How I Built This with Guy Raz - Kenneth Cole: Kenneth Cole

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Kenneth Cole launched his shoe business out of a forty-foot truck in midtown Manhattan and quickly became known as an up-and-coming designer with an eye for street fashion. In 1986, he made a bold move by associating his nascent brand with a controversial issue at the time: the AIDS crisis, and the vital need for research. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Kenneth grew the company into a $500M brand, leading it through downturns, department store consolidation, an IPO and a return to private ownership. Throughout, he stayed committed to AIDS research and many other social causes. Order the How I Built This book at: https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Hey, really quick before we start the show, the How I Built This Book is now a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. So thank you to all of you who ordered it and for your support of this show. If you haven't picked it up and you want to learn the secrets of how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, how I built this, the book is for you. It's now available wherever books are sold and in most countries around the world, or by visiting how I built this.com or guy Raz.com. And thanks. What happened in 94 was the landscape changed. When I started my business, there was maybe 70 or 80 departments store chains in the United States. All of a sudden, 10 years later,

there's maybe 15 or 20. Consolidation. After consolidations and some bankruptcies. And I said to myself that these guys are going to need to find economies. I thought at a certain point, they'd buy similar shoes under their own labels, and I'm not in business anymore. You didn't think that they would just continue to buy Kenneth Cole shoes and sell them? I didn't. And if you don't see my design, it's like a tree in the forest.

I'm only as good as you know me to be. Right. And if I'm not out there, then I don't. exist. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Kenneth Cole launched his shoe business out of a 40-foot truck in Midtown Manhattan and grew the business into one of the best-known brands in the fashion industry. There's a basic principle in business when it comes to politics. Stay away, far away.

But the past four years have tested that view, especially because lots of consumers want the brands they support to take a stand on issues they care about, things like racial justice and voting rights and climate action. And it's meant that a lot of big companies have increasingly been doing that, even at the risk of alienating a certain segment of their customer base. But long before it became fashionable to weigh in on controversial. topics, the shoe company Kenneth Cole was doing exactly that. In 1986, when the AIDS crisis was just coming into focus, Kenneth Cole began to take out full-page ads in magazines promoting AIDS awareness and research, and this was at a time when many people in America refused to even acknowledge the disease. In that same year, In 1986, the company ran a campaign calling for strict gun control. In 1992, for strong abortion rights.

In 93, for equal civil rights for members of the LGBTQ community. And throughout all those campaigns, the brand kept growing. In fact, by the mid-2000s, the company's revenue hit over half a billion dollars. Kenneth Cole, the company's namesake, started out with very little money, but he managed to turn the brand into one of the best-known American fashion labels. Kenneth was born in Brooklyn in the 1950s. His dad was in the shoe business, but following in those footsteps was not part of Kenneth's plan.

Instead? I was going to be the shortstop for the New York Mets. Were you really? Yes. Like mostly kids in your neighborhood, probably, right? And then I'd wake up every other day, once a day, and I realized that was not likely to happen. Actually, my first job was selling peanuts at Shea Stadium.

I don't know if you know that. Wow. It was also a creative endeavor getting that job because it was during the World Series in 1969. Yeah. The Miracle Metz. Yeah. And there were no lights, so there were no night games. And they needed kids to work during the day.

And the city was very tough. So they insisted that the students all had notes from their principals that they could take that time off from school. So I got my principal to give me a note saying that he thought it was a worthwhile cultural experience. And he endorsed my employment at Chase Stadium. So you got to see the Mets play in the 1969 World Series? I did. And I also, by the way, I leveraged that job to get one at Madison Square Garden, where I got to see the Golden-N Ranger Games.

And tell me a little bit about your parents. First of all, what did your parents do for a living? Did they both work? No, my mother, for a little bit, did some. charity work. My father was an entrepreneur. He was in different businesses. He was later on he was in the shoe business. He had a small shoe factory in a very tough part of New York at the time called Williamsburg. A tough part of New York called Williamsburg. Wow. Not so tough today. Interesting. I think so changed. Yeah. And what was the name of the factory? El Greco. Does that mean the Greek? It means the Greek in Spanish. Yeah. And what was that name? What did that come from? I think he had acquired a small business, and I think that's what it was. And eventually he assumed it.

So he made shoes and sold them in department stores at the time, women's shoes. But the last thing on my mind was the last thing I would have imagined myself doing, and the least masculine thing I could have imagined myself doing was going to the women's shoe business. So it wasn't something I ever contemplated. What was your relationship like with your dad? It was good. He was a tough guy. He was a Marine.

World War II veteran? World War II veteran. Was he deployed overseas? He was. He served in the Philippines. He was a gunner. Wow. And it was on several missions.

And he was relentless. He was very determined. I learned a lot from him in many ways what to do and in some cases what not to do. He was working much more than he wasn't. And I always often reflect upon that being generational, I made it point to be the opposite with my kids to the degree I was able to. But work came first and second, and we were often third. But he was focused.

He was determined, and he was relentless. So when you set out to go to college in the early 70s, you went to Emory. I take it like you didn't really contemplate eventually working with your dad? No, truthfully. I went to school thinking I'd probably become a lawyer, and I studied political science. And law was something I believed would create interesting alternatives for me going down the road. So I was admitted to a couple of our schools. I did apply. And then that summer, my father had his superintendent, who was running the factory at the time, resigned to go into competitions.

And that factory was the proverbial hand that fed us. So I felt an obligation that summer to immerse myself in it and to learn the business to the degree that I could. What your dad said to you, he said, I need you to help me out at the factory. He didn't say that. He was too proud. But my mother kind of encouraged it and he welcomed it. And I wasn't thinking that this would be something I would jump in with both feet. But I knew once I started doing it, I also knew that I needed to commit to it to learn it and to create it. have the respect of the people I was working with.

