Pamela Skaist-Levy - The Glitter Plan: How We Started Juicy Couture for $200 and Turned It Into a Global Brand

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Copyright 2014 by Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor

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Version_1 To our loving parents, who encouraged us to find our passion and embrace our eccentricity; to our supportive, creative, kick-ass husbands, who stand behind us and let us spend more time together than with them; and to our children, who inspire us every day.

Contents

Chapter 1

T HE G LITTER P LAN

T his is a fairy tale about two nice girls who like stuff who managed to turn a dreamand $200into a $1 billion global fashion empire. We also changed the way the world dresses along the way. Not a day goes by that people dont ask us, How did you do it? Its one in a million, but it didnt happen overnight. Despite our lack of formal business experience or deep-pocketed family members to bankroll us, we turned a friendship, a love of clothes, and an endless entrepreneurial drive into Juicy Couture.

We didnt just create a brand; we created a whole rainbow-hued Fluffian universe complete with a visual vocabulary (pink power, purse dogs, and matching outfits) and our very own pink Latin, a language we call Juicy speak, with Smells Like Couture, Live for Sugar, Choose Juicy, and other slogans written on T-shirts and across derrieres throughout the land. First was our line of upscale T-shirts in juicy colors, buttery fabrics, and curve-hugging fits, then came the velour tracksuit, which turned sweatsonce considered full-blown slob wearinto something chic, making them stylish enough to go from carpool to dinner at Mr. Chow.

We put LA style on the map at a time when celebrity was becoming the driving force in fashion. By 2002, when Madonna was photographed wearing velour drawstring pants and a hoodie embroidered with her nickname, Madge, Juicy had become a full-fledged pop culture phenomenon and the fashion game had changed forever.

Juicy developed a cultish following, too. There are blogs and YouTube videos created by fans who collect our charms, our tracksuitseven our packaging. On Twitter, you can check out @GelaAndPamsArmy. Girls decorate their rooms in our distinctive pink-and-brown color palette and throw Juicy-themed Sweet Sixteen parties. Best friends send us fan letters about how they want to have a brand when they grow up and call it Fruity.

In this book, which is part memoir, part how-to manual, and part fashion industry field guide, were going to tell you what worked for us for the past twenty-five years (and, for the first time, how the word couture became part of our name). The chapters are our stories, our failures, and our successes. And weve listed the lessons learned at the end of each one.

From our honest-to-goodness fairy tale, beginning in the farthest reaches of the San Fernando Valley, to our early days of Dumpster-diving for used denim; from the time we marched into Fred Segal and made our first sale, to the 2003 sale of our company to Liz Claiborne, which netted us more than $200 million, from sitting in the front row at the Paris haute couture shows and on to our next big adventure, we want to share every Juicy detail. And were going to approach it the way we approached our business: with glitter and guts and stream of thoughtand together. We do everything together. We make the first phone call of the day to each other at six thirty A.M . We share not only an intense love of fashion, but an equally intense friendship. Were sisters from another mother, and its that sisterhood that has guided us.

We never believed in market research. We didnt need twenty people to tell us what was cute or wasnt, or if people were going to like it or not. We had one rule that we keep to this day: We both had to like it. If not, it was out. And, if we both liked it, we knew it was good enough for us. The truth is if you focus on product, create something people want, and find someone in your life who you have the right chemistry with, you can do it, too.

We didnt go to Harvard Business Schoolor any business schooland we never had a business plan. We didnt hire an MBA CEO to run the companywe did this with our own creativity and hard work and often by the seat of our pants. We just wanted to create something people loved and a work environment that made us happy. Thats our version of the American Dream.

Thats the glitter plan.

Chapter 2

B IRDS OF A F EATHER

W e met in 1988 when we were both working at the Diane Merrick boutique in Los Angeles. It was a classic LA storywe were picking up shifts for a friend who was in rehab. We worked on different days filling in her schedule and everybody thought we were the same person, except that only one of us was helpful (Gela).

Then one afternoon, we were there together, and we bonded while folding the guest towels that went on the sink in the bathroom, of all things. We were both so detail-oriented, we had to make sure every corner on those towels was perfect, even if most people who came into the store were never going to see them.

We definitely both noticed what the other was wearing. Pam was in a straw boater hat from her line Helmet, English riding boots, and black cutoff trouser shorts. Gela was in cowboy boots, kneesocks, and a vintage Victorian childrens dress bought at a thrift store. We started gossiping and then got into deeper stuff. It was instant chemistry, like magnets, like we had been friends forever.

