American Apparel's boom and bust (1989-2017)
Dov Charney built American Apparel from a T-shirt wholesaler into a vertically integrated basics powerhouse with roughly 300 stores and $600 million in annual sales, manufacturing everything in Los Angeles. The company unraveled under debt and scandal: Charney was ousted in 2014, and Gildan bought it out of its second bankruptcy in 2017, closing all stores.
Gildan absorbed American Apparel as a wholesale label, ending its brick-and-mortar retail presence entirely.
The collapse became a case study in founder-driven risk and overexpansion, leaving a void in the market for made-in-America basics that Los Angeles Apparel now fills.
The same founder, product catalog, and manufacturing model are being retested at a smaller scale in San Francisco. The key question is whether Charney's new company can grow without repeating the debt-fueled overreach that sank the original.