The GAP is a clothing store chain that went shopping in Hollywood for an executive who might soon lift its image, brand, and sales. In its current fiscal year, GAP reported $15 billion in sales, and $202 million in losses.
For that task, GAP looked to Richard Dickson (pictured above), a 55-year-old former president and COO of Mattel, because, after churning through various leaders in recent years, it has decided to eschew CEOs with strong operation skills and instead bet on, as one Wall Street Journal article put it, “a visionary who can unleash the power of its brands and make them relevant again.”
Dickson is credited with breathing new life into Mattel’s Barbie franchise, which under his direction went from the scourge of feminist advocates to a darling of modern girls and their parents. Mattel is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery. In its July’s opening weekend, the Barbie movie grossed $356.3 million worldwide (topping the $1 billion mark after two weeks).
The 54-year old GAP has already gone to Hollywood before, to tap Disney’s Paul Pressler as its CEO, but that lasted only three years, and he left the chain in 2007.
Even though Dickson has some apparel experience (he joined GAP’s board in November 2022), having worked from 2010 to 2014 at the Jones Group (which in 2018 filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy as Nine West Holdings), at Bloomingdale’s, and at cosmetic retailer Gloss, his talent is, as Bob Martin, GAP’s chairman stated, that “Richard knows how to bring brands to life.”
Dickson will start as GAP’s CEO on August 22.
The GAP strategy brings to fruition a famous quote by Norman Horowitz, a former president of Columbia Pictures TV, Polygram, and MGM/UA, who said that no one really knows anything, after all. He was perhaps paraphrasing American screenwriter William Goldman, who wrote that “nobody knows anything” in his 1983 book, Adventures in The Screen Trade. Now, in his new book, Breathless, American science writer David Quammen repeats the maxim: “No one knows anything.” And he should know since he practically predicted the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 in his previous book Spillover, published in 2012.
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