Tag: CBC

One of the new “dragons”

Soft-spoken, reserved, thoughtful. Hardly the epitome of a dragon. Yet, Joe Mimran’s definitely a dragon – one of the newest on the panel of investors on Dragons’ Den, CBC’s hit entrepreneur reality show.

The Canadian fashion designer, clothier and entrepreneur is best known for launching the Club Monaco and Joe Fresh brands. He is also a partner in Gibraltar Ventures, investing in early-stage digital businesses.

photo - Joe Mimran
Joe Mimran (photo from Joe Mimran)

The 63-year-old, Moroccan-born immigrant has spent nearly his entire life immersed in business, in ventures on his own or with family members, particularly in the clothing industry.

At an early age, he assisted his mother, Esther – who was a couturier in Morocco – in her Toronto-based boutique garment outlet. That business grew, necessitating the purchase of a small factory in Toronto’s garment district in the mid-1970s. Mimran joined to lead operations, manufacturing and finance.

“I was inspired by the design and esthetic world,” he said. “I like designing products, building stores.” He was “inspired by great prints, inspired to want to be entrepreneur.”

That inspiration evolved into Ms. Originals, tailoring suits and pants for women and, soon thereafter, Mimran and brother Saul hired designer Alfred Sung, with a goal to create their own clothing line. The Alfred Sung collection swiftly soared in popularity across the continent.

By the mid-1980s, he launched yet another line, based on the idea that a plain, white, quality cotton shirt was unavailable in the market – and Club Monaco brand was born.

“If you’re not a risk taker and abhor taking risks, entrepreneurship is not for you,” said Mimran.

“There were many people along the way of my career who said, ‘You’re crazy, don’t do this or don’t do that. What do you waste your time for doing that?’ I have stuck to my guns. Sometimes you need to say to naysayers that you have to pursue your dream.”

Unfortunately, the plan didn’t go smoothly at first. The Bay and Eaton’s didn’t want to carry the product.

“We realized that we had all these goods coming in and the only way we could move forward was to open our own stores,” he said.

They rolled the dice on a 5,000-square-foot store in trendy Queen Street West in Toronto, showcasing an array of attire. The day it opened in September 1985 saw their marketing campaign pay off in a major way, with line-ups to get into the store.

“From adversity comes something terrific,” said Mimran. “We realized, as we opened our own stores, we’ll cut out the wholesale margin.”

At the time, such a move was rare. Typically, retail stores bought through a wholesaler, he explained. “But, sometimes, you just have to dive in, make the mistakes, fix it, move forward, make more mistakes, and try different things.”

Mimran dived in, not only opening a flagship Club Monaco store in New York City on Fifth Avenue in 1995, but opening another 120 stores in the next four years. That success caught the eye of Polo Ralph Lauren Corp., who purchased both Club Monaco and Caban (another Mimran line) in 1999.

“A lot of businesspeople, having had lots of problems in the past, will try to dissuade somebody else,” said Mimran. “But your idea might be done in a new way, might resonate in a way that this very experienced person didn’t, couldn’t, anticipate. There’s always an idea that surprises people, and that leads to success.”

Mimran has continued that success, time and again.

Pink Tartan – a women’s line – was yet another Mimran venture, appearing in high-end retail outlets such as Holt Renfrew and Saks Fifth Avenue, as well as in its flagship store in Toronto’s Yorkville.

Mimran’s Joe Fresh Style, a private-label apparel line for Loblaw Companies Ltd., was launched in 2006. The label has since opened free-standing stores – the first Joe Fresh opened on Granville Street in Vancouver in 2010 and, soon thereafter, in New York City. Many others followed.

Mimran said the apparel industry is among the most competitive industries in the world. Because of this fact and his own experiences, he empathizes with the entrepreneurs who come to the Den having had tough breaks.

“No matter how good you are, or what you know, you can still fail in our business,” he said. “It keeps you pretty grounded.”

Today, Mimran sees a future of entrepreneurs that have opportunities that were nonexistent a generation ago.

