At a European auto show, I had someone from a German car company come up to me and say the Karma should cost $125,000, not $87,900, but our development process lets us lower the costs. I guarantee it's profitable.
To do high fashion, you have to go into a little bit of a higher price point.
Affordable luxury - these are two words that don't go together.
We can have a leather jacket for $1,500, and if it's a good value, young people will understand that. But we also want to have the feeling that this won't be here in a month.
Designer pricing should hurt, but it shouldn't kill you. You wince when you hand over your AmEx, but once you get it home, you never regret it. You divide it by how many days you're using it, and suddenly it becomes affordable.
You don't see a lot of super-high-end hotels being built in Houston because it's so expensive to build, unless you're in New York and can charge $1,000 a night.
Michael Bastian is a designer line and priced a certain way because of where it's made and the materials we use, and Gant is the more accessible version of that: more sports-inspired, more branding. It has the same DNA; it's just a different time and place.
I often get the question from people, "well how can you sell luxury at that price?" What I'm explaining to everyone is I'm still paying the same factory cost as I paid when they were $800. I pay the same as my competitors who are in the luxury space pay, I just don't mark them up as much because I haven't put them in a wholesale channel. I don't have to put that extra margin on them.