..................

Pam: I was born in LA and grew up a skateboarding Valley girl in Encino. I was always outside, climbing trees, riding horses, going to the beach to boogie board, and playing competitive sports, too, but mostly just for the costumes. Encino was a magical sunny place in the 1960s and 70s, a weird melting pot of creative kids who had the burn. The founders of Mossimo, Joie, and True Religiona crazy Southern California tribeall grew up there together, and the fashion companies we started grew out of our obsession with SoCal pop culture. My inspiration started with Vans sneakers, Hang Ten T-shirts, and Op shorts. That was California luxury then.My father, Dr. Leonard Skaist, was a pediatric urologist, and my mom, Elaine, was a homemaker. Both were superpreppy and conservative. When I was a teenager and it came time to shop for back-to-school clothes, my mom tried to take me to Saks and Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. But I wanted to go to the surf/skate store Val Surf in the Valley or to Aaardvarks Odd Ark on Melrose Avenue for vintage. When she took me to Aaardvark, she held her nose so she didnt have to smell the stink of old clothes, which made the hunt even more fun for me. I loved that it tortured her.When it came to style, I had very strong likes and dislikes: After I left the house for school in the morning, I would take my pants off so I could wear my Oingo Boingo T-shirt as a minidress. My mother would say, Pamela is just expressing herself!My younger brother, Mark, and older sister, Lisa, were in all the serious gifted-kid classes in high school. They knew they were going into academia. I knew I wasnt. I loved my friends and I liked lunch. There was one teacher who made me feel passionate about photography and he changed my life. Before that, I knew how to look but I didnt know how to see and edit and form opinions and make creative choices about what I was looking at. I discovered that I loved being able to express myself through an image and it hit me on a visceral level. He gave me the only A I ever got.When I got older, I put on a great outfit, drove across the hill, and got a job at Fred Segal on Melrose, which was the fashion mecca of Southern California. I worked there on and off for ten years until I got married, including every vacation and school break. I arranged flowers, decorated store windows, and worked in the pit, which is the prime real estate as you walk down the stairs onto the selling floor reserved for the most killer collections. One day, Juicy Couture would own the pit.After high school, I went to Grossmont College in San Diego, where once more I had an incredible photography teacher, and I put all of my focus on that class. But I still didnt know what I wanted to do with my life. After college, I moved back to LA and into a house with my friends, where we spent all night partying and all day sleeping. Eventually, my parents made me get it together, and I decided to apply to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles.On the first day of FIDM in 1985, the teacher asked the class, What is the job of a designer? Some people said, To make patterns. Others said, To be creative. But the right answer was this: The job of a designer is to solve problems. And that is a big lesson. Every day when you are running a business, there is a problem to solve.For an independent study, I launched a line of hats named Helmet and sold them at Fred Segal. Once my hats were selling there, getting them into Barneys New York and Neiman Marcus was easy. (Thats how much weight Fred Segal carried at the time.) My senior project was to design a whole clothing collection, and I was the only one in the class who did down-to-earth T-shirts and casual clothes, as opposed to fanciful paper or tinfoil ball gowns. My teacher told me that I knew how to build a collection. I realized that I didnt have to be good at everything; I just had to focus on what moved me.While I was going to FIDM, I was also working as a waitress at Sushi On Sunset, where I met my future husband, producer-director Jefery Levy. We were wearing the same round tortoise-and-wire nerd glasses. (I said to him, I like your glasses, and he said to me, I like your face. We have been together ever since.) Jef was wearing the coolest Yohji Yamamoto trench coat and hanging out with the Brat Pack. It was a lightning-bolt moment; he was an artist wearing cool clothes and making it. I wanted to be part of that.I started designing clothes for a vampire film called Rockula, which Jef wroteI just put in clothes that I loved: cameo necklaces and riding jackets that I sewed bits of lace onto. I even hand-painted suits. I didnt know I needed duplicates of costumes, and I made everything one-of-a-kind. We were filming an action scene, and Thomas Dolby ripped his jacket by mistake. They said, Send in the stunt suit! and Im like, Stunt suit?! Whats that?!I liked designing costumes up to a point, but when yelling and budgets and dealing with jerky action film producers came into play, I didnt like it so much. The last film I did starred George Clooney. Being a prankster, I did make continuity blunders on purpose because I knew I was out of there. I was ready for something new. Then I met Gela.Next page