He is a billionaire from a poor family. How the founder of Ralph Lauren managed to create a premium brand and start selling dreams

Ralph Lauren, an American fashion designer whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at $10 billion, founded his eponymous fashion house Ralph Lauren, but few people know that he had no financial cushion for his career. The man was born into a poor migrant family and once couldn't afford new clothes, but now he dresses the whole world in his clothes.

Nowadays, the fashion brand Ralph Lauren is known for its quality and sophistication of style and belongs to the premium class. However, the designer started his business by opening a restaurant and did not have a degree in fashion design. On Ralph Lauren's 85th birthday, OBOZ.UA decided to recall the main milestones of the billionaire's life and why he said he was selling a human dream.

"I created all this. I didn't go to fashion school. I created a restaurant. I created a home business. I created a way of life. I created clothes for life, not just fashion. I was a consumer. I wanted what other people wanted," Loren once said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Ralph was born into a poor family in New York. In one of his interviews, he said this about his childhood: "I loved new clothes, but I didn't have the money to buy them. I had to keep up with my older brothers' clothes all the time. I often said to myself that I wanted to have my own clothes and I wanted to express myself to the world through clothes."

Lauren did not plan to be a factory worker when he was young, as was common in the 1950s and 1970s, the time of his youth. The future fashion designer started his career as a clothing salesman at Brooks Brothers, one of the leading American menswear stores. Later, he began to specialize in tie design at Rivetz & Co.

Later, he was inspired to create new tie models by the book "The Great Gatsby" by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Ralph sewed the first models from scraps of fabric, which he then delivered to stores. Later, the designer found an investor and opened his own company, Polo, which continued to specialize in ties.

Selling his goods in Bloomingdale's department store helped him to get the first 500 thousand dollars of profit per year. In 1971, the fashion designer released his first collection of women's clothing Polo Ralph Lauren and it was at that time that the famous logo appeared – a polo player on a horse. Then Ralph Lauren created his famous polo shirts.

The 70s marked the beginning of the era of brand recognition and its significant contribution to the global fashion industry.

"I don't make clothes, I make dreams," this is Ralph Lauren's catchphrase that has become his catchphrase describing almost his entire path to success.

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