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- [00:00]
John Davids
What's up guys? JD Here. And on today's show we're going into the Making it archives. This is my conversation with fashion mogul Joe Mimran. Originally aired in October 2022. Joe is the founder of Club Monaco, Joe Fresh and so many other iconic brands. An amazing conversation with such a talented entrepreneur and businessman. That's coming up in just a sec. If you're a fan of this podcast, make sure to subscribe. Leave a Rating Leave a review so I know to keep making this stuff. And of course you can my best content to your inbox go to john davids.com sign up for that newsletter now let's get to the show.
- [00:43]
Joe Mimran
You're listening to Making it with John Davids.
- [00:51]
John Davids
So a lot of people are going to know who you are and already have some sense of it. But why don't you just give us a quick minute on who who Joe Mimran is and then we'll get into your story.
- [01:01]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, my whole career has been about being merging business and creative. Like I've always loved it from when I was a kid. I tell the story of you know, being in fat loving fashion at the age of 12 years old, 13 years old, when I'd go to the junior high in a yellow mohair sweater and brown corduroy pants, loved music. I actually had my mother would make me. You know, there was a trend when I was 13 that's the weirdest thing, right? The trend was like these over shirts, right? Like lumberjack shirts, right? That was a big trend and kids would buy them at like a woolco or whatever back then. But no, me, I had to get my mother to make it in a beautiful French wool and slightly smaller check, right? Yeah. And luckily I was a tough kid or else I would have gotten picked on quite a bit. But yeah, I loved fashion, loved the arts and even when I went to university I would take sociology, psychology and then I took Japanese cinema and fine art, right? And then realized I better get another degree and went out and got my my Bachelor of Commerce very quickly and got, I got a ca. I became a CPA ca and the minute I got my CPA I ended up leaving and going into entrepreneurial world and I found that fashion was amazing because it blended both business and art at the same time. I had an art gallery when I was 18 years old. I opened a gallery on Scholard called Starving Artist and I represented a bunch of up and coming artists back then. But I had to have three jobs to maintain the gallery, right? So again it was like passion. But I had to work my tail off in order to be able to afford to do that.
- [03:01]
John Davids
I think I actually. I'm sure it wasn't around then, but my first condo was on Scholard, so I know I knew those art galleries very well.
- [03:07]
Joe Mimran
Yeah. Yeah.
- [03:09]
John Davids
So one thing I want to get into here, because this is actually, you're a bit of a savant in the sense that. And I've. I've had financial conversations with you where I think to myself, wow, you're. You're. You're more. Your financial acumen is greater than most people would think of a fashion creative guy. And I didn't know until now that you actually have a cpa. So this kind of mix of skills, I mean, you're a branding person, obviously a fashion design person, and you also have this great financial mind. I'd imagine that's been a pretty big competitive advantage for you. Did that skill of the finance come in handy throughout your career?
- [03:42]
Joe Mimran
Oh, my God. I think that's the biggest gap most creative people have in the fashion world is they think they can go out and run a business or they want to be an entrepreneur, but they don't realize that they're missing this other side of their brain. And my advice would always be to young designers who wanted to try and take it on, was like, find a partner. If you can't do that stuff yourself, go out finding, get a partner, give 50% of yourself away in order to get that left, right side balanced. Because the apparel business, the fashion business, probably one of the most difficult businesses. It's like when you say you're going into the restaurant business, are you crazy? The apparel business is worse. I'd say that everybody with a sewing machine could compete. Now, that resonated more 40 years ago when people had sewing machines. But today, it's like everybody with a phone now can compete from a marketing standpoint. Right? Everybody is their own celebrity. And I think it's very much akin to that world. And the apparel world is as competitive as this new marketing world is. And so it has kept me in such good stead. I never would have been able to grow my business in the early 80s if I hadn't had that degree. Because I go out and I look for money, and I would spend 60% of my time, 60 to 70% of my time, just on financing the business. Because imagine Canada, 1980, 81. I'm borrowing money in 82 at 18% plus, that was prime plus 10%. So I was borrowing money at 28% from a factoring company that they would never give me the money if I wasn't able to give them the cash flows. You know, work on projections. You know, really convince them that we had the discipline to run a business as well as drive it creatively.
- [05:50]
John Davids
So this was the. So in the late 70s, you had a garment factory. And then in the 80s, that's when you started Club Monaco, which I'd imagine was your first big win.
