Karl Kani

Karl Kani has always had a flair for fashion. As a young man growing up in Brooklyn, Kani, along with his friends, never wore what everyone else wore. “When we were growing up, all of my friends [and I], used to get a lot of our clothes tailor-made,” he explains.

Not content to just be the best dressed cat at a party, Kani, born Carl Williams, took it a step forward. “[I] realized that this [could] become a business because a lot of people were paying me compliments on the clothes that I was wearing. I decided that I wanted to come out with my own line instead of wearing other people’s stuff,” he recalls.

Today, that decision has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar urban fashion industry. Although Kani never consciously set out to pioneer a whole new facet of one of the world’s oldest industries, he did take steps to control his own destiny. “I did some research and I realized that a lot of people were doing manufacturing in L.A. so that’s what made me move to California.”

In 1989, Kani set up a store in Los Angeles. A year later, he hooked up with the black-owned clothing company Cross Colours and launched his creations nationally. Throughout the early 1990s, Karl Kani set the tone for much of urban fashion, especially in the music industry. Rocking Kani clothing became both a symbol of success and a fashion statement. When Cross Colours faded in 1995, Kani didn’t falter. He continued to make moves but one move really helped to define his company.

“We’ve had several dynamic situations in my company [but] I think one company that stands out in my mind is Skechers,” he says. “They had a licensing arrangement with me and they wanted to go public and I didn’t want to do it. It got to be a very big court battle situation and I had to really stand my ground. As a black man who started something, I didn’t want to sell my soul per se to the stock market at the time because I wasn’t really controlling the entity. When I decided to make a move like that, it really made me grow up as a man, to stand out there on my own and make a lot of moves. It changed a lot of things in my business and it made me understand that business is warfare and you’ve got to be prepared for battle at any moment to really stand for what you want.”

With the marketplace more saturated than ever, Kani’s main battle is keeping his designs fresh. “When you originate something,” he says, “it’s always difficult to stay cutting edge because everyone has basically learned something from what you’ve done and tried to capitalize on it.” To that end, Kani is blazing trails again. His latest line is geared towards high-end stores such as Barney’s.

“We’re going back to custom-tailored clothing. The new line, Life, we have coming out in the fall is very high-end,” he says. “I feel right now the urban market is saturated with so much garbage. It’s just reaching rock bottom to me, as far as where it is, where it was and where it’s going right now. It’s like the stuff is getting cheaper and cheaper and everything is price conscious and we are not with that anymore.”

For Kani, who wants to pass his company down to his children, focus is essential. “I think that in this business you’ve got to learn how to zone a lot of things out and really stay focused on what you are trying to do and your destination because there are so many people out there trying to do the same thing,” he says. “If you get caught up into worrying about what everyone else is doing, it’s going to distract you in what you’re trying to do.”

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