketplace that aggregates the best existing product, wherever it is, and makes it available, wherever there's supplied to wherever there's demand. So outlet model, in my mind anyway, and at that time was obsolete, and I wanted to make the brand a better brand. And I felt we should not be in these stores. So we systematically went about closing them.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Systematically started to coast the stores. And the prior management team had opened up a lot of outlet stores and places where we shouldn't have been.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at that time I owned 80%, now I own 100%. I brought in some outside, some of these friends who were advisors and invited them to buy in at the same price that I did, and they formed an advisory board.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was costly, but it's part of the process. It's part of the way you have no choice. You have to do that. And it was one of the best days of my professional life.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if we offer $15 and the stock at the time, I think it was $13. So we offer a premium of $15 to 20%. So there was a benefit everybody was realizing. And then the process was going on so long, we lowered our offer because the value of the company had gone down in the process. It's just gone down. And we had basically said to the marketplace, and I had also said, I'm happy to do this, and we're going to do a vote. And it's called the majority of the minority. So I won't even vote my shares because my shares were more than 50% of the outstanding vote. So my shares will not vote. And the public shares will. And if the majority of the minority shares win, then the deal will not go through. And if it does, then it will and we'll accommodate that.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, when we announced that we were going to do this, we announced it at 9 o'clock when the New York Sock Exchange opened. We put out an announcement. We had a class action suit filed and on our desk by 10 o'clock, an hour later. These law firms just file suit and then they build the quest afterwards. They start a class action suit and then they find the class and they Sue you without knowing any of the facts because that's irrelevant and they will attach them later on as part of the process.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Upon analysis, I can do this without a venture capital firm. Because to do it with them, many will argue is harder. It's harder to exist in that structure than it is as a public company”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't remember exactly step by step, but we did what most people do, and we hired an offer, and we retained bank advisors. And I spoke to a lot of people in the industry. And, you know, actually the process getting here is I spoke to all these very smart people that I knew, and many of them were friends, and I asked them, you know, if I totally tried to overhaul the business in. In a whole new board and restructure, and they all said to me, well, that's great, but you can't do this as a public company. And then they'd say, well, and by the way, why are you public? And I said, well, because I don't know how to not be public. Well, they said, well, just it shouldn't be that hard. And, you know, looking at your balance sheet. So, because I had always maintained and held on to a reasonable amount of the shares. So we realized that”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying That's yeah, that's what you do, and how do you make what you're doing sound as good as you can, and rather than how do you make it better? So being public is not, you know, it's a place to be unless you need the public markets to finance and or run your business. And we needed to get smaller to get bigger. We needed to shrink the business, step back, and we couldn't do that as a public company, partially because of my personal visibility. But as a private company, you can do those things. So we felt we needed to go private and I needed to make that happen.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt I needed to fix the business. And it wasn't working the way it was. We'd gotten too big. We were selling some of the wrong product to the wrong people. We were licensing to people. Maybe we shouldn't have been, maybe the wrong product and doors that shouldn't have been in because invariably that's what the public markets will do to companies like ours. But what was happening is we as an executive team were spending most of our time talking about how we're going to talk about the results rather than trying to fit how to fix them.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it was a good short-term decision, but I didn't have appropriate foresight. And over time, it did dilute the brand value. So it did take the product down market. And as a fashion company, you have to keep reinventing yourself. And you need to maintain some level of aspiration, otherwise you'd have no reason to exist at a certain point. So the brand lost a little bit of its esteem when we did that.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is, but until you realize that they had to make the product more accessible, more accessibly priced, more accessibly fit, designed, so it fits a broader customer base and it's priced to appeal to a broader customer base, which is what they wanted to do at the time. And I was as running a public company, I was blinded by demands and encouragement to drive sales.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it didn't initially, because that wasn't the case initially, but I made one of the biggest deals I had ever made as a company. We licensed women's wear to Liz Claude. And they agreed to huge minimum sales levels, actually $250 million a year, which is crazy high numbers.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I was doing apparel on Joshua's yet. I was doing, for sure I had done women's handbags and then I had done outerwear. And I think I had done men's ties and a couple of things.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there were people, I remember having a conversation with Nordstrom at the time and they were a big customer and they were challenging the fact that we had all these stores. And I would show them quantifiably how every mall that we had a store, where they had a store, they did better with our shoes than Nordstroms that did not have a Kenneth Cole store. And I think because there's people that wanted to buy from Nordstrom or from Boomindales or from Saxe or wherever it was. And they're going to do that. And I just helped create a cachet and elevate the brand equation on their behalf so everybody won.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Matter of fact, I use the word fucking. But we were, their stores were all profitable and they were... driving customer engagement in the brand was doing better wherever it existed. It did better in the department stores.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the expansion plan was to open stores in important markets, which are aspirational markets. In Chicago and Los Angeles and Miami, Boston. And we systematically went down that road.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Needed the cash. I wasn't going to put myself in any more debt than I needed to be. And I started by going public was the best way to do that. And in Verbu, when you go public and you ask the public for funding, there's a question everybody asks, which is use of proceeds, what are you going to do with the money? And I had a very clear use of proceeds.