“There’s more willingness to try by the new generation – millennials – who are asset light, where boundaries and borders are not an issue. They live in a virtual world and have the ability to take on more risk. They look at the world in a dynamic way that leads to entrepreneurship,” he explained. “Particularly in today’s world, where things are so different in terms of how one communicates with the consumer, all the new online fundraising channels that are available, what’s old is new, what’s new is old. It’s the Wild West out there.”

Dave Gordon is a Toronto-based freelance writer whose work can be found in more than 100 publications globally. His is managing editor of landmarkreport.com.

Bad journalists, very bad!

Rolling Stone magazine recently completely retracted a story purporting to delve into an incident of gang-rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. The story was so devoid of basic journalistic processes and fact-checking that it is destined to go down as an object lesson in journalism schools for years to come.

Other incidents, less egregious but still dubious, popped up in the last few days.

Social media was ablaze last week over news that the federal government was preparing to criminalize critics of Israel, specifically by applying Canada’s hate laws against supporters of BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.

Advocates of free speech were up in arms – and rightly so. BDS is a movement that seeks the destruction of the state of Israel, in the guise of a one-state solution, and is discriminatory in its targeting of products, people and ideas based on their national origin. It is the contemporary equivalent of book-burning. It is deserving of scorn and contempt. But it is not deserving of legal prohibition in a country that respects free expression.

As it turns out, the very idea that Canada was about to criminalize the BDS movement and its supporters was fabricated almost from full cloth by CBC reporter Neil Macdonald. Macdonald, who has been the subject of years of complaints for anti-Israel bias for his reporting from the Middle East and Washington, had a brief (and somewhat snarky) email exchange with a spokesperson for Canada’s department of public safety.

The exchange began because Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney, in a speech to the United Nations, promised to take a “zero tolerance” approach to those who boycott Israel. Macdonald demanded clarification of what “zero tolerance” meant.

In the email exchange, the spokesperson cites hate speech legislation, as well as laws around mischief involving religious buildings, and she noted the security infrastructure program that funds communities, such as the Jewish community, to improve security in communal buildings.

The response from the government was probably inadequate and Macdonald should have gotten a comment directly from the minister explaining what he meant by “zero tolerance,” and not used boilerplate from a civil servant (something he himself acknowledged in his exchange). Instead, he went ahead with an inflammatory story that was more conjecture than news, but which had the effect of rousing the reliably tetchy anti-Israel crowds.

This, too, could be an object lesson for future (and current) journalists. As could a story more visible than either of these: the story that Pope Francis declared Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an “angel of peace.”

The story of the old terrorist being dubbed an “angel of peace” by the head of Roman Catholicism alarmed those of us who have been impressed with Francis’ approach to world affairs. However, the fault did not lie with the pontiff but with the media.

What Francis said was that Abbas could be an angel of peace – if he made peace with Israel. What the Pope said to Abbas – “May you be an angel of peace” – is a far different thing than what was reported. It was a wish, not a declaration. And it is a wish we could not more heartily share.

Journalism struggles today in the changing landscape of media, tighter budgets, fewer staff doing more tasks – we understand all this. But when some of this country’s and the world’s leading voices of reporting get things so wrong, the institution of journalism suffers even more.

In a world where information (and misinformation) has never been so plentiful, what readers really need are the critical tools to discern fact from fiction and half-truths. In a world of 140-character attention spans, though, do we hope for too much?

Alon Nashman’s play tells story of director John Hirsch

Alon Nashman as John Hirsch in Hirsch. (photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

When theatre and its creative engines become the main focus of a theatrical show, the results can be fascinating. An audience is always hungry for a glimpse behind the scenes.

This is exactly the case with Hirsch, which tells the story of the well-known Hungarian-born Canadian director John Hirsch. Premièred at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2012, it played in Edinburg and then Winnipeg, and it’s been a smash hit in each location. It’s coming to Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre Feb. 25-March 1. Presented as part of the Chutzpah! Festival, it is co-produced by Touchstone Theatre.

