Riding with Polo
One of my favorite branding stories involves the Ralph Lauren Polo brand. In early 2009, I was Chairman and CEO of a company called Africa Israeli, USA. It was the U.S. subsidiary of the Israeli parent of the same name, a company I liken to the General Electric of Israel because it was big and diversified. However, instead of washing machines and jet turbines, Africa Israeli had gone down a path of real estate development. It had been quite successful at that in Israel and had decided to branch out to places like the United States and Russia in the prior five years. Naturally, its timing was about as horrible as could be, but that was exacerbated by a culture that doomed it to fall prey to the worst of developer fraudulent tendencies.
I always found it interesting that the general public thinks of Wall Street as a den of thieves, but somehow thinks of real estate development as a shrewd but mainstream and relatively honest activity for those with local knowledge and a keen eye for needs and trends. Every inch of the world has real estate development underway in one form or another. It follows a sage pattern of investing in what you know best and people know their territory better than anything. The slogan for developers that I found most appropriate and amusing it, “a dollar borrowed is a dollar earned and a dollar repaid is a dollar lost forever.” That certainly comports accurately with what we know of the world’s most notorious developer, Donald J. Trump.
When you look at the annals of great wealth across the world at any moment in time, you usually see something specifically hot in the moment like tech or oil & gas or pharma, but you almost always see in a strong second place, good old real estate development. The numbers can get big very fast and the “real” nature of real estate always seems to induce the greatest leverage available with the reputation of the developer standing behind the value of the asset. In fact, some of the shrewdest lenders around are mezzanine lenders who engage in the “loan to own” game where they hope that a developer missteps or outspends his means so that they can pick up the underlying real estate asset for something less than its true value at the expense of the equity and more subordinate lending that has gone on ahead of it. All of these opportunities for wealth creation attract investors who want in on the game even though their primary game is in some other economic sector. Those investors club together with developers who have more of the real estate-specific staffing and skills to do the maneuvering needed to optimize the slick-Willy play. One such investor that I met during the Africa Israel days was the family who brought us designer jeans in the 1980’s and had become one of the largest global manufacturers of denim in the world. They played denim from every angle imaginable and played real estate investing on the side with their extra cash, which had the habit of pouring in when the jeans market got hot for a moment. The story I like has to do with the family patriarch, a man who got his start as an immigrant cab driver. He seemed to march to the beat of his own drum, which may well have been the secret to his astounding success.
The story comes from one of his senior-most lieutenants who I befriended along the way. The patriarch wanted to get into the growing retail outlet business, which had long since eclipsed the “factory seconds” game and become a downmarket cheaper manufacturing and branding game. One day he announced to his staff that he wanted to market jeans and apparel into the outlet market under the Polo brand. Everyone chuckled and reminded him that Ralph Lauren might have something to say about that. They thought it was a joke, but soon realized that he was deadly serious. It seems on one of his sojourns to Palm Beach he had seen an advertisement for a polo match featuring contestants from the venerable U.S. Polo club that existed in Florida for almost two hundred years. He did the research and came to understand that the club was quite long of tooth and getting a bit natty around the fringes for lack of new membership and lack of funds. So, he went and bought the rights to use the brand for apparel for a relatively modest sum. And off he went using the U.S. Polo brand with impunity and a logo that was similar to the Ralph Lauren logo only much bigger. It seems branding laws pay close attention to size in such cases and he created his new brand with a logo of a size recommended by a good copyright attorney.
Naturally, Ralph Lauren too him to court over this and ultimately he did the impossible and prevailed on the theory that the U.S. Polo brand had existed long before Ralph Lauren was out of short pants. That is why you will see outlet mall knock-offs that are confusingly similar to what you might find in the Ralph Lauren section of Bloomingdales. Score one for the aggressive immigrant who won’t take no for an answer and bothers to think well beyond the box.
In the category of immigrants with lots of chutzpah, I have a new friend. His name is Polo. He’s the big guy Brad picked up when we needed some muscle for the hoisting up of the 1,400 pound basalt tower for the new garden fountain. Brad had used him for some heavy work installing the new lighted vanity for Kim while we were away in Ithaca. Since I have visibility via my Ring security cameras, I had seen that he came in his own silver pick-up truck. So when I returned home to find so much gardening to be done and some temporary lack of clarity as to whether Joventino would be available, I called Polo and hired him for a day (yesterday). I had chainsawed a number of limbs off the live oak by the patio (it was badly overhanging the palapa) and one of overgrown Yuccas along the patio path. I also had a great deal of weeding to do both front and back since we had given the weeds six weeks to flourish on their own.
One of the good things about Polo is that he speaks English well and despite enjoying practicing my Spanish on household laborers, I prefer to give explicit direction in English to minimize misunderstandings. Polo worked a good long day and accomplished a lot of what I asked and even took some initiative to clear one area rather than just whacking the weeds just so they would grow back in a few weeks. He didn’t get through everything I wanted, so this morning while it was cooler, I hit the slopes for some aggressive weeding for several hours. Quite frankly, it wore me out and reminded me about why I hire guys like Joventino or Polo, who manage to keep working for 8+ hours when I can do much less without a relaxing and cooling shower and a long rest.
Joventino comes on Monday and I will have him focus on the front area. I’m not sure when I will reach out to Polo again for day work, but its good to know he’s available. I am too big and too old to go horseback riding any more and the sport of polo would never have been on my list of things to do, but for my money, hiring committed and aggressive immigrants like Polo or Joventino are good value. I will always go riding with Polo and trust that the jog will get done well.