And I did. I learned it. And I kept, I was fascinated by it, and I kept gravitating towards the sample room where I watched all these components, this piece of leather and plastic that was the heel or wood and then a metal shape of a foot that became, it was the last, and how all these things put together in a certain way became a shoe. How was it that your whole life you were around this world and exposed to it? And then, because I agree, I would find it fascinating to just see the pieces of cut leather and the wooden heel and people sewing the pieces together. But why do you think you began to see it that way at the age of 22?

I think I wanted to understand not just what my father did, but what was behind the curtain. And how did this work and what made it so distinctive and why was he able to do it differently than other people? And so I was, and I realized very quickly that what distinguished what he did from what everybody else did was what happened. in the sample room. So that's where I spent much of my summer that year, and I learned how to make patterns and how shoes were constructed and how they were crafted. And by the way, I just think of this as a dad myself. Like, if my kid joined my business, which I don't want them to, I want them to do their own thing, but I would be so proud. It would just be, like, just gushing, you know, it'd be amazing. Was your dad, it doesn't strike me that your dad was that kind of guy, but he must have been

pretty proud that his kid was there in this company? No, he was, but he pushed me as hard as he felt he could in the way that he would. Well, how would he push you? It was always how big is big and how good is good, and he was careful with the compliments and the encouragements, but I know he was proud. And I learned how to make shoes in his factory for our company. in that six-year period where you worked for your dad's business and really start to understand the business like two years in you were involved in launching a whole new line of shoes I think they're called candies

designed to sort of targeting young women what was that initiative had that come about so we were making shoes in Brooklyn and and there were a hundred steps that went into making that's most simple shoe and the slightest thing that would go wrong, if you're missing any of those 100 plus components, we're not in business anymore. And in the best case scenario, you can only make so many pair of shoes, and the worst case, you're out of business. You have nothing. So that business model I struggled with. And then we went over to Europe and bought some shoes and started selling them here in the United States. It was a... Yeah, what was it? Was it like a Mary Jane? It was a piece of leather that was stapled onto a polypropylene bottom with a high heel. And it was what Olivia Newton

John wore in the movie Greece. Oh yeah. And what you identified, like you found those shoes in Europe and you said, hey, we should sell shoes like these? Actually, I think my father and I found them. And then we came back and I started to sell them and, and, um, but you weren't making them. You were, you were still importing these shoes. We started importing them. And then it became very clear that in that, in that, sort of a business model. If you do a lot of business, you make a ton of money. If you do a little bit, you make less. But you don't have all the overhead that we had in a domestic shoe factory. And it was very compelling. So we converted the business eventually to that. That became the business because it grew very quickly. So he shut down the factory part. He did. And focused on importing

shoes and then reselling them. Correct. When did that happen? Do you remember what year? So if I joined the business 76, maybe 79, 80. So this was the new model, and you were now focused on importing shoes that you could identify, mainly from Europe, I guess. And it actually boosted the business. The business grew as a result of that? Exponentially, and very quickly. So initially the factory became a warehouse, the existing factory, and then eventually we moved to a bigger facility and then left.

vacated those offices in Williamsburg. So clearly you catch the bug, the shoe bug. Right. After six years of working with your dad, this becomes something not just interesting, but you see this as your future. You decide to leave in 1982 to start your own shoe company.

I guess you're around 28 years old at the time. Why did you decide to leave your dad's business and go off on your own? He and I didn't agree on a lot of things, and I didn't have the right to not be a hundred percent compliant and supportive. And I felt that I was young enough and probably naive enough that I could just go and do it and figure it out independently.

So I woke up one day and decided that's what I'm going to do. Did you and your dad argue a lot? Or was it more that your dad was my way or the highway and you didn't argue with him? I would argue, but invariably he had. had his way that he felt things should be done. And I'd say to myself, why am I putting him through this and why am I putting this through it? So then at a certain point, I figured my relationship is only going to get better with him if I do this independently. So when you told your dad you want to start your own thing and you're leaving, was he sad? Was he hurt? Was he supportive?

He was too proud to be visibly hurt anyway. And he wasn't supportive, but he, at the same time, he was supportive, but he wasn't encouraging. Maybe that's a better way to put it. And when I did tell him I was going to leave one day, which was shocking to him, he had said, you'll be back. It's very hard out there, and you're going to be back with his message, at which point I knew there was no way that was going to happen. So he says, I'm going to leave your office open for you because I know you'll be back.

So when you said, hey, I want to start my own shoe thing, he didn't say, how I'll write you a check to help get you started. No, not just the opposite. And I'm not sure I would have taken it if he had either, because I became equally proud. So you wanted to start your own shoe company. Obviously, you had experience now and some connections to factories. But how did you have, did you have any money to start it? Very little. But what I did was I went over to,

Italy, because that's where I had been working with candies. And I found an agent who had a lot of credibility in the marketplace. And that agent, by nature of my relationship with that agent, I had probably more credibility than I was entitled to in the marketplace. This is an agent who helped you find factories to make your shoes. Yeah. And everything was, I created everything at the time to be variable. And so the agent would get paid only if I did business.

And to the degraded business, they would make more. And through this agent, I got open account, which was a big deal. Like a line of credit? A line of credit. And I learned very early on in my career that it's much easier to get credit from a factory that needs business in Italy than from an American bank that doesn't. So you go to the factory and you could say, hey, I need to make this order and I'll pay you 90 days or something like that. Yeah. And I had an arrangement with the bank where they were going to give me 80% of the receivable once I invoiced it.

So I would fly the goods to New York and we'd ship them out because we had pre-sold them. And who did you, by the way, who did you sell them to the same places that you were selling candies to, the same department stores? Actually, more elevated. My first year in business, I sold sacks, I sold Macy's, I sold Bloomingdale's, I sold Bergdorf, I think. You wanted this to be different than your dad's business. You wanted to make like higher end shoes that you would actually design yourself. I wanted to create aspirational shoes for that aspirational woman. And I also did not want to compete with him.

