TEACHING & LEARNING
Acquiring
Knowledge, Acquiring Companies
OUTREACH
Heart
and Sole
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Compete
or Cooperate?
Silicon Valley's Resurgence: Is It for Real?
Outreach
Kenneth
Cole on Kenneth
“I’m totally inspired by popular culture. It’s just a part of who I am.”
ColeFashion designer Kenneth Cole visited the Wharton School in December to talk about his business, his beliefs, his new book, called Footnotes, and his famous affection for puns. He also took time for a chat with Get It Started.
Get It Started: Do you write the copy for your ads?
Cole: Mostly, yes. It’s a collaborative process—we’ll get together at the company and talk about what we want to say—but it’s mostly me, my ideas.
How do you come up with your ad copy?
First I sit down and figure out what I want to say. That’s often a short process but figuring out how to say it isn’t so short. If you assume that attention-deficit disorder is pervasive in our culture—and I do—that invariably takes longer than figuring out the message.
You’re Mario Cuomo’s son-in-law and Bill Clinton’s friend. Have you considered running for office?
I’d more likely consider running from office. I think I can do so much as a private person, and I can accomplish it without all the scrutiny that comes with politics.
Is it true that Cuomo calls you his pun-in-law?
I’ve been accused of having a pun sickness. My mind is often distorting what I see and hear, not just what we say but how we say it. It’s a game that I’m always playing with myself.
You told students at Wharton that you don’t put much stock in planning. Isn’t planning what CEOs do?
I make plans because I’m supposed to and because it’s a good discipline. But we as a company have no second thoughts about abandoning them. You need to have a plan to allocate resources. But you need to be open to reassessing circumstances, too. If you’d asked me five years ago if I could’ve seen myself writing my book, I would’ve told you there wasn’t a chance. But the only constant is that everything changes.
How do you stay current, especially as your life becomes less like that of your customers? You’re an older, family guy who lives in the ’burbs and the CEO of a big business. Your customers tend to be young, urban professionals.
I don’t know that I’ve changed, other than what my birth certificate speaks to. I surround myself with people who have a sense of what and where we are as a company and where we’re going. And I’m totally inspired by popular culture. It’s just a part of who I am.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .