Always In Fashion: From Clerk to CEO -- Lessons for Success in Business and in Life

19

Who’s That Weirdo?

Although we didn’t buy Monet from Crystal Brands, we did buy its Izod brand, and I was chosen to manage and integrate the brand into the company. For 25 or 30 years, the Izod brand was recognizable by the alligator logo that it shared with a French company (Lacoste) that had licensed it to Izod. The two brands were intertwined and were called Izod/Lacoste.* By the time we bought Izod, its previous owner had sold the alligator mark back to the French company to try to avoid bankruptcy, and so the alligator is now strictly a ...