14 DAY TRIAL // Jessica Simpson is the one celebrity whose fashion lines can rival designer brands, having registered a profit of nearly $750 million for last year, and with sales expected to surpass $1 billion in 2011. With all this, she remains incredibly grounded, as her latest interview with New York Magazine
confirms.
Even more than this, Jessica is probably the first person to admit that she never saw this coming, she never expected to be this successful – it’s not like she set out to become a “fashion mogul,” she says.
All she wanted to do was to offer fans the ability to recreate her style at partially, but using items that are affordable and of high quality at the same time. This is the recipe for her success.
“I never thought I’d be some fashion mogul!,” Jessica says, laughing her wide-mouthed laugh. It’s perhaps this quality of being so easily relatable that’s making her such a commercial hit.
“A girl could go to the shopping mall with her mother and she’d have a great new outfit and still have some money left for lunch at McDonald’s,” business manager David Levin tells NY Mag about the idea behind the first Jessica Simpson collection.
“She can look like Jessica Simpson, smell like Jessica Simpson, and she can afford it,” Levin adds for the same publication. From this, Jessica and her team built a fashion empire, one that can rival brands like Michael Kors.
Being involved in every step of the creative process also helps with sales. Jessica is not simply a “face,” she’s not the typical celebrity who just signs her name on the paper but invests nothing of herself in the items that bear her name, she says.
“I put everything in the line and then it just blows out. We try not to set trends, but you need your trending pieces in every delivery. But those go fast: What you really need is your basics for every type of person,” Jessica explains.
“When it comes to other celebrity brands, I think a lot of people do a great job, but it can’t be all about them. Everybody doesn’t want to just look like the celebrity, because they can’t. They just want one element of that style,” she adds of her philosophy.
In the same interview, Simpson also talks about her engagement to Eric Johnson and, of course, how the proposal has changed their relationship. No word on the wedding, though.
For the full interview with Jessica Simpson, check out the New York Magazine piece here.