- [06:00]
Joe Mimran
No, Alfred Sung was our first big win. So 1970. 1977, I left my career at the accounting firm of Coopers and Lybrand, and my brother and my mother had started a factory. And they were in business for seven months when I joined them. And it was a little factory with six sewing machines, and it was on Richmond street, and there was no air conditioning in the summer, and there was very little heat in the winter. And that's where it all started. And I realized right away that. And we were in the dress business. And I learned the dress business immediately, very quickly. And also learned that the retailers had all the power, the brands, and the retailers had all the power. So what are we going to do? So we had to create a brand. So the first thing we did was we went down to New York to get a brand like all other Canadians. Canadians. It was a branch office. There were no brands being created in Canada. You cannot mention a brand that was created in Canada in the late 70s. It's still around today. I defy you in the fashion world, right? And so we went down, and we're going to do what every other Canadian manufacturer did, which is, you know, license a brand. So we did dresses. We went down, we met with Oscar de la Renta and the president, and we convinced them that we were young and aggressive, and we had this wonderful factory and everything. And they said, okay, sure, let's put something together. And on the way home, we're talking and scheming, and we thought, well, why are we going to pay a royalty? Why don't we create our own brand? And this is where naivety is a big advantage. And when I would see naivety in, particularly when I was doing Dragon's Den, and somebody would come up with this kind of. And they'd be so naive. And the last thing you want to do is quelch that. Because out of that naivete, you do things that it breaks through. And so you can never be cynical of that. Because we said, no, no, no, no. We're going to build our own brand. I hired a designer, a woman, and we're going to Move from dresses to sportswear, because that's where it's happening. And designer, after three months, she quit and said that she got a better offer. I said, you sure we're going to make you famous? And she goes, no, no, no, no. I had already put all the fabric and everything. So then I phoned up Alfred Song. I say, come on down, we're going to make you famous. And, you know, he came down and we made him the face of the brand. And within three years, he hit the COVID of McLean's magazine in Canada as the king of fashion. And we grew our factory from six sewing machines to over 150, 200 people. King and Bathurst. We had a 35,000 square foot, state of the art manufacturing facility by that point in time. And we had just licensed the brand for fragrance to Riviera Concepts. That grew it to over 60 countries and became one of the top 10 selling fragrances in the world. And that was from 1979 to 1983. So that, that was a huge run. And so we had a big org. And at the time, in 83, fashion was shifting 84. I'd just been to Japan and I fell in love with this sort of Japanese aesthetic. And I noticed that there was a big opening in the market and it was for high quality product at great pricing. And we actually, again, this is where you learn to pivot in business. We developed a line, was called Club Monaco. We did all the research in terms of names and our company name was Monaco Group. And we found that that was one that pulled very well with consumers. And so it was Club Monaco. We came out with this line. We were going to sell it wholesale because that was how we were selling at those days. And it was kind of unisex is how we kind of build it at the time, which everybody thinks unisex is new right now. It was done way back then. And we went to the department stores where we had clout like the Bay, Eaton's, Simpsons in the US and they all said, we don't get it. And we just don't understand this at all. But we had bought all these goods. All the goods were coming in anyway, so we had to open stores in order to unload all the product. That's how.
- [10:35]
John Davids
Oh my goodness. Is that why you had stores?
- [10:38]
Joe Mimran
That's why we had stores. We were not read, we were not retailers. We became retailers.
- [10:43]
John Davids
And for one second, Joe, this is a great story. I just want to understand one thing because you kind of glossed over the fact that in four years you went from, like, you and your family to 200 people. Can you just unpack that a little bit? How did you get your product? I mean, how did Alfred selling get into all the stores, become a fashion phenomenon? How did you scale? How did you pay for it? Unpack that a little bit.
- [11:04]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that's a great part of the history because, you know, when we first started, we took a 6,000 square foot space. We moved from Richmond, which was like 2,000ft. We took 6,000ft at the corner of King and Bathurst. And my dad said to me at the time, he goes, oh, my God, how are you going to fill this place up? And he would. When we had a customer in our showroom, he would. He would have to go downstairs and make phone calls into the office, so we would sound busy. And my brother was on the sales side. I was on the production design side and accounting side and financing side. And we built the wholesale line. We had a dress line at the same time. We had Deborah Kuchme that we brought into the fold. But it was Alfred Sung that was really the mainstay of the business. And it was really hard because, you know, you had to fund the inventory, you had to fund the receivables. And this is where, again, the financing. Why I spent so much time financing, because, you know, I had to fund all the equipment purchasing, bring the factory up to standard. And, you know, we started with 6,000 square feet and it had no air conditioning. We finally put air conditioning in. When I put air conditioning in, I got a call. I got a call from one of the guys that was on the. They were on the Dress Guild. I was part of the Dress and Sportswear Guild. And I got a call from one of the guys on there who had a factory on Spadine. And he said, joe, you're killing me. I said, what are you talking about? He said, you put air conditioning in your factory, you're killing me. Right? Because he was running all of his factories without it. So it was pretty interesting. And, yeah, I even brought in, you know, we had one of the politicians come through our offices as well. Sort of an example of things that we were doing and expanding within Toronto. And we really believed in Canadian production at the time. I had to hire a great engineer that really helped to streamline. And we were trying to do it ourselves. We were. I brought one of the first fax machines in because we had an office in New York. And, you know, orders were getting delayed because they were getting mailed, you know, in those days, you'd mail stuff. So fax machine was like a easier way of getting things in.
- [13:36]
John Davids
And so just. Just the one last piece there you said Alfred Sung obviously was a hit and it worked. Did you do anything sort of creatively on the marketing side or were you doing anything or it was just a good product?
- [13:48]
Joe Mimran
No, no, no, no, no. It was a combination of amazing product of the moment. Women were entering the workforce. We were making clothing that was right for the moment in terms of women's suits and women's tailored products. We built a factory that made amazing products. We had technical people that we hired, pattern makers, cutters, the floor ladies that we would have on the floor. We had the engineer that came in and made sure that we were efficient. And then we did marketing that was very, very aggressive. I mean, we spent a tremendous amount of money marketing in the states. We used international models. We advertised in Vogue magazine. We used every single bit of marketing that was available at that time. And it was mostly magazine marketing. And then we opened an office in New York, right in the garment district, but a beautiful office that was at the corner of 37th and 7th and it had hired the best salespeople. These were all our employees. Had another office that we put in a technical office and sample office in New York at the time. So we were investing heavily and we were investing ahead of our revenues always. Even though we were doubling our revenue year on year on year, we just kept plowing it back in.
- [15:22]
John Davids
Always reinvesting in the business.
- [15:24]
Joe Mimran
Always, always. And always taking huge risks. Like huge risks. And fast.
- [15:33]
John Davids
Yeah. So let's go to Club Monaco because this is really fascinating. So you create all this clothing. Nobody wants to put it in their store. So you figure, okay, we're going to open our stores. And was it one store that you opened or did you decide to open a chain right away?
- [15:46]
Joe Mimran
Well, we had to open a minimum of three stores right away in order to absorb some of this inventory. Like there was no way even three stores could do it. And we opened like high profile stores. We opened Queen Street. We opened Hazleton Lanes at the time, which was an amazing center. And we opened West Edmonton mall.
- [16:07]
John Davids
Any of those locations, Is it the same Queen location as today?
- [16:10]
Joe Mimran
Same, same.
- [16:11]
John Davids
Same one. Okay.
- [16:12]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, same one.
- [16:13]
John Davids
Same one, yeah.
- [16:16]
Joe Mimran
At the time that was a very big store. Most boutiques were 2,000 square feet. All boutiques were multi branded boutiques at the time. And it was way off pitch because first of all, it was the rent I could afford. I wanted a big enough store to put this merchandise in. And it was a completely unique model. We didn't use mannequins, normal mannequins. We didn't use imagery that you would see. Normal imagery at that time was, you know, girls kicking up their heels and like, very modely. We focused on the product, we focused on the environment, we focused on the way our staff looked. It was cultish. We cut everybody's hair. We did an intense amount of radio marketing at the time. We had a beautiful, our sign at that time. We did a painting over the store, which was a replication of the casino in Monaco. And then we had our crested. And so it was like we did this as a stealth campaign where nobody knew what was opening. We said a gift to Queen street from Clubmonico and we just started a teaser campaign and we spent a half a million bucks just on the teaser campaign to open that one store, on the marketing, let alone the build outs and everything else. But to, you know, what was amazing and so gratifying was when we opened up, we had lineups and we had lineups every single weekend for over a year. And we were selling our sweatshirts and our pants and we just couldn't get enough of it. And the same thing happened when we opened up Hazleton and West Edmonton mall and it just became a runaway train. And then we opened a store a month for 48 months. That was, that was the pace. That was the pace we were on.
- [18:20]
John Davids
So I remember in high school, that white Club Monaco T shirt with the crest on the chest that was like, that was a status symbol. And I'll tell you a funny, a really quick, funny story. When I was, I don't know, 16, 17, and I was applying for jobs at the movie theater and the restaurant and, you know, just trying to make some money, I applied for a job at Club Monaco. And what I remember, I didn't get it. But what I remember was it was like a two day interview, Come back, sit in a circle, talk about fashion trends. It was the most intense interview. And if you didn't know fashion and if you weren't going to be able to contribute, you were not making it in that store. And it was, you could just see, wow, this is like these are, these guys are serious about this brand versus, you know, you go down the hall to the Old Navy.
- [19:03]
Joe Mimran
Oh, yeah.
- [19:03]
John Davids
You want a job? Sure. You know.
