NEW YORK — American Apparel, a Los Angeles-based manufacturer and retailer of T-shirts and other activewear, has signed a lease for a 2,000-square-foot store in SoHo at 121 Spring Street, on the corner of Greene Street.
“There are not many corners in SoHo that have such great exposure,” Dov Charney, the company’s founder and chief executive officer, said on Friday. “Much larger companies would have taken that space if there wasn’t this economic down cycle.”
American Apparel, whose prototype is a simple white box, plans to open the SoHo unit within the next two months. Garrett Bowden, a broker with Affirmative Equities who’s involved in the SoHo transaction, said he’s looking at the Upper West Side and other areas in Manhattan for additional American Apparel sites.
Related Galleries
The company’s other stores here are on Houston Street, lower Sixth Avenue and Broadway in NoLIta. In addition, the company operates one store in Los Angeles and three in Canada. “We’re opening a London store, a Frankfurt store in two weeks and a Berlin store in a few months,” said Charney. “Miami is on our list, and we love Japan. We’re going to conquer markets as we can.”
Charney, who speaks in retail metaphors, said he’s not interested in expanding the brand’s focus. “We’re not looking at bottoms,” he said. “We want to be Levi’s for tops”
“Our goal is to become the biggest apparel operation in human history,” the hyperbole-prone Charney has frequently said. “We will challenge the Gap in my time.” He declined to say how many stores American Apparel could eventually open.
“We’re not Chuck E. Cheese, we’re not Wal-Mart,” American Apparel states emphatically on its Web site. Not indeed. For one thing, American Apparel’s annual volume was $80 million in 2003, while Chuck E. Cheese logged $645.5 million in sales last year and Wal-Mart overtook both by an enormous margin with $256.3 billion in volume.
American Apparel claims it doesn’t use subcontractors or sweatshops, and that all of its products are manufactured in its own downtown Los Angeles factory. Charney claims the company’s business practices are not only ethical, they’re efficient.
“There’s money to be made from vertical integration,” he said. “We have the most productive workers in the world.”
American Apparel sewers can earn $14 to $15 an hour or more after working for the company for six months. Benefits and perks for its 1,300 employees include access to health insurance for children of American Apparel employees, whether documented residents or not. The company also offers dental insurance for less than $1 per week per employee and free regular on-site massages.
Asked whether consumers consider ethical working conditions when buying apparel, Charney said: “It’s an afterthought and it should stay that way. Consumers should buy products they love. If it’s made in a fair-minded work environment, that’s good. If not, consumers should take note. The responsibility lies with the industrialists within the fashion business.”
— Sharon Edelson