American Apparel Files for Bankruptcy
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Your cool for a while until its the brand that your dorky older sister used wear and then you just become another brand. A similar analogy can be made for Facebook, it was cool in 2008, in 2014 when your mom and grandma want to friend you, not so much. Atleast tech companies like Facebook stand a chance of keeping their users as they age.
Not many 30 year olds have both the body and the mentality to wear the American Apparel clothes that they bought when they were in university.
Restaurants are very similar, which is why they tend to start to group together under uber companies that run each brand as stand alone entities. Fashion also tends to follow this playbook. This atleast lets companies diversify their risk among multiple brands.
Its been said that tech companies need to reinvent themselves every 15 years to stay relevant, in fashion, its more like every 4 years and that's depressingly quick.
Speak for yourself.
http://i.imgur.com/C4C9Llb.jpg
I'm going to grave with these on. These colors don't run!
Disney has mastered this
You realize that 99% of fashionable, expensive clothing can be described this way right? I'm hardly a fashionable person but even I know that fashion has much more to it than those two aspects; cut, form, material type, etc.
[1] http://investors.americanapparel.net/releasedetail.cfm?Relea...
It's possible the wholesale business is still profitable, but the retail portion has sunk the entire company.
I have no clue if that is what happened, but it certainly is possible.
You shall be horrifiee
While the management problems, debt issues and slowing demand were problems, it seems they never really tried to bring in different consumers. I hope they consider different markets in their reorganization.
That's a shockingly low number for a founder of such a huge business.
Just listened to a Planet Money episode on the benefits of bankruptcy, and it seems like while you will have every single document and decision reviewed/approved by creditors and the judge if you try to make a deal and pay it off, you'd still retain ownership.
Not familiar enough with the details though to know how that works in various scenarios.
I can only imagine the GM filings...will have to take a look at that sometime.
As for board seats, I can't say. I've watched a couple of large companies restructure fairly closely but don't recall board seats being offered as part of that. Certainly at the point of being in Chapter 11 bankruptcy you're no longer the company you once were, one option is always to liquidate and move to Chapter 7 to disperse the assets. We had a customer company do that (one of the baby telephone companies) in the dot com bust when I was at Tut/FreeGate. As I recall from that transaction we got a check for around $3,000 for what had been something like $1.2M worth of networking gear they had deployed and not yet paid for.
Am I right in assuming that creditors are able to write off any such losses (such as your networking gear example)?
[0]: http://www.duluthtrading.com/store/product/mens-ballroom-5-p...
Chapter 11 Voluntary Petition . Fee Amount $1717. Filed by American Apparel, Inc.. (Attachments: # 1Board Resolutions # 2Top Creditors with Certification # 3Creditor Matrix # 4Verification of Creditor Matrix # 5Corporate Ownership Statement) (Jones, Laura Davis) (Entered: 10/05/2015)
and the docket ( https://www.inforuptcy.com/filings/debke_160493-1-15-bk-1205... )
The Iconix Brand Group has made a business of buying up hip brands in decline and turning them into JC Penny/Walmart/Kmart labels. They own about 25 once-cool brands, including Danskin, Ocean Pacific, Joe Boxer, and Peanuts. Maybe they'll pick up American Apparel.
[1] http://www.abercrombie.com/shop/us/womens-jackets-and-coats
We talk about needing a basic income, but I propose that we need the modern equiv of "40 acres and a mule" == a basic wardrobe and a basic pantry that anyone should be able to sign up for... It gives some standard clothing and a set base of foods to a family and is subsidized across the board in specifically corporate tax (you shouldn't tax the people for this, you should tax industry only)...
But I'd love to hear any argument for or against this concept
EDIT: obviously the down votes are "arguments against" without the ability to articulate your opinion...
American Apparel's manufacturing was the one good thing it had going for it, US based garment factory and above industry average wages was a step towards reversing decades of overseas sweatshop production in the fashion industry.
Vertical integration by definition shrinks a company's
carbon footprint, as the materials are not shipped back and
forth internationally, across thousands of miles, in the
production process. As you can imagine, most garments you
buy are the sum of disparate entities - knitted in one
place, dyed in another, sold wholesale somewhere else and
finally cut and sewn in unethical, sweatshop conditions.
American Apparel, in contrast, is made in the USA by highly
skilled workers we consider our friends and family.
When you buy a t-shirt from American Apparel, a smaller
portion of the margins goes towards fuel, trans-ocean
container ships, middlemen, boxes, pallets and entropy.