- [19:05]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, well, that's right. It was very cultish in, you know, we had 12 people that were kind of our founding members of the business, you know, of all different disciplines from visual presentation, to buying, to design, to whatever. And I remember when addressing them right at the very beginning, when we would have. When we would have our. Our meetings and just saying that this journey is just the beginning. We are going to become an international brand. We are not a local brand. This is an international brand. And it may have sounded stupid at the time. And again, this is where dream big can get you into a lot of trouble, or it can really be a way of channeling everybody's energy into something bigger, something greater. Right. And making them enthusiastic about the brand. I mean, yeah, these were disciples. And the store was like, I would always refer to a Broadway play. Everybody had a role to play. The curtain goes up, we better be ready. And that's how we approached it. Our first store was designed by Yaboo Pushelberg. Yaboo Pushelberg has gone on to become one of Canada's great top designers. They now design hotels all over the world. W Hotels, Four Season Hotels. They did the Four Season here in Toronto, but you can't touch them anymore without putting a million dollars down first. But we just did things differently. We didn't have a model. We didn't show a model in our imagery for five years. There was not a model that showed up for five years. Everything was product focused and it was different. We just looked different than everybody else.
- [20:53]
John Davids
So I want to ask questions about this. I want to get to the exit, or I guess there might have been a couple exits in. But what I'm really curious about is on the inside. So here you are, an entrepreneur with all this massive success. People are seeing it on the inside. I'm wondering, were you living hand to mouth or did you have a lot of cash flow and you were secure at this point, or were you still kind of like at any point? This was a bit of a house of cards. What was actually happening on the inside.
- [21:19]
Joe Mimran
So we launched in 85 and we owed the Factor so much money. You can't believe it. So much money. He didn't sleep. It wasn't me not sleeping. Now it became he was not sleeping. And he was so nervous because he had to roll the dice with us because he was already in with us. And I still remember it clearly. It was Boston Factors that came up to Toronto and Jim Shonecker was the president at the time. And Jim just believed in what we were doing. But, boy, he was taking a huge risk because we were his largest exposure. If we didn't raise money. It was 1986. I had to go out and I had to raise 7.5 million bucks. And I had been working on it for six months, had a whole bunch of private equity guys that were going to put money in. And then the night before the deal was going to close, the lead investor called me up and he tried to negotiate my salary and he tried to negotiate a bunch of other stuff. And I said, you're not the partner for me. I can't do this deal. And I pulled the deal, and then I owed all these legal fees, and I went to the lawyer who was running the deal on behalf of these guys, and I said, I can't pay. You said, the only way I can pay is if you help me raise money. And we went to the public market in 80. It was now because it took a year to go through all this, and in 87 we actually went public and raised the money.
- [22:50]
John Davids
Going public, Was that the dialects thing?
- [22:53]
Joe Mimran
No, the dialects thing was another thing. I can tell you about that.
- [22:56]
John Davids
Oh, my goodness.
- [22:57]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, yeah. So. So we went public, we raised money. We were the first company to be able to show pictures in a prospectus because we said to the commission at the time that, we know you're not allowed to show pictures, but that's our business, and if we can't show pictures, that we're at a disadvantage. Anyway, we were the first prospectus to show, and I was. I had to sit in prospectus meetings for three months, putting the prospectus together with the lawyers.
- [23:24]
John Davids
They get in trouble for that because they put pictures.
- [23:28]
Joe Mimran
Anyhow, there was a whole story around that. And at the time, we took both Club Monaco and Alfred Son public at the same time.
- [23:38]
John Davids
Quick break here while I tell you about something really exciting I've been working on called the Business Essentials Kit. Here's the deal. I get asked all the time, john, how do you run your business effectively? What's the best way to build a website? How do I get a branded email? How do I save on legal fees? How do I manage my social media? So what I've done is I put a kit together for you for free. You can download it@john davis.com with all the tools and services that I use to run my business. Get it right now for free@john davids.com.
- [24:09]
Joe Mimran
And things come out of the woodwork at the last minute. We had a lawsuit that came out of New York, one of the fragrances. You know, there's always somebody that tries to disrupt a going public process, tries to green mail you or whatever. Anyway, we had to resolve that. And yeah, we successfully went public, paid off our Debts, was able to use the money to continue to grow the business, which we needed desperately. And then in 1990, three years later, we were growing so fast that again, we needed capital and our stock was trading, was underwater. We didn't want to dilute ourselves. So we, we entered into a going private transaction with Dialects. And Dialects at the time was very unique. Dialects was a company that really revered entrepreneurs and was very happy to go into 50, 50 deals with entrepreneurs where they would provide the capital, all the capital without diluting you, and you would provide the intellectual capital. And they did that with Harry Rosen, they did it with Susie Shearer, they did it with Byway, they did it with a lot of different companies. And we thought we had found a home there. And so in 1990, we did the going private transaction. Lionel Robbins was my key contact there. He was the founder, Fairweather, a fantastic guy. And we had a good run there. And then the shit hit the fan when the Gap came up. And all of a sudden our Chinos weren't as good as the Gaps chinos and they just seemed like the newer, cooler kid on the block. They opened a flagship store right beside us on Queen street and we got worried.
