Fashion brands live in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Milan.
That is not a rule anybody wrote down. It is just where everything is.
The showrooms. The press. The buyers. The photographers. The people.
Billy Reid built a nationally recognized American fashion brand and headquartered it in Florence, Alabama, a town of around forty thousand people in the northwest corner of the state.
Not as a gimmick. As the actual center of the business.
That sounds like a disadvantage you would have to overcome.
It turned out to be an advantage you could not buy anywhere else, and the reasons contain one of the more useful ideas available to anyone deciding where to spend the next twenty years.
Let me walk through it.