More than 50 years ago, Morris Goldfarb took the reins of his family’s leather goods company and over the ensuing decades turned it into the G-III Apparel Group. He initially transformed it into a New York licensing powerhouse and now is honing the company into a brand builder, one that is ready to shape the next chapters of Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan.
Being chief executive officer and in charge is hard enough. Staying in charge — and over such a long stretch with so many seismic changes in the fashion industry — is something else entirely.
To pull it off, and build a $3 billion business, he has displayed stamina, tenacity, quick wittedness, nimbleness and a healthy dose of creativity.
That is why Goldfarb, who’s chairman and CEO of G-III, is the recipient of this year’s WWD Honor for Creative Leadership.
He sat down with WWD to talk leadership, the entrepreneurial drive and a wild ride on Seventh Avenue.
The Spirit of the Entrepreneur
Even when Goldfarb was just a marketing major at Long Island University and interviewing with advertising firms, still unsure the family business would be the right fit, he knew where his trajectory would eventually take him.
As he proposed to his wife — presumably after some romantic overture — he told her: “No matter what I do, I’m going to be the best at what I do. If I start out driving a cab, I’m going to own a cab company.”
Big words for a young man, but what he knew about himself, others came to realize soon enough.
Goldfarb recalled a much later instance when his “right hand” in business told him that she planned to retire and go to Hawaii to open a little tiki bar.
“I’m coming with you,” he said.
“She comes in my office an hour later and says, ‘No, you can’t come with me.’ I said, ‘Why? We do this together so well.’ Jokingly, she said, ‘Because by the time you’re done, you’re going to have 500 tiki bars.’”
Most likely, she was right.
Goldfarb has a home on St. Barths, where he has been engaged in various ventures. So, a vacation on the island for Goldfarb, a 24/7 CEO in Manhattan, is a chance for him to check in on his hotel project or one of the other businesses he has a hand in there.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s a reason beyond relaxing that provides comfort for me. It’s not a job. It’s a comfort. It occupies my brain, occupies my time, and hopefully it makes a little bit of income for myself and generations to come.
“I’ve had a million investments and those investments in most cases are investments in individuals that have strength in the area that I’m investing in,” he said. “My strength is to find those talents and the industries or sector or isolated void that I can exploit for financial gain.”
That’s a talent that he clearly puts to work at both his many side hustles and his main gig at G-III.
“I’ve had one job in my life and this is it,” he said.
The Start
Goldfarb’s father Aron was a Holocaust survivor who in 1956 founded the smaller leather goods business that would become G-III.
But father stepped aside for son very quickly and in just two years, the younger Goldfarb was running the front end of the business and would soon be CEO, the perch he would lead the business from for more than half a century.
It was a beginning in a world that is now gone or just utterly transformed.
“I had a hundred customers, maybe more that were New York based, that came up to the showroom,” Goldfarb remembered. “My warehouse was literally behind the showroom. They’d pick out their 24 jackets. They’d be delivered to their car or their truck that was waiting downstairs. A lot of the traffic that you saw was that kind of stuff — in and out traffic that was amazing.
“It had a unique vibe that was almost spiritual for the industry,” he said. “You kind of loved those streets. My shoes would get all scuffed up because I kicked a rack as I was walking the streets. My shoes were always in terrible shape.”
He had 400 or 500 people working in a factory down the block and would use nearby warehousing.
Everyman Outerwear
It has been a long journey from that on-the-ground Garment Center hustle and bustle to the refined boardroom in the skyscraper G-III almost wholly occupies at 512 Seventh Avenue.
Along the way, Goldfarb was able to put his creative business mind to work.
Like nearly everybody in 1986, he went to see a young Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” and instantly recognized the potential of the aviator jacket.
“Everybody would buy that aviator jacket,” he recalled thinking. “It was easy. I was a leather guy. It was a leather bomber jacket. We did the same thing with Michael Jackson” and his famous zipper jacket.
Goldfarb — who clearly still has a soft spot for his years focusing on outerwear, when his hands were more directly on the wheel — recalled another jacket adventure, this time with the JL Colebrook brand.
The apparel collection was being rounded out with down jackets and active jackets, but nothing was hitting.
“We kept making great product, but it didn’t retail,” Goldfarb said. “I walked into a showroom in Hong Kong. I stepped on this jacket and I pick it up and it’s this orange jacket with a chambray lining in it. And I said [to the producer], ‘How much is this jacket?’ He said, ‘$12.’ I said, ‘I understand this jacket. I don’t understand the retails that we’ve created for elevated down jackets and we keep trying and we just don’t find success.’ This I get.
