A feel-good American success story recounted with candor, heart and attitude.
With the assistance of Moore, the founders of Juicy Couture chronicle their real-life fairy tale in a “part memoir, part how-to-manual and part fashion industry field guide.”
Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor became friends in 1988 “while folding the guest towels that went on the sink in the bathroom” of the boutique where they worked. “We started gossiping and then got into deeper stuff. It was instant chemistry, like magnets, like we had been friends forever.” They quickly discovered their shared love of fashion. Their first venture, started with $200, was in the niche market of maternity wear, which they discovered was stuck in a fashion time warp and “was a very specific targeted idea, which is the best way to start something.” So they created cool maternity jeans and then moved on to T-shirts with the idea of perfecting the fit, fabric and color. The authors learned as they went along, constantly trying new ideas and products, failing on some but always building a work environment that was both enjoyable and financially viable. By the end of 1996, Juicy Couture had sales of $5 million. In 2003, Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor sold Juicy Couture to the Liz Claiborne corporation for “$56 million plus an eventual $200 million earnout” and began with a new line. The authors lace the fast-paced back story of the company with tips for the budding entrepreneur, including Learn From a Starter Business, Dos and Don’ts of Hands-On Branding, Competition Can Be Healthy, Build Your Staff Like a Family, Coping with Growth, the Problem You Want to Have (“If your infrastructure can handle it, spin out ideas for new products to meet demand”), and How to Prepare Your Business to Sell.
A feel-good American success story recounted with candor, heart and attitude.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-809-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
An easy reading book of supportive encouragement to follow one’s dreams.
More than 40 career-changers tell their stories.
Introduced by Facebook executive and founder of Leanin.org Sheryl Sandberg, Lewis’ second cousin, the book offers exuberant advice for people who want to make a leap—daring or modest—from one career path to another, just as he did. At the age of 24, working for the investment firm Bain Capital, the author felt restless and dissatisfied. “I began to realize,” he writes, “that I wanted this life mostly because I thought I should,” but he heard “a very distinct if faint voice” urging him to try something “very different.” As he considered following his passion to become a professional squash player, Lewis sought advice from others who made similar jumps: a banker-turned-cyclist, for example, and a journalist-turned-politician. From them, and the others whose stories fill the book, he came up with the idea of the Jump Curve, a process of four key phases: listening to your inner voice, making a practical plan, believing in your own good luck, and rejecting regret. “You will come out stronger,” Lewis insists, even if your initial plan fails. “I keep coming back to the idea of agency,” said a man who made a move from corporate hospitality service to restaurant ownership: “the difference between life happening to you versus you making life happen.” Among the individuals profiled are a nurse who, at the age of 50, became a doctor; a football player–turned-writer; an investment professional who became coxswain of the U.S. Paralympic Rowing Team; a PR executive who found her calling as an Episcopal bishop; and a lawyer who sued the New York fire department to admit women firefighters—and then became the first woman hired. “Harassment, discrimination, death threats,” and physical abuse dogged her 25-year career. But, she says, “this was a jump worth fighting for,” a sentiment that Lewis underscores. Changing careers is risky, but “there is a risk to not taking a jump at all.”
An easy reading book of supportive encouragement to follow one’s dreams.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12421-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to...
A French academic serves up a long, rigorous critique, dense with historical data, of American-style predatory capitalism—and offers remedies that Karl Marx might applaud.
Economist Piketty considers capital, in the monetary sense, from the vantage of what he considers the capital of the world, namely Paris; at times, his discussions of how capital works, and especially public capital, befit Locke-ian France and not Hobbesian America, a source of some controversy in the wide discussion surrounding his book. At heart, though, his argument turns on well-founded economic principles, notably r > g, meaning that the “rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy,” in Piketty’s gloss. It logically follows that when such conditions prevail, then wealth will accumulate in a few hands faster than it can be broadly distributed. By the author’s reckoning, the United States is one of the leading nations in the “high inequality” camp, though it was not always so. In the colonial era, Piketty likens the inequality quotient in New England to be about that of Scandinavia today, with few abject poor and few mega-rich. The difference is that the rich now—who are mostly the “supermanagers” of business rather than the “superstars” of sports and entertainment—have surrounded themselves with political shields that keep them safe from the specter of paying more in taxes and adding to the fund of public wealth. The author’s data is unassailable. His policy recommendations are considerably more controversial, including his call for a global tax on wealth. From start to finish, the discussion is written in plainspoken prose that, though punctuated by formulas, also draws on a wide range of cultural references.
Essential reading for citizens of the here and now. Other economists should marvel at how that plain language can be put to work explaining the most complex of ideas, foremost among them the fact that economic inequality is at an all-time high—and is only bound to grow worse.Pub Date: March 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-43000-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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