Paul R. Charron’s office, located in the heart of New York’s bustling Fashion District, is so quiet you can literally hear the proverbial pin drop. The corner office boasts terraces facing east and south. Light bathes the office, which with its commodious red sofas, big rattan chairs, and warm wood tables has the feel of a country cottage. Charron prefers to call the look “Americana,” and the decorative iron stars and signed print of Norman Rockwell’s Gilding the Eagle that adorn the walls make the point loud and clear. A wall of mementos, from photos of his wife of 31 years and their two kids to awards he’s earned over the years, adds to the down-home atmosphere.
Yet
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Paul Charron of Liz Claiborne |
the 63-year-old Charron is hardly in a cottage industry. As chairman and CEO of Liz Claiborne Inc., he leads a $4.6 billion global fashion conglomerate with more than 45 brands and 17,000 employees worldwide.
Today, the name Liz Claiborne is no longer synonymous only with the famous fashion designer with the big, round glasses. That Liz Claiborne took her eponymous fashion business public in 1981, and eight years later left the business entirely.
Since then, the company Claiborne left has gone on to embrace popular, mainstream brands such as Ellen Tracy and Sigrid Olsen. Younger, trendier Lucky Brand Jeans and Juicy Couture are part of the Liz Claiborne portfolio. Mexx from Europe. C&C from California. Axcess in Kohl’s, Crazy Horse in JC Penney, First Issue in Sears. They belong too. There’s Elisabeth for plus-size women, Enyce for urban men, and Monet for jewelry lovers. And yes, the Liz Claiborne label remains, and is in fact the single biggest contributor to company sales and profits, accounting for 24 percent of total revenues in 2005.
Charron has been one of the chief architects of this massive empire since he first arrived at Liz Claiborne in 1994 and took the helm as CEO a year later. The company has embarked on a strategy to grow the overall business through the acquisition of new brands and subtle tweaks to existing ones.
A case in point: the acquisition of the hotshot label Juicy Couture to
appeal to a younger clientele. “We looked at the map and saw what space hadn’t been covered,” Charron explains. “There was a strategic need to buy a younger brand because younger brands have longer runs.”
For all his success, however, Charron’s arrival at Liz Claiborne was initially greeted by some raised eyebrows. The executive had clocked time in the apparel industry at VF Corporation, but his reputation was built in the packaged goods sector. After earning a degree from Notre Dame and an MBA from Harvard, Charron made his mark at Procter & Gamble.
“It’s all brand management,” the easy-going executive claims. “I studied how things get done and what needed to be done. Whether it’s soup or detergent or apparel, how a woman chooses or uses a product and how that product evolves to suit the consumer are pretty much the same. Since 1949, Tide has been getting out tough stains, but now its formulation is more contemporary. Now it might be a concentrated liquid, not a powder. We adapt, nurture, and develop brands without changing their essence and their target demographic.”
As keeper of all the brands, Charron uses knowledge learned in each of Liz Claiborne’s business units to make the other brands stronger.
“We have ‘town meetings’ once a week, and all sales executives from all businesses sit together and talk about the marketplace,” he says. “They share intelligence and discuss problems. Each brand is part of the same family. There are a lot more commonalities than differences.” Charron’s biggest accomplishment just might be that he has created the near impossible: a family where everyone gets along.
— Kathleen Beckett
Steve Powers is fired up. Striding down the storied boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Coney Island — past the penny arcades and target-shooting galleries and the Tilt-A-Whirl — he stops suddenly and gazes at a large white building on Surf Avenue, the Eldorado Arcade.
“My first sign,” he says with pride and excitement, pointing to a long sign, dominated by big red letters, that indeed invites attention to the Eldorado
as a place worth checking out. “Looking at that building is why this roughshod, down-and-dirty community deserves a lackadaisical, sign-painting community activist like me!”
But the 37-year-old former New York graffiti artist is doing far more than just painting himself. He’s organized a unique collective with 20 other gallery-level artists eager to do the same kind of work, and in doing so has become a driving force in reviving Coney Island’s carnival-esque heritage.
“What Steve is doing is helping the small operators, people who can’t afford signage,” says longtime Coney Island sideshow operator Dick Zigun. “We have an old expression for those who have a mystic pull to this place: They have sand in their shoes. Steve does; he gets it.”
Calling itself the Dreamland Artist Club, after a onetime Coney Island amusement park, the collective is helping to preserve Coney Island’s funky, working-class past with its colorful, retro-style handiwork. Dreamland operates somewhere “between community outreach and a social club,” Powers says. Its work is supported by a grant from Creative Time, a nonprofit arts group.
The Dreamland collective’s colorful signage adorns some of Coney Island’s eccentric attractions, from places like the Eldorado to numerous mom-and-pop bars and pizza joints on the surrounding blocks. The artists are even sprucing up vacant walls
with paintings of snake charmers, sword swallowers, and other colorful reminders of bygone days, giving the faded seaside resort a new splash and dash of color.
Powers, a Philadelphia native and art school dropout, hasn’t always devoted himself to such mainstream art projects. In 1999, the young artist with the “Eraserhead” hair earned the wrath of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani when he participated in an exhibition in which people threw dung at Giuliani’s likeness.
Today, Powers is a talent to be reckoned with. His new book of short urban stories, First & Fifteenth (Villard Books), shrewdly straddles the line between graphic novel and visual art.
But Powers would rather not talk about himself or his book; he prefers to focus on Coney Island. “There’s a lot to be gained for being a little more community oriented as an artist,” he says. “It’s all about Coney, not me. It’s the total ‘id’ of Brooklyn. I feel so at home there. [It’s] amazingly dark and wonderful, even on the sunniest days, with a patina to it that won’t be scrubbed clean.”
— Jim Reisler
If you’re headed to Coney Island: On the subway, take the D, Q, or F train to Coney Island/Stillwell Avenue (last stop). If you’re driving, take the Belt Parkway to Exit 6, then head south on Cropsey Avenue to West 17th Street. Turn left onto Surf Avenue, and the amusement park will be on your right, after Stillwell Avenue.
Senator Mike DeWine is a patient man
He met his wife in the first grade. But he waited six years to ask her out. A courtship like that takes patience. And deliberate pursuit.
A second-term Republican from Ohio, DeWine employs that kind of patience in his approach to policy making. He’s worked closely with both Republicans and Democrats, and he’s done so from both the majority side and the minority side of the Senate. “You have to work with people on a bipartisan basis,” he says. “Every bill I’ve
worked on, I’ve worked with someone from the other party. In the Senate, you need a bipartisan coalition, or you won’t pass any legislation.”
DeWine’s wife, Fran, thought the man she married 38 years ago was destined to become a schoolteacher. And he did seem to be headed on that path. The senator received his B.A. in education from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1969, but that came before the law degree from Ohio Northern University in 1972, before the job as an assistant prosecuting attorney, and before his first successful political campaign, for county prosecutor, in 1976.
Since joining the Senate in 1995, DeWine has become a leading child advocate. The father of eight children — ranging in age from 13 to 38 — and a grandfather of nine, he was a lead sponsor (with Democratic senator Christopher Dodd) of the Better Pharmaceuticals for Children Act, which supports improved pediatric drug testing and labeling. DeWine has also championed child abuse laws, a national
poison control hotline, support for children’s hospitals, school bus safety, and
the strengthening of abuse and neglect courts, to name a few notable successes.
And he’s not done yet. “Children don’t have persistent advocates in Washington. They get left out,” DeWine says. He’s behind legislation that would allow tuition
reimbursement for social workers and lawyers who work on behalf of kids. “People are idealistic when they go to college. They want to help, but they come out with huge debt and feel like they can’t afford to teach or go into social work or work in the public defender’s office. Instead, they make the pragmatic decision to go out and make money, which means we’re deprived of the services they could have provided.”
DeWine hopes to give those advocates the chance to stay in their fields and work for kids, right along with him. He welcomes their resolve. And their patience.
— Kathleen S. Carr
Hardly 30 minutes into my meeting with Christopher Lindholst, he asks if I would like to take a nap. Coming from the 30-year-old co-founder of New York upstart MetroNaps, that’s neither a sarcastic comment on my mental acuity nor an expression of concern over signs of puffiness around my eyes. Lindholst is simply trying to convince visitors of something that makes hard-driving bosses blanch: that it’s OK to catch a little shut-eye at work.
Not coincidentally, Lindholst, who has an MBA from Columbia University, has just the device to do it. His company designed and markets a high-tech napping chair called the MetroNap Pod. An ordinary desk chair isn’t right for a restful nap, Lindholst and his partner, Arshad Chowdhury, insist. “First of all,” says Lindholst, “it’s not socially acceptable to be seen napping at your desk. Plus, it’s ergonomically bad for you. Your body wants to lie down in order to relax.”
The MetroNap Pod, which should be placed in a darkened room for best results, is a chaise lounge with a kind of privacy cupola at the upper end. The whole thing wouldn’t have looked out of place aboard the vessel from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
After I sink into the soft leather cushioning, Lindholst dims the built-in light, tilts the contraption until my back and legs signal something approaching weightlessness, and hands me a Bose noise-canceling headset plugged into a portable CD player. “What, no iPod?” I grumble under my breath, but he’s already discreetly left the room to let me enjoy a test nap. My ear canal is being massaged by ambient music in the vein of Brian Eno or Ian Boddy, with a babbling brook added for extra soothing effect. Slowly, I drift into a state of nothingness.
Some time later, the chair vibrates automatically to wake me from my slumber, and the light inside the enclosure comes on to confirm the nap is officially over. I am directed to a so-called waking station, where a citrus spritz for the face awaits, as well as a bowl of
peppermint candy — a one-two combo that is supposed to make drowsy
nappers pleasantly alert again.
Lindholst is pleased when I sigh politely that I’m going to save up for a pod of my own. One pod, however, costs about $7,000 — hard to justify for a private individual unless you’re Bill Gates. But for a company, the expense might not break the bank, especially, Lindholst points out, because it’s an investment that should pay off handsomely. How so? “NASA has calculated that taking an afternoon nap raises productivity for the remainder of the day,” Lindholst explains. “We wouldn’t be at all surprised if, in five to 10 years, specialized napping pods are part of your everyday office trappings, like desks or copy machines.”
For those who’d rather not wait that long, Vancouver International Airport sports three MetroNap Pods for rent. The price can’t be beat: $15 (Canadian) buys a two-hour slumberfest. Visitors to New York can find relaxation on the 22nd floor of the Empire State Building, where pods can be reserved at $14 for 20 minutes.
— Rogier van Bakel
