Janice Min embraces more with less

"It's not about how big you can get, but the discipline of how small you can stay."

Risk is expensive, and it does not figure into P&L. When the pressure is to show YoY growth on the quarterly basis, as is the case of the publicly traded companies, or when expectation is to deliver wild returns in case of PE-backed ones, no one wants to make anything remotely surprising or different. Prada is able to put forward fearless creativit... See more

the merger of these two companies speaks to the predicament of American fashion, which is not focused on managing brands so much as it is about managing businesses

When I was in grad school, the unstated assumption in most of what we were taught was that the sole point of a business (or any institution, really) was to grow. To grow, grow, grow, to as large a scale as possible. To build an empire, take over the world. My classmates — tycoons in waiting — lapped it up. “Lifestyle businesses”? Nah! Those were fo... See more

Hong, 48, had no experience in luxury. She was, however, a Proenza Schouler customer, and had specific ideas about how to crystallise what the brand stood for.

“Inconsistency made it difficult to build a business.”

“My observation was that there was zig-zagging; an inconsistency,” she said. “Even as an outsider to this industry, I knew that inconsist... See more