Ralph Lauren Sold the Dream. His Workers Got 2 Hours Sleep transcript

The logo is on everything. On the shirts of presidents, >> [music] >> in the wardrobes of rappers and hedge fund managers, on the chest of athletes at the Olympics, on the backs of men who've never been near a Polo field and never will. The Polo player, one of the most recognized symbols on Earth. And behind all of it, a boy from the Bronx. No training, no connections, no money. He built it by selling something that isn't a product at all.

He sold belonging. And for 50 years, the whole world bought it. But nobody asked the obvious question. If you spend your whole life selling a dream, whose dream is it? And who pays for it? Because when you look at what it actually took, not the logo, not the mansion, not the 12 billion dollars, when you look at what was underneath it all, it has to do with dreams. That's what Ralph always said, and he wasn't wrong. He just never finished the sentence.

October 14th, 1939, The Bronx, New York. Ralph Lifshitz is born, the youngest of four children in [music] a one-bedroom apartment in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the city. His parents fled persecution in Belarus. His father paints houses. His mother stretches every dollar until it tears. But even as a boy, even then, Ralph is watching something. He sits in the movie theater every Saturday. Not for the stories, for the clothes.

Cary Grant in a tailored suit. Fred Astaire moving across the screen like money had always been effortless. Those clothes weren't fashion. They were proof that another world existed. He wanted to live there. By 12, he saved enough from odd jobs to buy a three-piece suit. He walks through the Bronx wearing it. Not performing, deciding. This is who I am going to be. At 16, the name changes. Ralph and his brother petition the courts.

Lifshitz becomes Lauren. [music] Some say Lauren Bacall, the actress also from the Bronx. Others say it was chosen because [music] it sounded sophisticated, American, aspirational, like someone who already had what he was trying to build. This was not just a name change. It was the first design decision he ever made. He designed himself first. But here is what the story never asks. When you build yourself from scratch, from the outside in, what are you actually running from?

And does it stay behind when you change your name? 1967. Ralph Lauren is 28 years old. He is broke. He is living with his wife Ricky in a tiny apartment under the L train in Manhattan. Every few minutes, the trains rumble overhead and shake the walls. They have nothing, no savings, no safety net. He has an idea everyone around him thinks is insane. Wide ties. 4 inches wide. At a time when the entire industry has decided that narrow is the only option.

Made from expensive fabric. Sold under his own name, his own label. The company president tells him directly, "The world isn't ready for Ralph Lauren." He quits, borrows $50,000, and sets up in the Empire State Building. One drawer in a shared showroom. That's it. One drawer in a building full of people who don't know his name. He delivers by hand. He pitches every store in Manhattan. And then, Bloomingdale's, the hottest department store in America, the store that decides what matters.

They love the ties, the width, the fabric. >> [music] >> They want to buy them. Two conditions: make the ties narrower, and remove the Polo label, replace it with theirs. >> [music] >> Ralph is 28. He is broke. He has a wife and a dream and one drawer. He walks out. For 6 months, nothing. [music] Small stores barely surviving. Ricky writes him a letter during those months. I would wish for the wings for you to fly, she writes.

I believe in you and think you're going to do it. Belief doesn't pay rent under the L train. And then Bloomingdale's calls back. They couldn't find ties like his anywhere else. They wanted them, all of them. His label, his way. 6 months later, the Polo ties generate half a million dollars in sales. He had just made the most irrational decision of his life, and it [music] worked. Something that will take decades to fully reveal itself.

The man who walked away from Bloomingdale's when they tried to control him would spend the rest of his life making sure nobody could do the same thing to him. Nobody. From here, the story accelerates. The Coty Award, the fashion industry's highest honor. 3 years after one drawer in the Empire State Building, Ralph Lauren is being recognized as a major American designer. He stands at the peak of what he has built. And then the calls start coming in.

Vendors unpaid, customers undelivered, orders flooding in from across the country, and nothing nothing is shipping. The company he built around his vision has no systems, no logistics, no financial controls. He was the creative. He assumed the rest would follow. It didn't. He sits with the numbers. The company is hemorrhaging money faster than the orders can replace it. He has won the industry's highest award, and he is watching everything collapse at the same time.

He does the only thing he can. He takes his entire life savings, $150,000, everything he and Ricky have, and injects it into the company. All of it. Gone. Then he brings in a business operator, gives away equity he swore he would never give, restructures from the ground up. It works, but only just. Ralph would later tell Forbes he almost blew it. Not almost, he did blow it. He just survived the wreckage. Ralph Lauren could build things no one else could imagine.

He could not run them. The same obsession that created the brand, the refusal to see anything except the vision, was destroying it from the inside. He fixed it. He brought in the right person. He saved the company. But he never fully surrendered the controls. Not then, not ever. The Polo shirt, 17 colors, a logo that becomes a language. Hollywood calls. The Great Gatsby, Annie Hall, the Olympics, the first standalone designer store in American retail history, Rodeo Drive.

