Today we’d like to introduce you to Luis Toro.
Luis, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
My name is Luis Toro. I am originally from Colombia. I was a kid born in the fashion industry. I grew up between fabrics and sewing machines. My parents owned a 300 employee menswear manufacturing company back in Colombia. We manufacture all types of menswear and we had several men and kids labels that were very popular in our own stores and in our country. Needless to say my childhood was full of memories of the factories and the stores, where my sister and I used to work since an early age after school at every stage of the manufacturing process. My mother’s side of the family is also very artistic, and a lot of my influence in my career comes from their craft. They are experts in all kinds of embroideries, jewelry manufacturing and knitting.
All that is creating the perfect mix to be the person I am today. I attended one of the best universities in Colombia (Universidad Javeriana), where I got my bachelor’s in economics and history. I also studied in Oxford, England with my sister, where I was exposed to international living. Soon after and due to insecurity in Colombia, there was an attempt to kidnap my father and all my family had to come to the US. That is when I moved to Miami and started my Masters in Business Adm. (MBA) from the University of Miami, where I graduated very young (22 years old).
Being in another country with several degrees and great knowledge of the fashion industry my natural instinct was to create my own company and launch my own menswear contemporary label in the USA together with my sister and two of my best friends. The label was called Dulce De Leche and we were very successful and sold the collections for more than eight years to department stores like Macys and Saks and internationally in stores like Le Bon Marche and Gallerias La Fayette in Paris France. During this time, I was in charge of the product design and marketing of the brand. I will design three collections a year, traveling to Europe for fabric shows and then traveling to Colombia to manufacture all our lines in our own factories. It was one of the most amazing times of my life since I got to work with people I loved most and I was able to use my business training and my craft as a fashion designer that I learned from my mother who trained me everyday since I was a child.
After the crisis on 2008, we started to see the wholesale market suffer tremendously and we decided to sell our brand to Perry Ellis International. After that, I decided to go into teaching. I always wanted to be a University professor later in my life. But the dean from Miami International University of Art and Design (Charleene Parsons) called me because there was an adjunct professor opening for a class called: Entrepreneurship for fashion. I took the opportunity immediately regardless I was very young and people would confuse me for a student. Since then, I have been teaching university students of fashion for more than ten years.
At the same time, the owner of Perry Ellis recruits me to lead the multicultural marketing efforts of the company. Perry Ellis International has more than 18 brands that include: Perry Ellis, Original Penguin, Cubavera, Golf and some woman brands. We are a multinational company with offices all over the world but we have a big Hispanic audience not only in the USA but also major licenses in Latin America. My role in the company is to expose the brands to the Hispanic and multicultural market-creating digital, traditional and social media campaign through the use of celebrities, influencers and 360 marketing tools that makes us relevant to the Hispanic audience. As the Multicultural Marketing Director of the company for almost ten years, it has been a tremendous opportunity to work for the company that has given me the opportunity to learn about the corporate world since I only had experience working as an entrepreneur. Currently, my life moves between working for Perry Ellis and working for the University passing to students all that I have been blessed to learned and to be exposed through discipline and hard work.
Has it been a smooth road?
As an entrepreneur, nothing comes smoothly. My biggest challenge was moving to another country where the fashion industry works completely differently than in my country of origin in Colombia. Colombia is in the tropics and we do not have seasons. So the whole concept of seasonality in fashion design was new to me. Also the consumer behavior and shopping attitudes of the American man (even of those Hispanics living in the USA) were completely different than that of Colombian counterparts. Designs had to be cleaner, cuts bigger and the way to sell completely different.
Another challenge was becoming a professor. I remember my first class being petrified of teaching a 4-hour lecture class completely in English, which is not my first language. Also, working for a big corporation like Perry Ellis was a challenge at the beginning. Getting used to corporate structure and decision making where you do not have full creative or strategic control of what you do was hard. In the corporate world, there are so many departments you have to be collaborative with and success comes from great communication so ideas and strategies are a consensus since everything you do have repercussions in big dollars in areas other than your own.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Perry Ellis story. Tell us more about your work.
I am a fashion guy but above all, I would like to think of myself as a communicator. I communicate messages and ideas. When I had my own label, I used to do that trough my designs and clothes and nowadays I do it trough my advertising campaigns. I have been blessed to have opportunities in life that I have grab and worked day to day with major discipline for. I am a very focused person with a great ability to put groups of talented people together to manifest a vision or a goal. I see things other people do not see. I guess that makes me a visionary.
Being a professor has also allowed me to craft better my listening and patience skills, which I think are super important to be a leader. They see something that has not been created and as a team being able to manifest it to reality. I think that is the greatest reward for me. Seeing to fruition what I see in my brain that has not materialized yet and then being able to work with a group of talented people to see it become a reality. I think that is my superpower.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Our industry has changed tremendously in the past ten years. I would say a little too fast. So fast that we are still trying to comprehend how the consumer is adapting to all these technological changes that are affecting the way we source, shop and interact with each other. From the marketing standpoint, I feel the biggest change is that brands now can talk to the consumer directly without the need for a middle man (like the magazine editors in the past or fashion directors). Those people were gatekeepers and decided who was in front of whom.
Nowadays, that power has been shifted to the brands. Brands control their voice, their customers and even their distribution. The biggest shift in consumer behavior is Amazon. Amazon has completely disrupted the industry and is taking every day more market share from traditional retailers. That, together with COVID19, is creating uncertainty on how the consumer will behave in the future for brands that have traditional stores and depend on traditional formats.
Contact Info:
- Address: Perry Ellis International 3000 NW 107th Ave Doral FL 33172
- Website: www.pery.com
- Phone: 305-8731413
- Email: [email protected]
Suggest a story: VoyageMIA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
