The Fashion Businessgreatest inspiration. Resourcefulness is the key to value and excellence. In
making quality a priority in our lives and products. By respecting one another
we can reach all cultures and communities. By being bold in our vision we
continually expand our boundaries.’^29
Hilfiger understood the need for ‘glamour’ in his new retail stores.
Couturiers have always understood the necessity for impressively expensive
retail establishments, hence the vast amounts spent on the interiors of elegant
salons in the Rue St Honoré, for example. Hilfiger’s new 1998 London
‘International Speciality Store’ in Sloane Street, London, was situated next
to those of Lacroix, Chanel and Harvey Nichols.
Above all, in terms of marketing techniques, Hilfiger understood the
commercial power of a successful brand logo. Many of his garments became
little more than advertising billboards, swathed and striped with his brand
colours and patterns with the name HILFIGER or TOMMY featuring very
largely. Thus Hilfiger sells his middle-market leisurewear and perfumes as if
they were the golden goodies of a top Paris couture house. As long as his
customers can be persuaded that his products are touched with the same
elite ‘designer’ quality as those of the couture houses, he will have made a
major and fascinating cultural and economic breakthrough. He will have
broken into the sacred portals of the elite fashion world without carrying
the financial burden of elite manufacture. He will have turned his TOMMY
logo into a gold mine. Without the brand logo Hilfiger products could in
many ways just as well be those of a sports/leisurewear company such as
Millets. With it, they are seen on the backs of stars such as the footballer,
David Beckham, who, wearing a white Hilfiger waterproof jacket, was
featured all over the press pushing his baby in a pram in March 2000.
Ever intent on upmarketing his design image, Hilfiger’s Internet publicity
in 1998 declared that ‘Tommy Hilfiger is THE American designer – he, along
with Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Perry Ellis are considered the four top
American designers.’ Unlike couture salons which move downmarket in their
launch of mass-franchised products, Hilfiger has tried to move up-market to
find credibility and therein may lie his Achilles heel. He opened an exclusive
store in the late 1990s at 466, North Rodeo Drive in Beverley Hills selling
cashmere goods at very high prices. Designed by Allen Greenberg with a
vast white neoclassical portico at the cost of $25, 000,000, this glass fibre
reinforced concrete building won the PCI Precast/Prestressed Concrete Award
for the best US commercial building of 1999.^30 In 1999 he launched his Red
Label line. With his new womenswear designer, Daryl Kerrigan as creative
- Tommy Hilfiger Corporation, Annual Report, New York, 1997.
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