- [26:00]
John Davids
Just closed?
- [26:01]
Joe Mimran
Yeah. And we're still there. Yeah. Well, we got very worried and our sales started to decline and we went into focus group mode to find out what was going on and what we learned in the focus groups. The focus groups were conducted by Luke Sklar at the time. Luke was. Sklar is a great, great marketer, great insight, individual. He's no longer with us, but his firm is great firm. And what we found in our research was that actually they saw the Gap as cheaper than us, even though they weren't. So there was this perception that we were higher priced and there was this perception that they were nice to date, but we were better to marry. There was this loyalty thing that was going on. They saw us as more leading. We had to switch out the company. All of a sudden, for the first time, we decided, we're going to show models, we're going to go after fashion, we are going to change the direction of the company. And that's what we did. And sales tanked even worse. We went into free fall and there was a recession going on at the time. In 91, 92, our business went into free fall and Dialects ran into all kinds of trouble in the States and capital was drying up. And my COO at the time, Saul Naiman, came to me and said, after steady, same on week, on week sales decline after it was like, 24 months was, like disastrous. And he said, I think we should hang it up. And I said, look, I know this is tough, but we've come this far, we can't give up now. And it was strange because that month, like that month, there's like a switch went on and all of a sudden, double digit increases every single week. And because we had to wean ourselves off of the sweatshirt chino business, we started showing. We started doing photo shoots in New York with high fashion models, like the best models in the world. We used the best photographers. We went into these campaigns that were highly, highly coveted. And it just changed the trajectory of the business completely. And then, you know, we didn't look back.
- [28:33]
John Davids
So what's interesting there is that when times got really tough, you actually invested more. You didn't cut.
- [28:40]
Joe Mimran
We invested more and we took the risk of a real big pivot, right? Like a super big pivot. And it wasn't easy, right, because I had to go to these, you know, weekly sales meetings with all these other guys, right? Like with Harry there and all these other guys that were there on a weekly basis. And we also opened up Korea, we opened up Japan, we opened up. Yeah, we. Yeah, like we were doing all this stuff, right?
- [29:09]
John Davids
Okay, so to cap this story off. So it ends in an acquisition by Ralph Lauren.
- [29:14]
Joe Mimran
No. Then we have to extricate ourselves from dialects. So. And I wanted. I tried to buy the business back, and Wilford always said, nah, you're not gonna steal this business from me, and blah, blah, blah. So I said, okay, well, the only way for you to think you're getting a fair price is let's take it public. We took the company public with RBC as the lead, and we went public in 1997. And we regained our freedom from the dialect situation, and business just continued to just be so strong. And we opened a store in New York. And I remember my CFO coming to see me and saying, joe, this store we're opening in New York is 10,000 square feet. He said, if it doesn't work, we're going to be bankrupt. And I said to him, no, no, no, no, it's going to work. Don't you worry. It's going to work. Anyhow, so we opened up the store in New York and it's a huge hit. A huge hit. And it was in the Flatiron district. It was so cool. We did our first anniversary party with Tyler Brulee of Wallpaper magazine at the time. We had like, all the best stylists and the best Photographers. And it was, like, really quite magical. And we then opened up, you know, another store in soho. We opened up a store in White Oaks. We opened a store in New Jersey. We had stores San Francisco, late 90s. Yeah, late 90s. But it was really the store in, I would say the flagship store we had in Flatiron that really garnered the most attention. We had articles written about us all the time. And. And then we had launched CMX in 95, which was a tribute to our 10th anniversary, which was a sport line, activewear line, which was really cool and interesting. We had kids at the same time. We launched Climatico Cosmetics, and that was a huge hit. We were selling that to Sephora and also within our own stores.
- [31:16]
John Davids
What about Cabin? Was that also at the same time or that was separate?