And I called a handful of customers that his current salesmen were not calling on. And then my father said, okay, take him to Footwear News, which is the only industry publication at the time. And I did that as well. And I met with this woman Vivian Infantino, who was the fashion editor. and Vivian wrote a story about these first few shoes that I ever made, and she said, buy this a new up-and-coming designer, Kenneth Cole. And I never looked at myself as that.

As a designer. As a designer. I created a little package of shoes I thought we could sell. Yeah. I didn't even have to draw yet. I've taught myself how to draw over the years, but at that point I didn't. Did you ever think of yourself as a creative person when you were younger? I think I had an interest in things that were creative, but I never really looked in the mirror and saw that in me.

You wouldn't look in the mirror and say, hey, I'm a designer, I'm an artist. It wasn't something that I had ever aspired to. So you have this, your designing shoes. And by the way, you have a co-founder, a guy named Sam Edelman. Tell me about Sam. Sam worked with me at El Greco. And when I left, Sam said, if you leave, I'm going with you because I'm not staying here.

So I was, as much as I had, I knew how great, because Sam was also a good friend, I had, and how much fun it would be and how great it would be to have him. I was reluctant to do it to my father because I didn't want him to think that I took anybody or anything. So eventually, when Sam made it clear, he wasn't staying, Sam joined me. And then we worked in my apartment on the east side,

I don't know, for like several months. I don't think we went outside, except when I went to Italy to make the shoes. I took a couple of trips. You worked in your apartment building that, like creating a business plan? We were creating, you know, the brand. We were setting up people to connect with, I guess, when I got to Italy. Lawyers, finding a lawyer, finding an accountant. And by the way, how many shoes, how many different designs were going to be in the first collection?

Because this is going to be women's shoes only. and how many different, like, skews would you have? So maybe three constructions and each in maybe three or four or five colors? Right. How many shoes in total did you need to make? So going into this process, I didn't have a sense of how many. I just knew that I could only show what I thought was great. I just wanted to create shoes that people wanted

and hopefully have less than what the demand was, but enough to make it all come together. Well, the 1982 version of Kenneth Cole is not inspiring a lot of confidence in me right now. So, but I was, but I knew I'd figure it out. You know, people said to me when I left my father, guy, they said to me, well, what would you have done if it didn't work? And what I don't tell people, and I didn't tell people often is that I didn't know what it was. I knew I'd figure it out along the way and that it might keep changing. I wasn't sure what kinds of shoes and I wasn't sure who I was going to sell them to.

And I wasn't sure what the price would be. but I knew somehow I would find product that people would want and I would deliver it in a way that people would find compelling. Tell me about the name, Kenneth Cole. I mean, it's a great name. It's your name. Was that the idea from the beginning to call it Kenneth Cole? No.

I couldn't take the chance of a made-up name and finding out many, many months or years later, whether it was acceptable or not through the trademark process. We didn't have Google in those days. But I also knew you can usually get away with your own name, as long as it's your name. So I called the Kenneth Cole, and I knew it would probably make my mother happy. So I did that.

Then I ran to Italy, because I didn't have credit, and I figured I'd get credit from a shoe factory, and I did. So I had a factory that agreed to do this. The factory was a single production line, and then when the production line stopped at 6 o'clock when the workers went home, is when Kaiser, who was the modalist who I worked with, and I would work all night long on the collections. So once the workers would go home,

then you would basically rent out the factory for your line. Yeah, I mean, because he had a relationship to the factory, they let him have it and use it. And he felt bad for this kid from New York who was desperate to have a collection within 30 days because we were getting close to market. Sorry, just to clarify it. You had to have this collection done in 30 days.

I did because, first of all, I knew that I needed to get to market quickly because I was going to run out of money if I didn't. And at the time, I think, I think 60 plus percent of businesses, probably even more today, startup businesses fell in the first year. Because people underestimate the amount of time it takes before there's a return on that investment. So I knew I needed to get to market quickly, and I knew that in December something, there was going to be a shoe show, and I needed a collection by then. This was Market Week, shoe show in New York, right? Yes, it was Market Week.

So you know you've got this deadline. You want to preview your line of shoes at Market Week, which is a sky. convention in New York. This is in December of 1982. Yeah. So what's the story? You want to get there. And do you meet your deadline? Do you get your shoes done on time for the show? So I, yeah, I'm doing that. But in the process, I needed to be prepared to show the shoes because at the time there were two choices. It was the room at the Hilton Hotel, not a lot

of individuality, not a lot of creativity, plus not without significant cost because you had to take a room, you had to decorate the room, you needed models. That was what Market Week was. It was a bunch of people with rooms at the Hilton Hotel. Yeah, about 1,100 of them. Okay. 30-some-od companies per four. And the buyers would just come and they'd walk the fours.

They'd go to room, turn them to room. They'd go more likely into the rooms they knew, people they had done business with. And the alternative was a big fancy showroom within a two-block radius of the Hilton Hotel, which clearly I didn't have the money at the time to do that either. So neither alternative really worked. And on a whim, I spoke to a person who was in the trucking business. And I asked him, if I could figure out how to park your truck on the corner of 6th Avenue, 56th Street, on December 2nd, 1982, would you lend it to me? What kind of truck, like?

A 40-foot trailer. You asked him to borrow it. Why? Because I was thinking that if I, maybe I could actually show the shoes in a truck on the corner because everybody was going to be on that corner at one point. in the process. So instead of being at the Hilton or in a showroom, you would just have a truck parked there, a 40-foot truck, that people would go into the container of the truck and see your shoes?