No one had done it before. Then the Rhinelander Mansion, a Gilded Age masterpiece on Madison Avenue. Bought, restored, 82,000 square feet of Honduran mahogany. By 1997, consumers are spending $5 billion a year on Ralph Lauren products. June 12th, 1997, the IPO. Ralph Lauren Corporation goes public, the largest listed clothing company in the market. He retains most of the voting shares. He had spent 30 years selling the idea that anyone could belong to the dream.

Now Wall Street owned a piece of it. And somewhere, deep in the supply chain of that dream, things were happening that nobody in the Rhinelander Mansion was looking at. That's the version most people know. The underdog, the dreamer, the Bronx kid who willed himself into existence and built an empire out of nothing but taste and stubbornness. It's in the case studies. It's in the business books. It's what gets quoted at commencement speeches.

But there is a version of this story that doesn't end at the IPO. That doesn't end at the Rhinelander Mansion, or the Cody award, or the Olympic uniforms. There's a version that asks a different question entirely. When you build a brand on a fantasy of belonging, when you sell the idea that the right shirt, the right logo, the right shade of navy blue can make you part of something, what does that fantasy require? Who builds it?

Who pays for it? And what does it do to a man who can never quite decide whether he's selling the dream or still waiting to arrive inside it? Because here's what the official story leaves out. This is the part that doesn't make it into the case studies. If you want to see what ambition actually costs, subscribe [music] so you don't miss the next one. It's about to get uncomfortable. In 2005, Ralph Lauren has a general manager in Argentina.

Between 2005 and 2009, that manager bribes customs officials cash, luxury goods, >> [music] >> dresses and handbags worth thousands of dollars, slipped to government officials to wave merchandise through without inspections. >> [music] >> In 2013, Ralph Lauren pays $1.6 million to the Department of Justice and the SEC to settle the case. No admission of wrongdoing, no press conference, [music] just a number quietly paid.

And that was the one that got caught. In 2020, a [music] BBC Panorama crew goes inside a factory in India supplying Ralph Lauren. They film workers sleeping on the floor between shifts. The window they're given, 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., 2 hours, then [music] back to the machines. The clothes they're making carry a logo associated with polo fields and country weekends. The people making them are not permitted a full night's sleep.

The Rhinelander mansion, 82,000 square [music] feet of mahogany, the polo match on the great lawn, and in a factory in India, 2 hours. That's how long they were allowed to sleep. >> Now, the UK supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Marks & Spencer say they are reviewing working practices one of their Indian suppliers after a BBC investigation [music] found evidence that workers were being exploited. Women at the factory, which makes home textiles for the brands, said that they were forced to work excessive [music] hours and weren't even allowed toilet breaks.

The BBC also heard claims of poor working conditions from staff at an [music] Indian supplier to Ralph Lauren. The American brand has said it will investigate. Our South Asia correspondent Rajini Vaidyanathan has this report. >> In 2022, independent [music] fiber testing reveals that sweaters marketed as 100% Pima cotton, a mark of luxury, contain less than 7% Pima [music] cotton. A lawsuit follows. The company disputes it.

In 2023, a stylist at the Ralph Lauren store in Sloane Square, London, wins a racial discrimination case. The store manager had referred to the mixed heritage employee as the United [music] Nations and the United Colors of Benetton. The tribunal rules the remarks were harassing and discriminatory. That same year, the Canadian ombudsperson for responsible enterprise launches a formal investigation into Ralph Lauren's supply chain.

Allegations of forced labor from the Uyghur minority in China. It runs for over a year. It closes in June 2024 after a private settlement. Not a verdict, a settlement. Quietly, with no public accounting. None of this is hidden. >> [music] >> It's documented. Court filings, government settlements, employment tribunal records. It just never appears in the version of the story that gets told about the boy from the Bronx who built the American dream.

And here is the thing about that. Ralph Lauren built his entire brand on one idea. The idea that belonging was real. That you could put on the right clothes and be part of something that had always excluded people like him. He knew what exclusion felt like. >> [music] >> He changed his name to escape it. And then he built something so large, so profitable, so global that other people's exclusion was somewhere deep in the supply chain, out [music] of sight, neatly pressed.

Ralph Lauren is in his mid-80s. He still holds creative control. The Polo player is still on everything. Some things he has made sure will never be taken from him. He built it from one drawer, from borrowed money, from a name he chose for himself because the one he was born with was a target. There is something true in what he built. The logo doesn't ask who you are. It doesn't ask [music] where you came from. A Polo shirt from a thrift store and a Polo shirt from the Rhinelander mansion carry the same [music] mark.

He was specific about that. He chose that. When critics asked how a Jewish kid from the Bronx could sell preppy, aristocratic fashion, could sell a world that would never have let him in, Ralph had an answer. He always gave the same answer. Does it have to do with class and money? He would pause. It has to do with dreams. He wasn't wrong. Dreams built the Rhinelander mansion. Dreams put the logo on 400 million shirts.

Dreams got a boy out of the Bronx who had no business being anywhere near a Polo field. But a dream is always built by someone, and the people who built this one, they never got to decide what it looked like, only what it was stitched from. It has to do with dreams. That's what Ralph always said. The question he never answered, and maybe never asked, whose? Every week, a new empire, a new cost, a new arc. Subscribe so you don't miss what's coming [music] next.