- [31:19]
Joe Mimran
Yeah. So Caban, I opened up. Yeah, Caban was the home division that I started. And I got a call from Loblaws at the time. And this was in 96. 96, yeah, 96. They asked me to open up clothing store in their center at Jarvis because they had extra real estate there. And I said, nah. I said, no, I wouldn't do it in the clothing store there. I said, I'll tell you what, though. I'll do a home store. They said, home? Well, you don't have home. I said, yeah, I know I don't have it, but I think we could do something very special. So I convinced them at the time. That's how I met John Letter back then, who became the CEO of Loblaws, but convince them that home would do exceptionally well. So we opened up. It started off as everyday essential and then turned into Caban. And we had three locations that we opened up there. And that was the precursor to Caban. And we kind of tested all of these new concepts in that way. So lots going on, right? We're in Japan, we're in Korea, we're in us. We've got cosmetics. And right before we go, right before I'm doing the deal with Ralph, our cosmetics, we had this artist, makeup artist who we work with, Denise Markey. And she was asked to do the makeup for a very famous person. At the time, she was going through this issue with Bill Clinton. I don't know if you remember her. I do. And so she ended up being interviewed. Monica Lewinsky ended up being interviewed on the Today show. And it was one of the most watched interviews in America at the time. And she looked fantastic. You know, her makeup, her lips, everything. And everybody was calling in to try and find out who did the Makeup. So they called me up and they said, joe, they want to release the name, right? We're getting all. I said, well, you know, I'm not sure I'm doing this deal. I don't want to get embroiled with politics. One thing, another. And anyway, the news got out that it was Club Monaco and that it was this lip gloss. I can't even remember the name of the lip gloss at the time. And sure enough, the news got out and our phone system crashed from all the calls that were coming in from the US all at one time to find this lip gloss. Right. Which sold out immediately all throughout Sephora and all of our stores. And Sheer Lipstick. It was. It was. No, it was a lip gloss. It was a newly developed product that we had at the time that was right in the middle of us trying to finish our deal with Ralph, who's doing due diligence at the time.
- [34:08]
John Davids
Okay, so.
- [34:09]
Joe Mimran
And that Ralph.
- [34:10]
John Davids
I just don't.
- [34:12]
Joe Mimran
Well, because he called. I got a call. I got a call from Irf Title Bomb, who said, oh, you know, somebody. Somebody wants to call you from Goldman Sachs. No, not Goldman Sachs. No. He says, somebody wants to call you from Ralph Lauren. I said, well, you know, give them my phone number. I'm in St. Martin at the time. I was in St. Martin, a vacation. And I get a call from the vice chairman, Mike Newman, and he calls me up and he says, you know, Joe, nice to talk to you. You know, I love what you're doing with Club Monaco. I think it's fantastic. Oh, I said, no, that's great. That's great. He said, I'd love to get together. I said, well, next time I'm in New York. I said, you know, I'm in St. Martin. And he said, well, when are you in New York? I said, no, I'm going back to Toronto from here. He said, well, how about if I fly up to Toronto to meet you? That's when the lights went on. Like, who comes. You know, who flies up to Toronto to come see. Anyhow, he comes up and he said, look, we love what you're doing. We want to buy your business. And just have to remember the history of me pushing everything that we had into the middle all the time, right? Betting, betting, betting. All of a sudden, Ralph, who's never bought a brand outside of his own brand, never bought a brand. And he was the master brander in the apparel space. I mean, the master. There was nobody better than Ralph at dissecting the market and knowing how to. How to leverage A brand over multiple distributions. And he just did it better than anybody. And it was the complement of. It was kind of. It was gobsmacking that he wanted to buy the business. And we were public so we had to have a special committee and had to hire our investment bankers to get involved. And yeah, we did a great deal and sold the business. And we did.
- [36:01]
John Davids
Was the acquisition.
- [36:02]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, it was a public number. It was 138 million bucks at the time, which back then was a lot of money. But you know what was amazing really was the fact that we did get slammed a little bit in the press that were Canadian sort of iconic brands selling out to the US but mostly it was well received, had got lots of great articles, attention, one thing and another. But I did find out that I do not make a good employee. I make a good entrepreneur, but I do not make a good employee. That didn't last very long.
- [36:39]
John Davids
I'm guessing it was like a two year buyout. And you said see you later.
- [36:43]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [36:45]
John Davids
Okay. So there are so many. I mean obviously the Joe Fresh story, I'm sure is a whole other. That was another mega brand.
- [36:52]
Joe Mimran
Another mega brand. Another mega story. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:55]
John Davids
And there were so many others. So I want to understand when you have this exit in 1999, so what did that feel like? Was it just like a huge weight off your shoulders and then you said, okay, I'm ready for the next chapter.
- [37:06]
Joe Mimran
Well, it was amazing because we were still in growth mode. I was going every week, I'd be going to these meetings with Ralph on a monthly basis and showing them we're going to open up a flagship in San Francisco and we want to do this in here and we want to do that there. There was still a lot of work involved, but it started to get a bit restrictive and I wasn't used to that and we couldn't move quite as freely as we had. And so I realized at that point that I had to move on.
- [37:42]
John Davids
Right. And so you start MMRAN and Associates then, I assume.