Correct. So I asked him, would you lend it to me? They said, you can't park a bicycle in New York for 10 minutes, let alone a truck for three days. But if you could figure out how to do it, not only will I lend it to you, I'll help you decorate it. So I call the mayor's office. So how does one get permission to park in the 454th,

the 7th, 56th, 56th Street? And the answer is Sunday don't. This is New York. We give permission only into two circumstances if you are utility companies servicing the streets or if you're a production company shooting a full-in-motion picture because we were going through an I-Love New York campaign

in the early 80s. Right. So that afternoon, we went to a stationary store, changed the companies, the letterhead in Kennetville, Inc., the Kennedical Productions, Inc. And then we filed for a permit sent the letter to the mayor that afternoon,

asking for permission to shoot a full-length motion picture called the birth of a shoot company. You filed a permit. File for a permit, yes. For a permit to shoot a film called the birth of a shoot company. Correct. Okay.

All right? And we opened for business on December 2nd, and we had two New York Boysmen as a doorman compliments of the fine mayor. Wait, they gave you the permit, they believed you, that you were going to... Did you shoot a film? We did. It never quite got edited, but we did. Wait, you had, like, camera piece? People just filming.

We had a director. Sometimes it was filming his camera. Sometimes it was cheaper that way. And we had stanchions and cleat lights. Was anybody from the city like permitting office there to confirm that you were a legit film company? Or was it just 1982 and that people were just more trusting back then? They had no reason not to trust it, I guess. I don't think anybody had done this before.

And the cops were there like as part of your, you know, security detail provided by the city. And they weren't like, hey, are you guys making a movie? I guess they wouldn't have asked that question. No, they weren't. But you know what did happen, though? We had a union guy came by after our first day of shooting. To make sure that this was a union crew. A union job, right.

And we told him we weren't really shooting. So he didn't buy that. So I just needed more security that night. And they didn't bother us. I guess eventually he just accepted that this was not a union job and that he wasn't going to be a beneficiary. some level. This was not even a film production. Oh, no, it was. It was. Some of the footage is actually on our website. Oh, okay. I got you. Gotcha. But so there was some filming on, but really, this was kind of a,

it was a stunt to get people to come to your trailer to see your shoes. And by the way, how did they know to come there? Did you like paint Kenneth Cole productions on the side? We did. There was a banner outside of the truck. And I would stand there and Sam would stand there and we would kind of to wave to people and then we saw every buyer in New York. And after the first few days, people, it became apparent, people heard about it. And then there was a, by the way, there's a phone booth on that corner. So I had committed to the factory to buy 40,000 pair of shoes. But I refused to commit to which specifically which ones. But I told them, I would let them know as the show was happening. So, you know, I'd get a little more red, a little more in the

lower hill, a less of the blue, more of the red. So I was, I was, you know, I would get a little more. I was, calling from the phone booth, I had lots of quarters in my pocket, and changing and adjusting the supply chain as we were selling the shoes. We get delivery in four to six weeks, which was unheard of, but we committed to do this. And I air freighted, flew everything in. How many shoes, by the way, did you sell at the show? I sold maybe 40,000 pair at the show. Wow. So you could call these factories from just the corner of what was a Street? Six and 56. Six and 56 in Manhattan and say, hey, yeah, we need those shoes. We need 20,000. We need 30,000, whatever it was. Well, no, I had already committed to the numbers. I was just adjusting them. And I was aspiring and believing and dreaming that I could sell all these shoes.

Right. And we did. We sold all of the shoes. After that show, was there buzz about Kenneth Cole, this hot young designer, or not quite yet? I think there was, invariably, people wanted 10 pair we'd only let up agree to sell mate. And the more we said no, the more they wanted it. And we got a lot of good editorial. So, Blumie Dells gave me my own shoe department on the main floor. In 1983? In 1983.

Wow. A little niche department. With your name on the wall and everything? With my name on the wall. Did your dad see that? He did. He was very. proud. And he came to the truck, to the trailer and saw it. And, you know, we lost him a couple

years after that. Unfortunately, he didn't really get to see how the business evolved over the years. But he was very proud. What was so different about the shoes you were making at the time? Why were they so hot? Well, they were different. And street fashion was really just starting to happen at that point in time. In a fashion up until that point had emanated from the runways of Milan and Paris. But now it was coming from the streets. And it was coming from people like Calvin. Calvin Klein. And I think Donna came a bit after that.

But that was about the time, the rise of the New York designers and American designers became a credible pursuit. And people were, they liked the shoes. People were, they bought them and I had them flown in from Italy. And I would then turn around and ship them before I had to pay for them. And then I got paid. paid before I had to pay the factories. So I had positive cash flow, like three months into business. But, I mean, the actual design of the shoes, was it the price point or was it the design?

What was it that, I mean, do they look very different from other things in the market at the time? They were very different from other things in the market. They were. They had a very distinctive look, a very high heel, pointy toe pump, and then also a flat pump. And then it was a convertible boot that had the ability to become, you could wear it at any height and it was made in canvas. Wow. And in the early 80s, denim was, you know, it became a big fashion statement at about that time. Even in shoes.

Well, but denim friendly footwear. Some of the shoes were made in stonewashed canvas, which looked like denim. And then some of them were in stonewashed suede, which also kind of looked like how people were dressing at the time. And I think people just, they liked it because it was new and different. But it was, we were going through interestingly, a downturn in the economy in the 80s. Yeah, 82 was a slowdown. It was a recession. So, and then in tough times, I've always said, are the greatest opportunities.

Because people, you know, when things are good, people want to just do what they're doing and do more of it. And it's only when things are difficult that they, that they're looking to kind of reinvent and re-engage. So, you know, in tough times, the shoes were different. There was nothing like them in the marketplace. And people were intrigued, and everybody felt they should have some. So we got off to a really great start. So where were you getting your ideas from? I often would go out at night.