Created by Alon Nashman and Paul Thompson, Hirsch is a solo show, directed by Thompson and performed by Nashman. In an interview with the Independent, Nashman described the show’s origins: “This play was built from research, blossomed into improvisation, and then was recorded, refined and ordered,” he said by phone from his home in Toronto. “It retains in performance something of the anarchic energy of improv.”

As do many theatre people, Nashman admires Hirsch, a legendary figure in Canadian theatre. Born in Hungary in 1930, Hirsch was the sole Holocaust survivor of his entire family. In 1947, he arrived in Winnipeg as a refugee. He didn’t speak any English, but that didn’t keep him from pursuing his passion, theatre. Eleven years later, he co-founded the Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC) with Tom Hendry. Afterwards, according to Thompson’s research, the MTC audience doubled for seven years in a row – an outstanding achievement in the world of theatre. Later, Hirsch directed phenomenally popular shows in Canada and the United States and from 1974 to 1978 was the head of television drama at CBC. He died of AIDS in 1989.

“Hirsch is a fantastic subject for a play,” said Nashman. “He lived more than nine lives and was constantly reinventing himself.”

Nashman said that the main goal of this project is “to convey the scope of his [Hirsch’s] life and the power of his work. And our solution was to refract his life through his productions. So there’s a back-and-forth between real-life segments and recreations of his rehearsals or performances.”

“I think that, for theatre lovers, it provides a rare glance into the mind of a brilliant director. It is also the story of a man who faced great loss as a child and tried to put the pieces of his life back together through theatre.”

Hirsch has received rave reviews as well as public acclaim, and Nashman attributed its success to the hero of his performance. “I think that, for theatre lovers, it provides a rare glance into the mind of a brilliant director. It is also the story of a man who faced great loss as a child and tried to put the pieces of his life back together through theatre. And there is the immigrant experience of someone who championed Canadian culture and creativity more than the people born to it. For all these reasons, it transcends generations and ethnic boundaries to become an Everyman story.”

As co-creator of the show, an author as well as an actor, Nashman said he doesn’t feel compelled to adhere too strictly to the text of the play. He wrote it, so he is free to improvise, to adapt to the pulse of the audience. As a result, every performance feels different, fresh. “The play-script does not convey the crackle of anything-could-happen, which fills the live auditorium,” he said. “In fact, my opening monologue changes each night in slight but significant ways, depending on the mood and people in the house.”

“Yes, I would love to play more Shakespeare and Chekhov. That’s why I am doing Hirsch. I get to embody his productions of Cherry Orchard and The Tempest and King Lear, imitating some of the greatest actors in Canada.”

The show not only forges a link between the stage and the audience but it also streamlines the history of Canadian theatre performance, from Shakespeare to contemporary works. Despite being a modern play, it allows the actor to experience classics the way Hirsch envisioned them. “Yes, I would love to play more Shakespeare and Chekhov,” Nashman said. “That’s why I am doing Hirsch. I get to embody his productions of Cherry Orchard and The Tempest and King Lear, imitating some of the greatest actors in Canada.”

Of course, introducing multiple characters in one show is challenging, but Nashman doesn’t shy from challenges, on stage or off. “Ideally, every project is a scary challenge, and I actually look forward to the moment in rehearsal when I say to myself, ‘this is impossible.’”

Nashman’s creative road is studded with such moments of daring and triumph. In 1999, he founded Theaturtle, a company whose mission it is “to create essential, ecstatic theatre that touches the earth and agitates the soul,” according to Nashman’s website. He serves as the artistic director and is the only constant member of the company, but Theaturtle has instigated many collaborations. One of these produced another Nashman solo show, Kafka and Son. Initially developed more than a decade ago, it toured successfully across Europe and won the Outstanding Performance Award at the Prague Fringe in 2013. Based on his performance in the show, Nashman was selected Toronto’s number one theatre artist of 2008 by NOW Magazine.

Nashman’s love for theatre began in childhood. “My father was a summer camp director and had a flair for showbiz,” he explained. “But my urge for theatre was self-generated and started when I was very young. It was so natural for me to perform that I had trouble considering it as a profession. Even now, when I’m busy, I say: ‘I have a lot of fun to do today.’”

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].