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A Tale of Two Extremes: The Gap that American Apparel Forgot to Close

Last week, the press announced that American Apparel is going through some hard times. Very hard.

There’s been a lot of analysis of the company’s potential downfall—from lawyers, activists, analysts, pundits, and other garment entrepreneurs.

I’m not going to try to explain, or analyze, or speculate on the company’s financial challenges, however. I’m a marketer more than I am a businessman, and, perhaps at heart, an aspiring ethicist (I am Jewish, after all).

So instead of diving in to the current debate on its corporate practices, I’m going to share my thoughts on the company’s complicated branding history—which is something I’ve been thinking about since I first read founder and CEO Dov Charney’s interview with Fast Company magazine about selling self-interest over sustainability. It’s a topic I believe that all of us as marketers should consider for ourselves.

Love at First Sight

You see, when I first discovered American Apparel back in, oh, let’s say 2005, I was in love: here was a company committed to values I cared about, values like environmental responsibility, making cause-driven business cool and hip, paying good wages to workers.

I was a bit confused about its tagline, though: “Vertically integrated manufacturing in the heart of downtown LA.”

“Huh,” I thought to myself. “I have no idea what that means.” As a marketer, I saw it as a slightly undersold value proposition, an earnest attempt to make an idea the company obviously cared about sexy, but without factoring in the “curse of knowledge” maxim that the Brothers Heath have taught us to avoid: the things that make sense to us as experts don’t make sense to other people.

I guess Dov Charney, American Apparel’s founder, must have agreed, because he went entirely and unambiguously with the “sexy” half of the equation. Pretty soon, images of downtown LA and sustainable factory practices were replaced with barely legal teens posing in pornographic photos.

In fact, as it turns out, Dov had indeed grown frustrated with the lack of consumer appeal for his “sustainability-first” angle. To add more biofuel to the fire, another eco-garment company, SweatX, had gone out of business shortly before American Apparel began emerging as a popular brand. In the aforementioned Fast Company article, published in 2008—three years after I discovered American Apparel—the author described Dov’s changing stance, which was in part a direct response to SweatX’s unfortunate fate, as follows:

Building a brand solely around a company’s ethical practices was not a good strategy for reaching masses of consumers… you must appeal to people’s self-interest, not to their mercy.

I couldn’t agree more. While it’s always easier to critique from the bench than the boardroom, I can’t say I was completely surprised that his previous tagline didn’t perform the way he had hoped.

Even “sweatshop-free,” which is a slightly more accessible idea, doesn’t tell you anything about the value proposition of the product itself. It doesn’t tell you how you’re going to feel when you make the leap from prospect to customer, from considering to wearing. That’s the stuff magic is made of.

A Branding Break-Up

Dov, without a doubt, needed to reposition his brand. And that he did. But perhaps not in the way I would have expected. He began publishing ads and plastering pictures all over his shops that featured young girls, sometimes with no American Apparel garments on at all, and often those with whom he worked (and, sometimes, slept with), posing in ways that a parent would likely struggle to label as “dignified.”

These are, to be sure, NC-17 images. They’re not R-rated. They’re reminiscent of the attitude expressed in Kids, a disturbing mid-90s movie portraying the unrestricted hedonism of a certain teenage NYC subculture, one that involved abuse in all of its many forms: sexual, emotional, and drug, to name but three.

Sales, not surprisingly, went up. And why wouldn’t they? Give any marketer a product and a beautiful women and a camera and good copywriter and they’ll make you a rich man.

But if we continue with our marketing is culture theme, then there might be a slightly more profound question to ask:

Is it necessary, or favorable, or even ideal, to go that far down the self-interest totem pole? If we agree that marketing creates culture, and doesn’t just reflect it, then what kind of culture are we creating with our ads? Is it the kind of culture we want, or or simply what we “have” to do to increase sales?

Redemption Song

Personally, I feel that developing creative that inspires, that provokes, that adds meaning and that grows sales–that’s the most challenging task for any brand and its marketers. Selling pornographic images seems to be the easier route to me.

In the end, then, I can’t help but think that Dov has yet to “bridge the branding gap.” He hasn’t delved into that difficult place where marketers go, that murky territory where story, authenticity, self-interest, sales, and a million other variables come into play. That’s the place, I’d argue, where we find opportunities for personal and organizational growth, where we wrestle with the issues that really matter.

He can, though. American Apparel can. Look at Levi’s, Nike, and the newly beloved OldSpice. American Apparel’s brand story could become radically inspiring, or empowering, or just plain funny. Maybe its centerpiece isn’t paying livable wages, or sustainability, or anything eco. Maybe it pulls on a different heartstring, like creativity, or resilience, or transformation, or hilarity, and then reinforces all of it with a powerfully exemplary company culture.

The point is, there are so many ways to sing a different song here. And that’s the wrestling, I believe, that needs to take place at the heart of American Apparel’s soul, if I could be so bold as to lay such a claim. It’s not the “eco, eco, eco” or the–well, you know the other extreme.

But I’m curious to hear what you think. Do you agree that we as marketers can sometimes go too far? What responsibility, if any, do marketers have in the overall betterment of our world?