These were also the studio 54 days. So I would go to the nightclubs, and I would kind of get a drink, and I'd sit in a lit corner, and I'd see what people would wear when they were trying to look their best for whoever it was they were trying to dress for. And I learned also that what are they wearing, but what do they wish they could be wearing? And, you know, people have to choose from what the universe would exist. So I had to be aware of what existed in the market, not so that I could make what existed, but how I could make what doesn't. I read a quote of yours talking about your early years where you said initially I would make what I thought people should wear.

But then I realized that I needed to make what people wanted. which is sort of the opposite of what Steve Jobs used to say. He would say, you don't know, customers and consumers don't know what they want. They need to be told what they want. My job isn't to tell people what they should wear. My job is to give them what they want, but not how they expect it. And I have to be sensitive to it, and I have to interpret it, and I have to give it to them in a way that doesn't exist in the competitive universe.

But I need to listen better. And the best salesman I learned early on were not the best salesmen. speakers there with the best listeners. So essentially, by 1984, you've got this brand, you're in Bloomingdale's, and I'm assuming that now your customers are mainly big department stores. Mainly in New York, are you starting to sell nationally by 1984? I'm selling nationally in 1982. I'm selling, I mean, my first season I sold, I remember I saw Fred Siegel in California. I sold Bergdorf's in New York. We sold most of the better stores in the country. You know, we worked very hard to, and Sam was a great salesman, and we worked very hard to get the product placed in

the best stores. And the company, its first year in business, did $5 million. Wow, that's unbelievable. I think about a year in, San went off and started his own thing, or he left to go work for, I think, a spree or something, right? Correct. But you guys left on good terms. We left on good terms. So you, I guess pretty soon, you know, early on, and within the first two years, you branch out. You move beyond just women's shoes. You go into men's shoes. You go into women's handbags and leather goods, presumably because you thought there was demand for this, right? Yeah. I started with women's shoes. And at the time, there's a company called Nine West that started about the same time that we did. Sure. And they were making and selling a lot more

shoes quickly than we were. And I had a choice. I could, there was clearly an opportunity to make more shoes and sell them to more people. Or as opposed to the one I took, which is to sell similar accessories to the same person I was selling to. But I was trying to sell the coolest person in town, and there's only so many of them. And I knew that if I had to, if I was going to sell more shoes, I was invariably going to have to change my relationship with the customer, and I was going to have to be a little less cool and produce maybe them in a little more accessible manner. which means that you had to offer a lower price point. I would offer a little lower price point

and there would be a little less extreme in their design and execution. And I could have done that. But instead I chose to keep the essence of the brand the way it was and create more products for the same person and then not that much later, including the male complement to the women's shoes, which is myself.

So I made shoes for me, shoes I wish I was there. Yeah. What I often say is I put myself in the customer's shoes. to try to get them to want to put themselves in mind. Let me ask you about men's shoes, right? Because it seems intuitive that it would be easier to design men's shoes because they're more straightforward. Is that true? It was for me because I would put myself in my shoes.

I would have looked at it. I could much more critically look at it and say, does this shoe need to exist in the world? I mean, even in 1984, the designs of men's shoes, of course, are different. than they are today, but there's some pretty substantial similarities, right? I mean, you had loafers, you had lace-ups, you had chaka boots and Chelsea boots. I mean, those existed in 1984. But fashion, men's fashion, was just, you know, finding its stride at that time. You know, up until that point, men basically had suits, and then they had torn chains and t-shirts and sneakers.

That's what guys had. That's what every guy we were like. We wore the same uniform. Right. And at that point, people were almost being encouraged and motivated to express themselves. And that vehicle was first really becoming accessible. One of the things that you would eventually become really well known for, in some ways, as well known for as your shoes, was a cause of bringing attention to AIDS, AIDS crisis.

And I think in the mid-80s, you were already really getting involved in this because one of your designers, David Brugnoli was the first person that you knew who was HIV positive and eventually died of AIDS. Was it David who inspired you to become involved in AIDS awareness? So David didn't, because David didn't never really acknowledge to me that he had AIDS. He never even told me at AIDS. But I knew he did. And this was, again, the mid-80s, I had. Adored David. David actually was an interior designer as what it was. He actually designed the trailer. I think I had originally met him from Sam. I think Sam knew him.

He designed the trailer for you in 1982. Yeah. He designed the inside of the trailer. And he designed the inside of our showroom. And David was a gay man in New York. And that wasn't something you wore on your sleeve in those days. And what I would do at the beginning of every season is I would essentially, as I said, put myself in people's shoes. And I would try, what is on people's minds? What are people thinking about? And in many ways, it was me. I was speaking to myself, you know, what was consuming me, what was on my mind. You were thinking about AIDS and HIV. 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 in 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. And 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, Cardley and American legal 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 and people weren't 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 right 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 talking about AIDS. Talking about AIDS. Sure. People would want to be around you. People were afraid that they would catch it. People were afraid.

And 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 your time were some of the biggest

advocates. And I committed myself to it and quickly, quickly, what I was doing was becoming meaningful to me. And just to be clear, I mean, you launched an ad campaign to raise awareness around AIDS. And I mean, for people who remember, that was like a really iconic ad, right? I mean, it showed up in all these magazines. Yeah. You had all these fashion models and they were just really becoming icons at that time and being celebrated. So I asked, Danny Lee was the little up-and-coming designer, but I asked Danny if she would do it. She would take photographs.

If she would, on a pro bono basis, because I didn't know I 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. Like the thing in the mid-80s, who were the top models at the time? At the time, Christy Brinkley was one of them.

And Christy did it, by the way, and she was eight and a half months pregnant. And Christy hadn't been seen publicly in, I don't know, for five months. but she allowed herself to be photographed for this day, at eight and a half months pregnant, as was Paulina and Beverly Johnson. Paulina Perescova.

