| or "invent" or "advance." It's "control." Control the look of your stores, your offices, your packaging, your parties. Control every aspect of the brand that a consumer can see. But there's another realm luxury-goods companies seek to master: production. Control the manufacturing and you control how fast your products get to the stores (the earlier they arrive the more time they have to sell). Control production and you control quality. The benefits seem obvious, the alternative impossible. ("What do you mean, Calvin Klein doesn't make his own underwear?") But the desire to own and operate factories — for clothing, for leather goods, for shoes — is a relatively new one. Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Gucci were founded by families who made the things — luggage, bags, saddles — they sold. The first designer clothing was haute couture, made to individual customer specifications by seamstresses employed by the creator. Those designs were sold to and copied by mass merchants, who reproduced them in local factories and sold them under the names of their own stores. As ready-to-wear designer labels began to emerge in the 1970s, the easy choice for a designer was to sign a licensing agreement with a |
manufacturer. Who wants the bother of running a factory and employing all those workers when it's so much simpler to sit in an atelier and sketch?
The designer would design, the manufacturer would manufacture. It was a great system in theory, but cracks soon began to show. Some designers signed licensing agreements and focused their attention elsewhere, allowing licensees to design products as they saw fit, diluting the brand image. Some manufacturers signed agreements and then produced cheap products that they sold to second-rate stores, diluting the brand exclusivity. Witness Calvin Klein's 2000 lawsuit against Warnaco, the company that makes the jeans and underwear that bear his name. Companies began to sign licensing deals for everything from chocolates and whiskeys to pencils and playing cards, negating the very nature of a luxury fashion brand. Pierre Cardin is the reigning master, with nearly 1,000 licenses to his name. There was an upside, of course. And the upside was money. The licenses generated huge amounts of cash that would be hard to replace.
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