To most people, the world of fashion is synonymous with catwalks and clothing. Jerome Chazen, Bus. ’50 and the founder and former CEO of Liz Claiborne, asserts that the real secret is in the strategy in his new memoir “My Life at Liz Claiborne: How We Broke the Rules and Built the Largest Fashion Company in the World.”
“I wanted to get the message across about the business of fashion and how important business skills and a business approach to the fashion industry is,” Chazen said. “It’s not all ‘Project Runway.’”
The book takes readers back to Chazen’s glory days at Liz Claiborne, where he explains how he turned a fashion line into a multibillion dollar company.
According to Chazen, his success grew out of an emphasis on an international business strategy.
“The general feeling way back then was America’s got everything,” he said. “We have the raw materials, we have the factories, we have the people, we have the money. We don’t need anybody else.”
But traveling changed his perspective.
“When I got into retailing and started to travel, I realized how important overseas was, and Americans just can’t shut some imaginary door and say overseas doesn’t exist.”
Chazen also led Claiborne with an eye for marketing. Liz was the first brand to convince department stores to display their clothing together in one section as one brand, instead of the categorical setup found in every department store, Chazen said. This system that shoppers have become so familiar with today is a direct result of such innovations, he said.
Chazen, a graduate of Columbia Business School, attributes many of these innovations to his education.
“The background that I got in Columbia, in finance, accounting and a lot of the other things ... made it much easier for me to do the things we had to do as we were growing from zero to hundreds and hundreds of millions and finally billions of dollars,” he said. “I understood the essence of how these things worked, and that was Columbia.”
In 1991, Chazen donated $10 million to fund the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business at Columbia Business School. The Institute focuses on promoting overseas business, through programs such as the Chazen Language Program, the Chazen International Study Tours and the Chazen MBA Exchange Program. Today, he serves on the Institute’s board. Though such programs seem a natural fit for Chazen, writing a memoir presented a different kind of challenge, taking Chazen two years to write.
“The book was written by my talking into a tape recorder, and then transcribing all of the notes onto paper, reading the paper and to some degree editing what I had spoken,” he said.
For students looking to enter his field, Chazen offered some words of wisdom.
“It’s essential that anybody that would like to be part of the fashion world should have a thorough grounding in retail, because it’s retailing that gets you closest to the consumer,” Chazen said. “And understanding the consumer is really the big secret of how you make your way in the fashion industry.”
And for the rest of the Columbia students who are heading into fields as far from suits and stilettos as you can get?
“If people are really interested in doing something, they should learn their craft and make sure they understand the business.”
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