I guess you remember all these supermodels from the 80s, yeah, Beverly Johnson, yeah. Beverly Johnson and Joan Severance and Kelly Emberg. So everybody said yes. And they would just be photographed, what? So they were, the concept, the campaign was, the message was for the future of our children. Right.

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 in my shoes. I'm not going to put anybody else so they'd be barefoot. And that, at the end of the day, turned out to be even a bigger statement. They were barefoot. They were not even wearing shoes. They were not wearing shoes. And how, so the idea was to take out ads and, like, publications.

So I wasn't sure how we were going to do it. I had a very small budget. And there was no such thing as pro bono advertising also in those days. So we got older models 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 age research. And it didn't say Kenneth Cole anywhere on it? It said Kenneth Cole in a list of sponsors. Wow. So you really weren't like, not, this was like... It was a gamble.

I wanted people to know I was behind it. I wanted them to know I used my limited fragile resources for this. But I did... But I was very careful. My role to archery 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. Because all of a sudden that you became more focused on a social mission. What we were doing just became important. And it became meaningful. I'm looking at that ad. It's so cool. I'm just seeing all these young faces. is Christy Brinkley and Andy McDowell and Pauline Naposcove and all these kids.

It's really cool. Yeah. So at the time, so I now had the message. I had 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 to. 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.

So the models all did it. Annie did it. The studio was donated. I think was donated. I even had cars donated to people. We 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, offering to run it for free. You also, I'm curious because this was sort of a foundational moment for your career and for you personally. I mean, you would become the chair of Amphar, the foundation for AIDS research. which you helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for, you would go on to be involved in other causes that are, quote, unquote, liberal or considered to be liberal. And you are openly liberal. Talk about that. I mean, I mean, is it, I mean, you know, some companies and some business leaders can hide their politics. And, I mean, not only do you kind of wear it on your sleeve, you're married into the Cuomo family. You got married in 1987 to the sister of the current governor of New York and daughter of the former governor of New York. I mean, did you ever think maybe I shouldn't be political because it could hurt my brand, or was it like a non-negotiable? But, you know, 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. Yeah. But they're social messages that have been politicized, but I don't talk about politics. Right. 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 a ways that I thought was political. Right.

So your business is really kind of growing in the 80s. And really your distribution model is still through big retailers, right? Because this is still the heyday of department stores and where lots of people got their clothes. And I guess in like 94, you decide to actually make a change, to actually really focus on direct-to-consumer sales. What happened in 94? Was there like a catalyst that sort of inspired you to start to open up shops? What happened in 94 was the landscape changed. When I started my business, there was maybe 70 or 80 departments to a change in the United States.

All of a sudden, 10 years later, there's maybe 15 or 20. Consolidation. 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,

which that's likely going 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. Why were you the middleman? I mean, you were selling your products to them. Yeah, but they could buy it directly from factories and then take out the middleman. And then no longer sell Kenneth Cole, just buy your shoes and not sell your label.

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 didn't, I believed. You didn't think that they would just continue to buy Kenneth Cole's shoes and sell them? 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, increased my marketing.

And I also knew that I couldn't fund that. I wasn't willing to fund that. So just to be clear, you had to fund that. The that is building stores. Building stores. I'm just trying to understand that because the value proposition was your designs. They couldn't steal your designs. But there were other designs.

And if you don't see my designs, it's 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. When we come back in just a moment, why Kenneth decides to take the company public and why he takes a big financial loss to go private again. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. And one more thing.

The New York Times best-selling book, How I Built This, is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect started out at the very bottom. Check out How I Built This, The Book, Available Wherever You Buy Your Books. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1994.

and Kenneth Cole decides he no longer wants to depend on selling his shoes through department stores. What he wants is a direct relationship with his customers. 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, having your own stores. I felt at that time. So you needed the cash? You need money to make this happen. I needed the cash.

I wasn't going to put myself in any more debt than I needed to be. And I decided by going public was the best way to do that. And invariably when you go public and you ask the public for funding, there's a question that everybody asks, which is use of proceeds, what are you going to do with the money? Yeah. And I had a very clear use of proceeds. You were going to expand like crazy.

I was going to grow the business as quickly and as responsibly as I knew how. I mean, because on your own, you'd taken the company from a $5 million, operation in your first year to a $85 million operation by 1994, which is impressive, but not enough, because that's revenue, that's sales and revenue, that's not enough cash or profit to fund the ambitions that you had. You had to go public, presumably you raised a lot of money in that IPO. Now you get the cash to expand. So what was the expansion plan?

So the expansion plan was to open stores in employment. important markets, which are aspirational markets in Chicago and Los Angeles, at Miami, and Boston. And we systematically went down that road. And how did that do? I mean, did people, I mean, by the late 90s, were people flocking to Kenneth Cole stores? Well, I don't know if I'd use the word flocking. But we were, we were, we were, the stores were all profitable. And they were driving customer engagement and the brand was doing better wherever it existed. It did better in the department stores. Because people would see the brick and mortar stores, and that was like an advertisement. Yeah, and then there was 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 Northstrom's that did not have

a Kenneth Kohl store. And I think because there's people that wanted to buy from Nordstrom or from Bloomingdale's or from Sacks 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. Do you know, it's very similar in a strange way to the story of Foot Locker. I interviewed the former CEO of Foot Locker, Ken Hicks.

And he told me that whenever there was a Nike store opened up in a mall, actually it increased Foot Locker's business. Right. Yeah, I believe that. Very interesting. You would think the opposite. So you had these stories. And by the way, were, I mean, were you licensing your name at this point in the late 90s or not yet?

I was. You were licensing your name to other products, apparel, men's dress shirts, things like that. I don't think I was doing apparel in dress shirts 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. Right. But was your brand, I mean, your reputation was kind of aspirational, right? So you call it higher end or aspirational, what have you.