“I said, ‘OK, let’s make this jacket.’ I didn’t have a designer at my side. I said, ‘Let’s roll the sleeves up a little bit. And this is the new soccer mom’s jacket.’ And [that outrigger jacket] became celebrated as probably the best jacket of that era,” he said.
Now, G-III makes 20,000 stock keeping units a month in factories all over the world and Goldfarb knows the company is a different beast today. Knowing what will sell and what won’t is a trickier question.
“Can I identify the winner? Possibly. But the odds were much more in my favor when I was a coat company,” he said. “Today, we’re different. We have 400 designers, 400 people in the design area of our business. And their mission is to be current, to be fast, to be affordable.”
Not Ralph
Goldfarb understands the fashion industry and knows where he sits in it.
He pointed to the branding purity of Ralph Lauren.
“They’ve done an amazing job,” he said. “Ralph has stayed pure to it from the moment he started. Look at early Ralph, you could look at Ralph today and he and his messengers, all the people that he’s brought on over the decades — it’s a beautiful model.
“We’re just not in that business,” he said. “I’m not Ralph. And I think Ralph is pretty much maybe the only one in the U.S. that has created that in scale.
“We, on the other hand, we were brought onto this earth by a founder [his father Aron] who couldn’t care if he made a leather jacket or if he made socks; he cared about making a living. That’s all he cared about and providing for us.”
Goldfarb’s own cares are very much the same.
He recalled when longtime partner and vice chairman and president Sammy Aaron walked into his office and asked, “Do you ever think about all the lives you’ve affected?”
“I do,” Goldfarb said. “I love the fact that I knew a kid that started here in the mail room that evolved into sales and got married and bought his home and had a kid. I look at them with fondness and said, ‘That’s success.’ Success isn’t, I’ve kept my payroll down to the barest minimum. Fondness and success for me is just seeing the growth and the maturity of people and that they’ve become good citizens. It’s a tribute to this company.
“We’re not known to be villains,” he said, pointing as well to the company’s quietly charitable nature. “This is a tough industry and we’ve survived so many years with integrity. There’s an important part of G-III, which is giving. It’s been an important part of my life. We don’t celebrate it. We don’t talk about it. We do it.”
The China Story
Goldfarb said he has “a million stories” about how the well-being of its workers has long been a metric of success for G-III.
Rather than test him on that — Goldfarb excels as a storyteller — WWD asked for just one to illustrate the company’s approach.
G-III was late to move production to China as the relatively high-ticket leather business is complicated and was already established in South Korea.
By 1990, though, China started to look good and Qingdao was just a 12- or 13-hour ferry ride across the Yellow Sea.
“We made a deal with the local government,” he said. “They would build the factory. They would provide the employees — and there were about 2,000 employees — and we would provide the technical help, the orders, the materials, and we’d have a joint venture.”
The government was contractually obligated to provide for the workers’ accommodations.
“They warranted that they would have, I believe it was six people in a dorm room, which I thought was crazy high. And then I was taught that the norm was about 10 people in a dorm room,” Goldfarb said. “There were cots and there was a common bathroom and showers for the staff.”
The CEO couldn’t make the grand opening of the factory, but said there were parades and 10,000 people marching with dragons and fireworks.
And amid it all, he received a call from one of his employees on site.
“’There are 12 people in a room,’” he told Goldfarb. “’There’s no common dining room. There is no heat and no hot running water.’
“I said, ‘No, that’s not going to work.’ So I have a fit. I call my partners. One of them was granted the factory as a military gift. He was a military hero and he was who he was. I said, ‘No, no, it’s not acceptable. It’s not in contract.’
“So my partners say, [more or less] ‘Morris, leave. You’ve got your investment, write it off and leave.’”
This was a time when a lot of Western businesses were setting up in China, but not necessarily following through on the deals they made.
“There was doubt that I was going to be able to perform and I said, ‘I can leave right now and these people will never know what they’re going to miss or I can stay and show them.’
“So we stayed and less than a year later, they come to New York with this great trophy that was presented to the factory by the Shandong province, which is 80 million people large. So I tell my partners, ‘That’s great. We’re done. We’re leaving. Joint venture is not going to continue. We’re going to another region.’