- [37:47]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, 2001 is when I started MMRA and Associates and I didn't really know what to do with myself. I thought try doing nothing for a bit, which didn't work out well and tried a bunch of different things. Consulted a little bit, you know, help some another apparel brand, help them build their brand and sell their company, which I did. And then I ran into John Letter who said to me, hey Joe, what are you doing now? I said, well, not really anything. He goes, well, would you like to design some Home products for President's Choice. He said, can you do like 20 products? I said, 20, John, that's like really not a problem, right? Yeah, I can do that. I said, I can do that. He said, okay, great. He goes, I want you to come to the office, you'll meet with Galen, blah, blah, blah. You know, we did Galen Weston. Yeah, Galen Weston. And Galen invited myself and Kim to the house, talk more about it. He loved Caban. He and Hillary, loved Kaban, loved what we did there. And so I was entrusted with this PC brand, which is, you know, multibillion dollar brand, to bring this new category to life. And it was a nice challenge. At the same time I was doing a few other things. 2004, I was invested in Canisat, which was the first public cannabis company at the time. And there was a bunch of other things that I was doing. But essentially that was kind of what turned into this big relationship where I really took on this home project with PC, which then became all of home. And I took on all of their home products and all of their brands. And then they gave me, then they asked me, can you create an apparel brand? And I said, well, yeah, I think I can do that. And they really wanted it to compete with Walmart opening price point brand. And they would bring me samples. And I said, no, no, no, if I do it, I've got to have control over this thing and this is how I want to do it. And then creating the name, the namesake. And the reason I was okay with using my name normally, I was always sort of behind the curtain as opposed to in front of the curtain, and was because it needed so much speed and credibility. And the problem with a lot of companies that try and do private brand is that it always gets mucked up. Too many hands touch it and then, you know, there's no credibility. And I said to them, when we advertise, I do not want it advertised as a house brand. This is going to be, we're going to, we're going to do all the marketing as if, you know, oh, and you can find it at Loblaws. And so set up a studio downtown, 14,000 square foot studio to launch it downtown, right in the Liberty, Liberty Village area. And did a huge launch to the press. And they were blown away by what we did and the opening price points that we hit. And at the time there were other brands in the uk There was like Tesco had a private label brand of apparel and so did their other food chain, Sainsbury. And so clothing in a food Store in Canada was certainly unusual. And I had friends who came to me and said, like, joe, what are you doing? Like, you just sold to Ralph. You're selling in a food store. Like, are you kidding? I said, no, no, no. I think this could be really big. I think this could be really.
- [41:26]
John Davids
You guys. I remember you had at one point a launch. It was the New York launch. I remember. And I remember reading about in the headlines that a store was just overwhelmed, and you couldn't open them fast. You couldn't keep product on the shelves. It was really like a home run out of the gate.
- [41:41]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, yeah. I think it was really quite amazing. But again, we prepped it, right? Like, we did all the right pr. The product was amazing for the price. I remember when some of the press. Sandra Platana comes to mind when she looked at the product and she said, joe, these prices are goofy. Like, how are you doing this? Right? And, you know, today, fast fashion gets quite a knock, right? Because they always associate it with sweatshops. And in some cases, that perhaps is. That's right. I mean, you can think about. You can think about it in those terms. But coming from a manufacturing background, I can tell you that the factories that we operated in were at least as good, if not better, than any of the factories on Spadina Avenue. I promise you that. Right? They're air conditioned, you guys. That's right. They've got, like, you know, they've got a room, like a first aid room. They've got a health room. You know, they've got, like, proper demarcation between all the, you know, different lines and everything. But, you know, we were able to bring a quality level to a price point that had not been seen here in Canada. And that's really. And a style level, right? There was a style sensibility which is really. If I have one stock in trade, it would be that we can do these things. We can bring good taste, good style. We can make it more accessible, more democratic, and be passionate about it. We're not here to just put out sausages to make money. We actually love what we do. We love the process of developing products. We love style and the idea of style, the idea of fashion, but not for it to be so frivolous, but, you know, enduring in. In a way. And I've made everything from expensive clothing because we cut our teeth on. You know, I used to buy fabrics in Italy from the most expensive mills in the world, from Rati and places like that. So I've done every. Every category, and I've done Every price point, I can tell you there's as much integrity sometimes in trying to achieve something fantastic at an amazing price. There's got to be a passion in it though, and hopefully that translates to when the consumer sees it. I often say inanimate objects that get designed with a purity can sometimes resonate with consumers. And I do this today, whether it's gray matter for staples that we have in Canada and the U.S. and now we do a myriad of products. You know, we pain over the feel of the pen, the feel of the paper, the COVID the elastic, the chair, the ergonomics of the chair that, you know, all of it, the materials that we use, the newness of the materials, like all that stuff is all. It's like food. You put passion into it and people can, you can see it, can taste it, you can see it.
- [44:46]
John Davids
If there was a young Joe Mimran out there right now, what I want to understand is Obviously in the 70s and 80s, it was a whole different world. You didn't have phones, you didn't have overseas easy overseas manufacturing. How would you build a business like this if you were starting today without the resources that you have?
- [45:05]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm starting businesses all the time and I help entrepreneurs start businesses. Every bit is difficult today in one way, but it's also much easier today because in the old days the border was a huge barrier. Today you have no barriers. You have no barriers to borders. So you are borderless. What an amazing opportunity. And to me, marketing is far more sophisticated today than it's ever been. I'm going to tell you quite honestly, even though I was inducted into the American Marketing hall of Fame, I find marketing today more complicated than almost any any other discipline in business because it has evolved so much and it evolves so much. Right? Like just the recent changes in Facebook and what TikTok is doing and, and how that's catapulting brands and this emergence of this new royalty of celebrities that are become royalty and they are spokespeople that can create billion dollar businesses literally overnight. I mean, it is phenomenal what is going on. And so I think if I were to start, I think having that marketing hat is as important as having the finance hat. Even more important, I think financing today is way easier than it ever was. Capital is much more fluid than it ever was and people are always willing to put money into great ideas, whereas that was not true 30 years ago. So I think if you've got that marketing piece nailed, and I know that influicity is Got that piece. I think that's a really important piece to have. And to have that knowledge is incredible.
- [46:55]
John Davids
Well, I can tell you, as someone who cuts their teeth in marketing myself, it changes so fast. And I think one of the problems that we see with marketers today working with big brands, but also emerging brands, is they get distracted and they think that because something exists, they have to be there. And the reality is if you have a channel, if you can find two or three marketing channels that work, then just do that. You know, you don't need to be on. On 17 social media platforms when all your traffic is coming from two.
- [47:25]
Joe Mimran
No, it's true. It's true. And I just want to, you know one little story. You know, when I was about six years ago, six or seven years ago, we were in Barbados for a quick trip and Galen Sr. And Hillary joined us and we had the opportunity to have dinner with Oscar de la Renta at his home. And when he was there, it was him and his wife and Julio Iglesias and his wife. And it was a funny kind of 360, you know, from not taking the brand in 1978 to have, you know, sort of culminating at that moment was kind of a funny kind of irony to all of it.
- [48:08]
John Davids
But wow, two. Two fashion designers and a Latin heartthrob are at dinner.
- [48:13]
Joe Mimran
Yeah. And he sang. And he sang Unplugged for over an hour. He sang Unplugged for over an hour at the dinner table. Right. There was just. It was just the six of us. Eight of us. Sorry. It was really remarkable. Right. There was a guitar player that was there on acoustic guitar and. And he was singing. It was. And Oscar joined in. And Oscar had just gotten out of the hospital, so. And they're best friends. They live beside each other and best friends. So he was just so excited. And he did turn to me and he said, you know, I never do this without getting paid. And that was kind of a funny story.
- [48:48]
John Davids
That's awesome. Where can people see your products today? You're all over still.
- [48:53]
Joe Mimran
Yeah. Well, we bought a company, Tilly and Durables, which is an amazing, amazing company, amazing history. We're refashioning it, reinventing it, doing lots of wonderful things, lots of great products. We're selling that Canada, us, UK just opened up Australia and soon to open up parts of South America. So we're pretty excited about that. And we're going to be opening a store on Ossington in the next few weeks. Of course, Gray Matter, which you can find at your local staple stores. And also staples in the US So we're very excited about that brand, Rise Little Earthling, which is a baby toddler brand which you can find at Toys R Us and online. And yeah, we are now doing work with Hudson's Bay. We're doing their Hudson north line and we're doing their Stripes reinvention which will be coming out shortly. So lots of different projects on the go. Feed that Brain, which is another brand that we're working on. And I do sit on the board of Simply Protein, which is a plant based protein bar company, lxr, which is the vintage handbag business online and really growing and performing well. And of course, I sit on the board of Riv Capital, formerly Canopy Rivers.
- [50:15]
John Davids
Amazing. But these days you've got air conditioning.
- [50:19]
Joe Mimran
That's a big step up. It's a blessing. It's a blessing.
- [50:23]
John Davids
Joe, this was amazing. Thank you so much for joining today.
- [50:26]
Joe Mimran
Yeah, thanks very much, Jonathan.
- [50:28]
John Davids
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to leave a rating or a review on Apple and Spotify. Wherever you listen to podcasts helps other people find the show and it lets us know that we're doing something right.