Built Ivanka Trump.

Transcript context

…So amongst many other things, you created a fashion brand. What was that about? What was the origin of that? I always loved fashion as a form of self-expression, as a means to communicate either a truth or an illusion, depending on what kind of mood you were in. But this second body, if you- … kind of mood you were in, but this sort of second body, if you will. So I loved fashion and look, I mean my mother was a big part of the reason I did, but I never thought I would go into fashion. In fact, I was graduating from Warden, it was the day of my graduation and Winter calls me up and offered me a job at Vogue, which is a dream in so many ways, but I was so focused. I wanted to go into real estate and I wanted to build buildings, and I told her that. So I really thought that that was going to be the path I was taking and then very organically fashion, it was part of my life, but it came into my life in a more professional capacity by talking with my first of many different partners that I had in the fashion space about… He actually had showed me a building to buy. His family had some real estate holdings and I passed on the real estate deal. But we forged a friendship and we started talking about how in the space that he was in, fine jewelry, there was this lack of product and brands that were positioned for self-purchasing females. So everything was about the man buying the Christmas gift, the man buying the engagement ring. The stores felt like that they were all tailored towards the male aesthetic. The marketing felt like that. And what about the woman who had a salary and was really excited to buy herself a great pair of earrings or had just received a great bonus and was going to use it to treat herself? So we thought there was a void in the marketplace, and that was the first category. I launched Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry, and we just caught lightning in a bottle. It was really quickly after that I met my partner who had founded Nine West Shoes, really capable partner, and we launched a shoe collection which took off and did enormously well and then a clothing collection and handbags and sunglasses and fragrance. So we caught a moment and we found a positioning for the self-purchasing multidimensional woman. And we made dressing for work aspirational. At the time, we launched if you wanted to buy something for an office context, the brands that existed were the opposite of exciting. Nobody was taking pictures of what they were wearing to work and posting it online with some of these classic legacy brands. Really, it felt very much like it was designed by a team of men for what a woman would want to wear to the office. So we started creating this clothing that was feminine, that was beautiful, that was versatile, that would take a woman from the boardroom to an after-school soccer game to a date night with a boyfriend, to a walk in the park with their husband. feminine, that was beautiful, that was versatile, that would take a woman from the boardroom to an after-school soccer game to a date night with a boyfriend, to a walk in the park with their husband. All the different ways women live their lives and creating a wardrobe for that woman who works at every aspect of their life, not just sort of the siloed professional part. And it was really compelling. We started creating great brand content and we had incredible contributors like Adam Grant who was blogging for us at the time and creating aspirational content for working women. It was actually kind of a funny story, but I now had probably close to 11 different product categories and we were growing like wildfire and I started to think about what would be a compelling way to create interesting content for the people who were buying these different categories. And we came up with a website called Women Who Work, and I went to a marketing agency, one of the fancy firms in New York, and I said, “We want to create a brand campaign around this multidimensional woman who works and what do you think? Can you help us?” And they come back and they say, “You know what? We don’t like the word work. We think it should be women who do.” And I just start laughing because I’m like women who do. And the fact that they couldn’t conceive of it being sort of exciting and aspirational and interesting to sort of lean into working at all aspects of our lives was just fascinating to me, but showed that that was part of the problem. And I think that’s why ultimately, I mean when the business grew to be hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, we were distributed at all the best retailers across the country from Neiman Marcus, to Saks to Bloomingdale’s and beyond. And I think it really resonated with people in an amazing way and probably not dissimilar to how I have this incredible experience every time somebody comes up to me and tells me that they were married in a space that I had painstakingly designed, I have that experience now with my fashion company. The number of women who will come up tell me that they loved my shoes or they loved the handbags, and I’ve had women show me their engagement rings. They got engaged with us and it’s really rewarding. It’s really beautiful.…

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