The Joe of Joe Fresh is no longer with the company.
Creative Director and founder Joe Mimran has left the helm of the low-priced private label brand and handed the reins to company President Mario Grauso. Apparently there are no plans to change the name to Mario Fresh.
I wear a lot of Joe Fresh clothing. They seem to have learned their lesson about safe clothing manufacturing after a terrible fire in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 garment workers. I don’t mean to gloss over that tragedy but it’s not a unique story.  Joe Fresh contributed $1-million to a survivor’s fund and paid three months wages to workers who were laid off while they rebuilt. And let’s be honest, Canada simply cannot compete on a manufacturing scale. A relative who’s marketing a product said he would love to have it made in Canada but at some point, it just doesn’t make financial sense. Retail giants dictate how much they will pay you for your item and how much they’ll sell it for. If the margin is too slim, you go offshore to make a profit. Who you blame for that is up to you.
While the clothing is mostly terrific for the price – $29 for skinny jeans – this year’s offerings are leaving me cold. It’s like they’re trying to come up with the ugliest patterns possible and put them on as many pieces as they can. I would love to show some of them to you but the company prevents its images from being copied. Just imagine clashing colours, a jumble of shapes and put it on a sweater, a dress, a pair of shorts and voila, you have … a lot of leftover stock, I suspect. Or maybe ugly is the new pretty.
As for Joe, he’s been announced as a new dragon on CBC’s Dragon’s Den. With the departures of David Chilton and Arlene Dickinson, the show will need some personality. That weird/creepy squillionaire Michael Wekerle isn’t cutting it for me.