kearly":2op8i3ty said:
Jessica Alba opened up a clothing line in 2012. Since then, the company has earned her a billion. It's just smart business for a celebrity, even a B-lister, to open up clothing lines. And Alba was hardly the first to get rich doing it. It's worth noting, neither Alba or Wilson included their names in their clothing lines.
There's no doubt that Wilson's company is targeting the upper 5% of purchasers. I don't see anything that's wrong with that personally. I don't suddenly get upset walking into a high end retail store thinking about the insane amounts of money they are making. Some people want high end stuff and are willing to pay way more for it.
Russell has never been one of the common man. Wilson may be African American, but he grew up in the rich part of town. His father attended Dartmouth and his grandfather was president of a university. So I think this clothing line actually makes a lot of sense given his background.
The "changing the world" commentary by Russell seems pretty silly given that only about 1% of proceeds go to charity. But if you look up Alba's comments on her company, she said a lot of the same things about changing the world and making people's lives better. And as far as I know she didn't donate any proceeds to charity at all. I get the sense that this type of commentary is par for the course in the clothing industry.
I don't see anything wrong here. That said, "Eat the ball" is pretty dumb.
The "pitch" of Alba's company is that all of their products are chemical free and more eco-friendly than alternative products on the market. And that's all true. (rolling eyes at the common definition of "chemical" to be "chemical free" though, of course).
In addition to that they have a well-publicized list of chaities they donate a proportion of their profits to, and also are well known for paying their employees to donate time to charities on company time.
Don't get me wrong, I'm as cynical as the next guy about all this ethical capitalism mumbo jumbo and her company is obviously doing all this out of their own self interest (they're trying to capture a market niche of people who will pay moderately higher prices for purchases that make them feel good about themselves for their consumer habits), but it's really incomparable to what Wilson is doing.
If Alba's company claimed that it was all about making toxin free products and just included 1% less toxins than their competitors we'd call equivalent BS.
Instead, her company is just BSing in a way that doesn't rub the BS in people's faces.
It's still, in my opinion, cynical, but not nearly as blatantly and laughably cynical as Wilson saying with a straight face that he's marketing to people on a budget and thinks his $300 Vans are going to make the world a better place, that he wants school contracts for his globe shaped white bread because it's an education tool, etc. :lol:
