If you were to ask me, ‘I hear this record on the radio, but Puff, what would you do to make the record sound better?’ I’m going to go in and remix that muthafucka. I’m going to make it into a hit. So that’s what I’m going to do with Enyce.
Yesterday, VIBE.com reported that Sean “Diddy” Combs had purchased the sportswear brand Enyce. Shocking? Not if you know Diddy.
The Bad Boy CEO called VIBE.com Tuesday evening to break down the exciting purchase.
VIBE.com: So how did this happen?
Diddy: Liz Claiborne purchased Enyce for $114 million back in 2003. Tony Shellman had the brand, and he’s a friend of mine, then he had sold it to Liz Claiborne. The brand has been doing okay, but I think [the owners] realized they maybe weren’t the perfect fit for the brand or really had the wherewithal to make the brand successful.
I heard about the possibility of them wanting to sell the brand, and I felt it would be a perfect fit for us as far as diversifying our portfolio and what I would call my little mini-fashion empire. Owning Zac Posen, owning Sean John, and now owning Enyce.
[I’m going to] take Enyce and do what I do with music, as the king of the remix: remix this brand into a hit. One of the hardest things to do in any business is to have a trademark that has name recognition and value. I believe Enyce has never lost its name recognition. You can walk down the street and ask if people if they know about Enyce, and [ask] is it a brand that has a positive or negative taste in people’s mouths. And through our research, we found out it has a positive taste in people’s mouths, it just wasn’t being heavily marketed anymore and it wasn’t in people’s faces anymore.
So we felt like, based on the expertise and infrastructures we have, we’ll redo the brand’s strategy, the design strategy, in a way that Enyce does not compete with Sean John whatsoever. We felt like it was a perfect fit for us.
Where do you feel you can actually take the brand? Enyce has been underneath the radar for a long time.
And that’s the thing that’s exciting: to remix the brand, to revamp the brand. And go in and make some changes, and make some tweaks and come out and introduce a new brand and design strategy. It’s almost like when you go in to buy a house, and you refurbish the house. And I think that this brand today, already has more value then it had yesterday.
It’s almost like a record, like if you were to ask me, “I hear this record on the radio, but Puff, what would you do to make the record sound better?” I’m going to go in and remix that muthafucka. I’m going to make it into a hit. So that’s what I’m going to do with Enyce.
How long did you know Enyce was up for sale?
Over the last 6 months I’ve been in negotiations with Liz Claiborne.
With the whole economic situation right now, were you and your team ever nervous about the Enyce purchase? Like, “Maybe we shouldn’t take that gamble…”
No, because we felt like the… a company is not just on the value of what it’s selling, there’s a value in the trademark. This trademark had such a positive value that we felt, in our hands, would have even more value. Also, just based on what’s going on economically, there’s an opportunity to go and take this brand and look at other areas of distribution that would kind of embrace what’s going on with the economy.
You mentioned that Enyce would not be competing with Sean John. Can you give us an idea where you see the brand going design-wise?
To be honest with you, we've [only] had the brand for less than a day now. So I’m going to bring in the best people, the best strategists, the best design team, and we’re going to come with a new plan. Probably in the next month or two, we’ll be announcing and presenting a new plan with Enyce. People think that we just bought [Enyce], and we’re just going to do what the brand had already been doing. But that really wouldn’t make sense. It would only make sense if we made some changes in the brand.
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