“They said, ‘Why? We’ve succeeded.’ I said, ‘You didn’t succeed. You didn’t take care of the people the way you told me that you would. There’s no heat. There’s no hot running water, and if you can’t afford it, I’m going to go.’
“They said, ‘No, no, no, no. There’s just no way we’re going to let you leave.’ I said, ‘Then you got to make me happy.’ They built more dorm rooms and hot water and heat were provided all year long.”
At the Negotiating Table
The story also shines a light on Goldfarb as a negotiator.
While not afraid to take a hard stand, he prides himself on reaching a balanced deal.
“I always put myself, I don’t want to call it the opponent’s side, but in every deal and everything I look at, it’s how’s this guy’s going to feel if we make this deal?” Goldfarb said “Is he coerced? Is he going to hate the deal? Is he going to be happy that the deal was made? Is he going to go home and celebrate or b—h about the fact that he’s been had and retribution is soon to come?”
At the end of a transaction, he said the person on the other side of the table should feel, “As good as I do.”
Goldfarb credited a good chunk of this outlook to his work with Lyle Berman, a top poker player and regular collaborator.
“We’ve had many partnerships and he originated from, of all things, a leather retail company,” Goldfarb said. “He taught me the art of a fair deal. He taught me how to limit a risk. He taught me fairness. He taught me, just deliver what you promise. And he and I, we had Rainforest Café that succeeded. That was his vision and I hated it. We had Grand Casino, which ultimately became Hilton Gaming and many other smaller deals that we partnered in. I went to China, to Hong Kong, Taiwan and [South] Korea with him for the first time in 1978.”
Staying Power
Goldfarb’s journey has been a long one, from small leather goods company to a Seventh Avenue powerhouse. For years, G-III developed big licensed department store businesses for PVH Corp.’s Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger.
But the CEO remembers talking to former PVH CEO Manny Chirico about a possible deal that never materialized.
“Manny put me on a path,” Goldfarb said. “He said something at a meeting that stuck, that I had no chips.
“The man’s right. I need some chips,” he remembers. “We went out and we bought brands.”
G-III’s portfolio of owned brands came in handy when PVH’s current management moved to pull back the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger licenses in 2022, effectively walking away with what was half of the company’s sales.
Now G-III’s owned stable of brands includes Donna Karan, DKNY, Karl Lagerfeld, Vilebrequin, Sonia Rykiel, Andrew Marc, G.H. Bass, Wilsons Leather and others, along with the newest addition, Marc Jacobs, which the company bought with WHP Global this year.
The trick to lasting so long and thriving in each new phase?
“You do that by listening, by associations, by a desire to succeed and a never-ending drive to be the best at what you do and surround yourself with talents that support your weaknesses,” he said.
That’s an attitude Goldfarb has held to, at G-III and beyond.
“My wife will tell you I never met a deal I didn’t like. I love exploring deals, whether it’s friends or my children’s friends who come to me for advice. I really get entrenched in problem solving. I just kind of like it. I like playing chess, not literally. I’m an OK chess player, but moving people and concepts around has been an innate skill. I guess I was kind of born with a desire to problem solve.
“My strength is leadership and finding the appropriate solutions for whatever weakness I have on this sector that I’m exploiting,” he said. “If it’s design, I’m going to hire the best designer. If I feel that there’s a weakness in creative financing, I’m going to have the strongest finance person at my side and I’ve succeeded in that.”
Welcoming Marc
Now Goldfarb has teamed with Marc Jacobs, who’s stayed on as creative director and whose brand marks one of G-III’s biggest steps into designer fashion.
While Marc Jacobs is set to hit about $360 million in sales this year, which began under the ownership of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Goldfarb sees an opportunity to drive that up to $1 billion over the long term.
“Marc and I have spent a fair amount of time together,” he said. “We meet because I’d like to be transparent and I’d like his involvement. Marc is welcoming that.
“Looking at Marc, seeing that G-III’s, who’s kind of a known entity in moderate department stores, partnered with a brand management company [WHP].…He had to be rattled as to what to expect,” Goldfarb said.
And how does one unrattle a top-tier designer at such a delicate time?
“By engaging him, being as transparent as I could,” Goldfarb said. “What was very important to him was the fashion shows. We’ve retained that and we are going to distribute into multi-distribution channels contrary to where LVMH has been. I think he’s OK with it. He’s commercial, he’s very bright, and we’ll see.”
And that’s classic Goldfarb.
Open, fair, realistic, ready to try new things — and alert enough to see how the world is changing and nimble enough to meet it.