But when you started to license your name, did that have an impact on how the brand was perceived? Because some of those products would show up at like T.J. Max. Well, it didn't initially because it 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 Claybourne. And they agreed to huge minimums. sales levels, actually $250 million a year, which is crazy high numbers. That was a guarantee that they would pay.

Guaranteed by the fifth year of our relationship. That's a great deal. It is, but until you realize that they had to make the product more accessible, more accessible, price, more excessively fit, design, 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. Get shareholders. They wanted to make money.

That was what we signed up for as chairman of public companies. I'm sensing a hint of regret in that deal with Liz Claiborne because it sounds like maybe it started to affect the reputation of the brand. It, you know, 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 have no reason to exist at a certain point. So the brand lost a little bit of it to steam when we did that. meantime, you reach a market cap of a little more than half a billion dollars in 2006. And then in the subsequent years, we began to hit the financial crisis. And I guess you decided at the time to step down as a CEO. Did you decide to step down because you felt like somebody could better manage the crisis? Or were you, did you feel, were you under pressure from shareholders? What was the decision behind that?

If I recall, I stepped down at the same time that I agreed to be the chairman of Amphar. I got you. Okay. So it had nothing to do with the financial crisis. No, it wasn't the crisis, but I also felt I needed, the company needed somebody who could be a little bit more accessible. Focused, right. And more focused and could be all in all the time. So you had kind of stepped away from running the day-to-day operations for a few years.

You had a different CEO, Jill Granoff. And during that time, the revenue went down like 30% or more. And you decided to return to the CEO role, I think, around 2011. I mean, I think I know why, but did you feel like you had to come? It's like Howard Schultz came back to Starbucks after being away from it for so long. Did you feel like you had to regain control and try and bring it back to life? I felt I needed to fix the business and it wasn't working the way it was

we've gotten too big we're selling some of the wrong product to the wrong people we're licensing to people maybe we shouldn't have been had maybe the wrong product and doors it shouldn't have been in because invariably that's what the public markets will do to companies like ours but you know

what was happening is we as an executive team we're spending most of our time talking about how we're going to talk about the results rather than trying to how to fix them. You were trying to figure out how to spin things. 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 desirable 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. So you decide to come back to the company with the goal of taking your company private. And for anyone who doesn't understand this, and I don't fully understand it, is very hard to take a company. private once it's gone public is you are essentially you got to buy back the shares from shareholders which means you have to raise a lot of money to do that and that's very challenging i mean i think how did you go about doing it i i don't remember exactly step by step but we did what most people do and we hired a law firm and um we retained bank advisors and uh i spoke to a lot of people in the industry and you know actually the process getting here is i i spoke to all these very

smart people that I knew. Yeah. And many of them were friends. And I asked them, you know, if I totally tried to overhaul the business and put 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, I, because I don't know how to not be public.

Well, they said, well, 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 upon analysis, that I can do this without a venture capital firm. Because to do it with them, many will argue, it's harder. It's harder to exist in that structure than it is as a public company. So you could do it with the shares that you already had. But the shares I had in traditional bank financing. Right. And from what I understand, you bought the company back at 15 and a quarter per share, which,

value of the company at like 280 million, which was hundreds of millions of dollars less than it was at its peak. So was there, I mean, I imagine there were some shareholders who were mad about this, who didn't want this to happen. You know, when we announced that we were going to do this, we announced it at 9 o'clock when the New York Stock 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. So you have this built-in process where, you know, these law firms just file suit and then they build the class afterwards. They start a class action suit. Then they find 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.

You've been quoted as calling these lawyers who file these lawsuits extortionists. And you may not be wrong here, but just to play devil's advocate for, for, for, moment. I mean, could you make the argument that some shareholders were, you know, legitimately pissed off because they bought the shares for, you know, $20 or, you know, $18 and now they're going to lose $3 a share? But if I'm, if we offer $15. Right. And the stock at the time, I think it was 13. So we offered premium up 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 this process.

down and we had basically said to the marketplace if you 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 we the deal will not go through and if it does then it will and we'll accommodate that and it did At the end of the day, the lawsuit, the Quest Action suit continued, and over time, we prevailed. But it must have been costly and stressful. 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 in my professional life. When you went private. When I went private. So you go, you take the company private, and now you're unshackled, I guess. all of a sudden you didn't have to think about short-term profits. You could focus on the brand.

You could focus on long-term strategy. And it was your company. I think you still own about 80% of it. Well, at that time, I owned 80%. Now I owned 100. We had, I brought in some outside, some of these friends who were advisors and invited them to buy it at the same price that I did. And they formed an advisory board. And I should also mention that, I think not long after that,

you start to close down your stores, most of your stores. We systematically started to close the stores. And the prior management team had opened up a lot of outlet stores in places where we shouldn't have been. We had like 63 outlet stores across the U.S. And the model had changed and we should not have been in that business. And outlet stores, do outlet stores also kind of devalue a brand? I think they do, but also would change in that period of time is the Internet. You know, the outlet stores 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 supply to wherever there's demand. So the 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 it. You closed virtually all of your stores. I think today, today there's just what, I think just one or two? There's one store, yeah.

Up until about six years ago, we had 100 stores in the U.S. I mean, completely overhauled this model that you had. I mean, the reason you went public was to expand the stores and expand the brand with stores and brick and mortar. And the reason we went private is to close them. But really, it's now you on the line. It's your personal financial situation. Because if at this point, you want 100% of the company, if it goes bust, you're broke.

