In the blog post “Meet American Apparel” in the blog “B-Ethics”, Kate thoroughly discusses the clothing brand American Apparel’s value propositions and furthermore criticizes how their provocative, sexual ads fail to portray their values. I would like to focus on the values that American Apparel holds as a company because I found their distinctive, mature, ethical values that are complete reversals to their provocative, scandalous, and pornographic ads absolutely fascinating.

If you thought of American Apparel as a “pro-sex” company that sells clothes for an unreasonable price, you were wrong. As a matter of fact, American Apparel’s business model consists of all made-in-USA clothing, fair employee wages, and extremely fair employee benefits. The company strongly believes in the legalization of gay marriage and takes a strong public stance on immigration policy reform.

Most importantly, while nearly all major fashion brands use cheap labor in China and Southeast Asia to produce their products, American Apparel produces all of its products in its downtown LA factory. As the “largest apparel manufacturing facility left in America,” American Apparel’s factory uses anti-sweatshop manufacturing practices; moreover, workers receive $12 an hour, the wage almost doubling California’s minimum wage of $6.75 – this is sharply contrasting to the factories in Asia. Employees receive free English lessons as well as subsidized health insurance for $8 a week.

Although the company has a few problems left to solve such as their sexual ads criticized for demoralizing women, I believe that American Apparel is a big step ahead of its competitors in that the company has built extremely strong and vivid value proposition as well as choosing quality, business ethics, and the standard of working environments over cost and profit. I think I might have once more fallen in love with American Apparel again.

Source:

http://bizgovsoc8.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/meet-american-apparel/

Photos:

https://thethreadtheory.wordpress.com/page/2/

http://www.bloginity.com/2011/07/american-apparel-announces-exclusive-ebay-partnership/