Instead we're able to spend that money on paying living
wages to our workers, higher-quality materials for our
garments, and investing in the future of our company.
By centralizing our manufacturing operations, we're not only
increasing efficiency, we're being held accountable and
responsible for our actions, because our name is on the side
of the building. We do our own knitting, dyeing, cutting and
sewing in-house which means we can ensure adherence with US
environmental regulations with regards to effluents, waste
disposal, airborne particulate matter, and many others.
Fashion labels who sub-contract their labor and sewing to
dozens of shadowy third-world factories never even need to
know the names of the environmental codes intended to keep
run-off from polluting local drinking water.
Our average factory worker makes $12 to $14 dollars an
hour -the highest pay worldwide for the manufacturing of
apparel basics, and significantly more than California's
minimum wage. For us, higher pay means heightened
efficiency, a better and more consistent quality of work,
stronger employee morale, and ultimately, retention rates
of skilled operators. For them, higher pay is often a
path to the American Dream for their families.
We don't have to do things this way, we just believe it's
the right way.
We employ more than 5,000 people in our LA area
manufacturing facilities, making us one of the largest
apparel manufacturing employers in the country. This, in
a state with unprecedented unemployment and an
unprecedented budget deficit. American Apparel keeps
Californians, keeps Americans, working, and in doing so
contributes millions of dollars annually to the State and
country's tax base, as well as the local economies in
which our employees live.
Some of these initiatives may fall under the banner of
"Sustainability." Others may be closer to "Corporate
Responsibility." To us, these are the natural results of
our business model, which encourages responsible and
informed decisions, alongside innovation.http://www.businessinsider.com.au/how-american-apparel-desce...
Cool to disagree, it's my opinion of American Apparel. Lots of people would disagree, and that's fine. I'm merely expressing my distaste of their ethical standards (or lack thereof).
http://www.buzzfeed.com/angelamv/the-28-raciest-american-app...
But...
their ads never really did anything for me one way or another. It's not news that you sell clothes to young people (and plenty of older people) by convincing them that the clothes will make you look and feel sexy.
AA advertising just seemed to beat around the bush a bit less. Maybe it's a bit too blatant for the more puritanical shoppers out there but they're hardly the only place where you see advertising that says "buy our stuff, you will be sexy and desirable".
Edit: Downvoters, if you've got a different interpretation, I'd like to hear it. By pretending not to know what chris_wot means by "sexually exploitative advertising", kaffeemitsahne is clearly implying that it's not real because no one is literally being forced to have sex for money or survival.
You've implied something kaffeemitsahne had never said.
Its fascinating to read how they never actually "ran" many of those ads, but the shock journalists had a field day and created a huge PR blitz for them on a few strategically placed sham ads on the file server.
I say they are exploitative because they reduce women to mere objects with which to sell clothing. As has been pointed out in a number of sources, many of the ads they ran were literally just soft porn, in fact many of the women didn't have much if any clothing on at all.
This in turn exploited the minds of young women to make them want to fit the type of ultra-skinny, skimpily clad models who appeared to want to have sex at the drop of a hat. They were just one of the brands who helped increase raunch culture, made many women feel their bodies were inadequate and, though they may protest, did not portray a positive message about sex.
If they were going to show a positive message about sex, then they could have at least shown models with a variety of body types. But then again, you've got to ask why sex seemed to be their ONLY real hook to sell their clothing.
So that's my reasoning, feel free to disagree but I think a large number of people across the globe tend to agree with my assessment of American Apparrel, including the UK Advertising Standards Board who repeatedly made them take down their ads.
I'm not immune, incidentally. I have to remember this every time I see an American Apparel advertisement. I speak out against AA exploitation because those ads debase sexuality by triggering in the viewer the urge for selfish sexual gratification. It can only do this because the viewer allows it to be so. The viewer is ultimately responsible for their own actions, but the advertiser is responsible for deliberately attempting to manipulate the viewer with their images. In my view, this exploits the viewer as well as the one being objectified. It's insidious, and whilst AA couched their advertisement in terms of not exploiting their workers, they used sexual objectification for one purpose only: to sell their clothes and make a profit.
So you advertise a dream, a goal, a desire.
You don't sell to them "a nice sweater". You sell to them all the things they could be if only they had this sweater.
Since nobody aspires to be old or plus sized, you don't see models selling how old you could be if only you had this sweater.