You have assumed the risk. I'm assuming all the risk. Yes, that's correct. Which is comforting, truthfully, at some level, because, you know, when you're driving somebody else's car, you drive more carefully because it's somebody else's car. But you can be a hair more reckless if it's your own, not that that's, or you can take more risks. And, you know, you can explore kind of new paths. that others might not otherwise. You stepped down as CEO for the second time

and then brought in Mark Schneider to run the company and the brand in 2015. And together you kind of focused on a rebranding, like rebranding Kenneth Cole. What was, because you had a bunch of different things. You had Kenneth Cole, reaction and different parts of Kenneth Cole. What was the rebrand supposed to signal to consumers in 2020? 2015. Well, 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 we're on a lot of different products today. We licensed the brand in 20-some-ar products. And I've been a licensed for 25 years, and it's probably something we do relatively well. But I think the

brand definitely is diluted in the process at some level because and you have to every day make very difficult decisions and every single business decision has financial implications. Right. And it also 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. So, but right now we're running shoes. Do you still think of your shoes in that same way, aspirational? I mean, I'm looking at the website, you know, there, these are not, this is not fast fashion. I mean, you know, you give a pair of your women's heels are still hundreds, some of them are $160, $170.

So they're not, you know, designer prices, but they're not the low end either. The goal is that I don't think people buy price. They buy value. And people learn the long time ago, you pay a dollar for something. You never wear it. You pay too much. So how do you create a product? that is, that looks good, that's comfortable, that we'll look and feel good today as well as tonight.

And that's the challenge. And that's what we try to do every day. I want to go back to the rebranding side, right? Because you had a very clear idea of what the brand was when you launched. And it, of course, evolved because all brands evolve. But when you rebranded, who did you want your customer to become? Who did you imagine your customer to be? The goal was to In my mind I wanted it to be me I wanted it to be

I wanted to want every one of the shoes and we want to wear every one of their 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 a little short You're in a better place than you were Are you still involved in designing the shoes? I am not as involved on a day-to-day basis, but I ultimately see everything and approve everything. What is a shoe that gets you excited right now that you guys are making? It's something that does everything for you, that checks all the boxes. You know, 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 is in 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. And 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. The mask. It's the mask. I see it on your website. They're nice masks. So we're trying to make the perfect mask. It doesn't just. just look good. It has six layers of protection. It is temperature control. It's waterproof.

So that is kind of getting on for resources put behind that right now. One of the benefits of our show, certainly this year has been as a source of comfort for our audience and our listeners who are running businesses. Because it's been a tough, tough year for pretty much everybody, unless you're running an online productivity software that everyone seems to be using remotely, right? And I have to imagine it's been a tough year for Kenneth Cole because it's been a tough year for the entire fashion and retail industry full stop. How are you building resilience into your company this year? Because am I right?

It must be a slower year. It is a very slow. It's a very difficult year guy. And we're better off the most because a lot of our, the business model is built on contractual relationships and licenses. Right. So there's some level of assured income. But this isn't sustainable, and we need to partner with our licensees, and we do. And the shoe business struggles, and to the degree is how do you vary wise 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 cleaner. 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, you know, stay a step. ahead. Kenneth, you earlier this year launched a new initiative called the Mental Health Coalition

to raise awareness about mental health and try to remove the stigma around it and help people get access to mental health services. First of all, we haven't talked about this. Have you ever been depressed or gone through mental health challenges? 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 it 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 isn't you, it's somebody you love. love. It's somebody in your family, in your community, or in the workplace, but we're all living with it. In fact, today, post-COVID, I think it's five out of four people. I think it's also 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. So we, you know, we as a company were working with Nami. I'll tell you how this came about it. My daughter also, Amanda, kind of encouraged this and this is something that's very important to her. Nami has an initiative on stigma-free companies, as we always look to do. What is NAMI? Sorry, I'm not familiar with NAMI. I'm sorry, nationalized for mental illness. They're the largest grassroots mental health service provider in the country.

Got it. 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 ask five psychiatrists just added 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 of the 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 of 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. Yeah. Ken, when you think about your journey, right, starting out, you know, kind of helping out your dad and then you really had incredible success with this business. Not only financial success, but cultural impact.

a name, a designer, talked about with Donna Karen and Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren and Kenneth Cole, all the same breath, pretty amazing achievement alone. You're a very kind guy, thank you. Do you attribute your success to how hard you worked and how smart you worked, or do you think more of it just happened because you got lucky? 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, you know, 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. Are you comfortable calling yourself a designer now after 35 years? I am. I still say I'm a shoe dog. That's an expression in the shoe industry. say and I embrace it still.

I mean, you are still a young man. You got a lot of life left in you, maybe 30, 40 years. Who knows? With genetic engineering, maybe 50 or 100. But at some point, you won't be around. What do you think should happen to Kenneth Cole? Do you see it as a 100-year brand? Do you see it?

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. So, and I'm just an accessory. I co-brand with them. And hopefully they'll allow me to be part of their brand. So if my brand is a reason to exist for 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. That's Kenneth Cole, the founder of Kenneth Cole. And by the way, remember how he registered Kenneth Cole as a film production company in the early days? And how they started to make a film called Birth of a Shoe Company? Well, you can actually see clips from that film on the company's YouTube page, where you will also notice a young, lanky, and bearded shoe salesman who happens to be Kenneth Cole. What kind of shoes you're wearing right now?

I'm actually wearing Kenneth Cole sneakers. Nice. Assuming your shoe closet is only Kenneth Cole. It's not only Kenneth Cole, but it's all that I admit to. Got it, fair enough. Because I think about my own shoe closet, I've got six pairs of chuck-a boots. I'm sorry to hear that guy. I've had Kenneth Cole, too, of course.

I respect you no less. I'm wearing Birkenstocks right now, just so you know. Oh, you're pushing it. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can also write to us at hibt at npr.org. And if you want to follow us on Twitter, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, it's at guy.org.

This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. Thanks also to Liz Metzger, Dareth Gales, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Farah Safari. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.