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So how do I become present where I need to be, when I need to be, to the degree I need to be? You can't do that without controlling ultimately the distribution and having your own stores, I felt at that time.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there were other designs, and if you don't see my designs like a tree in the forest, I'm only as good as you know me to be. And if I'm not out there, then I don't exist.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't. I thought at a certain point They're going to eliminate the middlemen if they could. So I needed to open stores, I needed to grow my presence, increase my marketing, and I also knew that I couldn't fund that. I wasn't willing to fund that Just to be”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They'd buy similar shoes on their own labels, and I'm not in business anymore, which was happening to some people. So unless my brand was a destination, then I had no reason to exist in those stores and I wouldn't. I believed.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After consolidations and some bankruptcies. And then I woke up one day, and I think, if I recall, Campo was trying to buy federated department stores, and these are two stores that were in and of themselves leveraged and questionably solvent. And I said to myself that these guys are going to need to find economies because they don't exist today. And they can't sell any cheaper, so they're going to have to buy better. What's that's likely to mean is they're going to take out the middleman and I'm the middleman. And I didn't like the way that felt.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened in 1994 was the landscape changed. When I started my business, there was maybe 70 or 80 departments that were changed in the United States. All of a sudden, 10 years later, there's maybe 15 or 20.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But Guy, I have been asked that question over the years. And I tell people, I'm not political. My messages are not political messages. They're social messages or maybe human messages. But they're not social messages that have been politicized. But I don't talk about politics. And I mean, I have on one or two occasions because I couldn't help myself, but for the most part, I have made a very exerted effort for 30 plus years not to talk about things that I, or certainly in ways that I thought was political.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So at the time, so I now had the message, I now had the ad and I ran and I started calling all the magazines to see if anybody would run this for us because I didn't have the budget. And I had everybody had done everything pro bono. And that wasn't really what you did in those days. That notion didn't really exist out there. Model did it, and he did it. The studio was donated hair makeup, I think, was donated. I even had cars donated so people could pick people up. And the magazines, I think, the message ran in 23 magazines, which was a lot. And at the end, and then once it ran in a couple, we had a lot of other people calling for it, orphan to run it for free.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A gamble. I wanted people to know I was behind. I wanted to know I used my limited fragile resources for this. But I was very careful. My role to a large degree was creative and conceptual and bringing everybody together. And that campaign in many ways changed me. It changed the man. It changed the brand and it changed my business in a profound way.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there was no such thing as pro bono advertising also in those days. So we got all the models to be to do it. And then with children, and these were two groups that were not stigmatized. Everybody appreciated a beautiful woman, and we loved all children. We didn't have a problem with them until they grew up and had opinions. So we had this beautiful photograph that Annie took of all these women. And the message was for the future of our children. And then in smaller letters, support AIDS research.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the concept was, the campaign was the message was for the future of our children. And the notion was we're talking about stigma. How do you talk about what nobody would speak about? And that was there was this silence that was deafening. And then I had to decide what they were going to wear. And I figured I can't put them in my shoes because then this campaign loses its purpose. It's going to look like I'm self-serving it. And I didn't want to send that message to Annie. I didn't want to send it to the viewer or anybody else. So I said, you know what? I'm not going to put mic is, I'm not going to bring anybody else's, so they'd be barefoot. And that, at the end of the day, turned out to be even a bigger statement.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The top models at the time. At the time, Christy Brinkley was one of them. And Christie did it, by the way, and she was eight and a half months pregnant. And Christie hadn't been seen publicly in, I don't know, five months, but she Let herself be photographed for this ad eight and a half months pregnant, as was Paulina and Beverly Johnson.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't have any money, if she would help me do a campaign, do a photograph, and she agreed to do it. And then we reached out to all of the top models in the industry.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you had all these fashion models and they were just really becoming icons at that time and being celebrated. So I asked Annie what I was a little up and coming designer, but I asked Annie if she would do it.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People were afraid. You could potentially lose your job, you can lose your neighbors, you could lose your health insurance, you could lose everything that you valued. So it was a frightening time. And maybe because I wasn't a member of one of those at-risk communities, I wasn't as fearful as others. And many women at the time were some of the biggest advocates. And I committed myself to it and quickly what I was doing was becoming meaningful to me.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And people were talking about it because they couldn't. So I decided to do a campaign. And also at the time, contextually I had all these initiatives happening. We had We Are the World, Hands Across America. Live aid, world aid, farm aid, and they were all about hunger. So there was this looming black cloud and no one people were not comfortable.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, HIV was consuming all of us. It was in everybody's minds, but very few people's lips at the time. And it was killing. countless amount of mostly gay men in New York and San Francisco and big cities and intravenous drug users. But people were reluctant to talk about it because the stigma was so devastating. So I always sought to find ways to make what I was doing as meaningful as I could. Arguably, and I say this today, shoes are in and of themselves are not, nobody needs what we sell. If every shoe store in America closed its doors tomorrow at 12 o'clock, cartily the American would go barefoot for 15 years. And I knew early on inherently that it needed to be about more than how much money we were making. And HIV was affecting our industry in a disproportionate way.”
2020-11-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT