view . fall 2009
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Opposite page: Joe Mimran BComm ’76
Mimran BComm ’76
, the Joe behind the Loblaw’s stores line of
Joe Fresh fashion, creator of Club Monaco and Sung’s long-time
business partner, recalls his professor Bill Arison, a production
manager at Hiram Walker at the time, repeatedly telling students:
“All you’ve got to remember is when you come into the office, you
just pat everybody on the popo and everything will be tickety boo.”
“I thought, I can’t believe I’m paying for this,” Mimran says.
But then he went into business and realized the wisdom in
Arison’s words. Mimran acknowledges following that advice
throughout his illustrious career.
The man hailed as “brilliant” by Fashion Television’s Jeanne
Beker, a “superstar fashion entrepreneur” by
Profit
magazine and “at
the forefront of the Canadian fashion industry” by Roots co-founder
Michael Budman, is not one to live in the past. Mimran is the living
embodiment of fashion-forward; he prefers to look ahead in life.
Looking back though, he says there are certain lessons that
remain from influential people who stood out during his “grueling”
11-month, fast-track Bachelor of Commerce program at UWindsor.
Accounting Professor Dave Wilson provided a “good grounding”
in the subject, says Mimran. He says he also benefited greatly
from his business strategy course. It included modeling exercises
in which students would analyze such strategies as injecting more
capital into a business to see how it would perform. “To this day,
those lessons still resonate,” he says.
Mimran helped repay his alma mater in 1998 by helping
kick-start a $3.6-million fundraising effort for UWindsor’s Great
Lakes Environmental Research Centre. The then-president of Club
Monaco helped stage a photo opportunity at the floor-to-ceiling
atrium of his company’s office in downtown Toronto with former
Ontario premiers David Peterson, Bob Rae and Bill Davis. All of
them were wearing leather bomber jackets provided by Mimran.
He says he became involved because Club Monaco’s self-
sustaining ecosystem in the atrium had been attracting so much
interest in Canada and the U.S. Mimran adds he dined with Peterson
this summer and the former Liberal premier remembered the
moment.
Among the characteristics that define Mimran are his integrity
and his unsullied sense of brand. He says that if “you control your
brand, you control your destiny. Brand is a lot like ego; if you don’t
have integrity of brand, you have nothing.”
Mimran acknowledges that some of his measures to ensure the
purity of his brand at Club Monaco were “almost draconian”. He
actually instructed new staff members exactly how to cut their hair.
However, he says it was important that people knew from
the outset exactly what the brand was. At the time he started
Club Monaco in 1984, he says Canadian fashion outlets were all
importing their stock from the U.S. He was convinced, however, that
Canadian consumers could support a homegrown quality brand.
Well before he founded Club Monaco, Mimran had a flair for
entrepreneurship. When he was 14, he and his brother Saul started
a student discount card business. Four years later, Joe was running
an art gallery in Toronto while holding down two other jobs.
With Club Monaco successfully established by 1995, he
launched Caban, a lifestyle home products and fashion concept.
He sold both brands to Ralph Lauren Polo Corp. five years later for
U.S.$52.5-million.
Mimran then started up Joseph Mimran & Associates,
providing design, product development and brand positioning
services. Among his spinoff business ventures was Pink Tartan
with Kimberly Newport-Mimran, whom he recently married. (One
Toronto Star
writer noted the couple is widely seen as the “king
and queen of Toronto’s fashion scene.”) The high-end Pink Tartan
line is carried in more than 170 stores across North America,
including Saks Fifth Avenue.
Joe Fresh was the other successful brainchild of his new
company. The line is an example of what some fashion observers
describe as the democratization of design, bringing taste and style
to the masses.
Joe Fresh was launched in 2006 and reached $400 million
in sales a year later. Loblaw has set an aggressive benchmark of
$1 billion in 2010, although Mimran points out the figure is more
symbolic than a hard-and-fast target.
What is important, he says, is how popular the brand has
become in such a relatively short time. In just three years, Joe
Fresh is the second-largest clothing label in Canada by unit sales.
Mimran points out that it takes top spot in market share in baby
wear, second in children’s wear and third in women’s clothing.
He defines Joe Fresh’s target market as women in their
“middle 30s, [with] 1.5 kids and time-starved.”
Mimran says his plans are to sustain the Joe Fresh line, which
also includes cosmetics, lingerie and hosiery, and “see whether
there’s one more big idea in me and go from there.”
That idea, too, will likely be a winner.
“Joe has super vision, super taste and great ambition. [He’s]
probably the smartest man I know,” Sung says. “As his partner for
30 years, he is like my brother, I love him dearly.”
n
v
JOE MIMRAN
– A FASHION ENTREPRENEUR WHOM ALFRED SUNG CALLS “PROBABLY
THE SMARTEST MAN I KNOW”– GOT A MOST UNLIKELY LESSON IN THE ART OF
MOTIVATING EMPLOYEES WHILE STUDYING AT UWINDSOR.
