A Debit to Fast Company for a piece on American Apparel’s marketing strategy that unveils old news, ignores current problems, and dismisses the company’s sexual harassment issues.
Let’s start with the scantily clad women. American Apparel’s advertising campaign tends to border on soft porn—but you probably already knew that. Maybe you find this edgy. Maybe you find it offensive. But you can’t argue that it’s new.
So we’re not quite sure why Fast Company is trying to. But that isn’t the only problem with the piece.
Strangely, it focuses on the company’s marketing, which is not news, and glosses over the actual business, which does have a couple of newsworthy angles—ones you won’t find mentioned in this story.
American Apparel is news for two reasons. It recently went public, a fact inexplicably absent from a piece about the company’s business model. And it’s had major financial problems for much of its history, as The Wall Street Journal told us in April and again in May. The piece not only omits this second fact but also contradicts it, telling us that American Apparel’s “business model is thriving.”
Lastly, reporter Rob Walker doesn’t take the sexual harassment problems at the offices of American Apparel seriously enough. He treats CEO Dov Charney’s well-publicized sexual antics as if they are beyond the purview of the article—which is interested in the combination of American Apparel’s U.S.-based, sweatshop-free production and its highly sexual ad campaign. But it’s impossible to separate a culture of sex at the office from the culture of sex in the ads.
And, quite frankly, it all comes back to business. One of the reasons American Apparel is struggling, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that Charney’s unconventional way of running the company hasn’t gone over well with investors. They might not care that he wanders around the office in his underwear, but they do care that he is unable to get his company to understand generally accepted accounting practices.
Fast Company should care too.
Elinore Longobardi is a Fellow and staff writer of The Audit, the business-press section of Columbia Journalism Review.