It was something that Charles had always known. Look at magazines. Women’s magazines were all about feeling something. There was advice on how to feel pretty, how to feel love, how to feel happy, all sold to you by making you feel like you were none of those things. Men’s magazines, on the other hand, were about making money, going places, having sex with beautiful women, and eating rare or bloody things. Passions, not emotions.
He had pleased himself with that thought whenever he looked over the piles of glossy business magazines commingling with the fashion books in the waiting room of his office: Fortune pairing with Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire splayed across Fast Company, staid Inc. and Money getting their kicks with V, SmartMoney sticking it to Glamour. Those magazines had always made him feel vaguely sorry for women, as much as he admired them and lusted after them.
Charles remembered reading something in one of the magazines—Fortune, he thought it was—back in the early days of the millennium, when it had seemed like nothing he did could possibly go wrong. “Companies fail the way Ernest Hemingway wrote about going broke,” the writer had said. “Gradually, and then suddenly.” That was exactly what it had been like for Charles, though even the gradual part had been very, very sudden.
Emotion was the culprit.
Really, Charles’s mistake had been as dumb as keeping all his cash in a box under the bed and then getting drunk and chatty with a thieving locksmith.
For years he’d expanded judiciously, buying factories only when demand raged or prices dropped, but suddenly, simultaneously, sales of three of the brands that he manufactured had skyrocketed, bringing a jump in orders and an influx of cash. The money needed to be reinvested in order to avoid a big tax hit, and Charles’s competitive streak was stoked. Why stay in the background, churning out goods for small-time makeup artists, when, in fact, he was the visionary? If it was all about the verticals, then he should be getting right in front of the consumer with his own product. Why let these amateurs earn the giant markup? Charles Wang knew what the world wanted, and he was going to give it to them.
But to do it right, he needed more cash.
In certain dark moments, Charles allowed the conversation to replay in his mind. Each time the turning point loomed larger, each time his own failings stood out more harshly.
Really, it was a series of strikes.
ONE:
Marco Perozzi, the banker he was accustomed to dealing with, was gone.
In his place, J. Marshall “Call me Marsh” Weymouth.
Charles was not a man who believed in the false familiarity of nicknames.
TWO:
It was 2006.
The Fed had just raised interest rates to 5.25 percent and threatened to go higher.
Charles was a man who knew that when governments made threats they tended to keep their word.
THREE:
The luxury cosmetics market was worth $6 billion.
The largely untapped ethnic cosmetics market was worth a potential $3 billion.
Charles was a man who believed in potential.
Right, wrong, wrong.
“Marsh,” Charles had said, wielding the nickname like a hundred prep-school roommates and fellow eating-club members had done before him, “no one is doing this right now. We can make fortunes!”
Marsh twisted his signet ring. He looked at the line of products that Charles had arranged on the long obsidian tabletop and fiddled with the trackpad of the laptop that Charles used for his presentation.
“What are your intentions in creating this line, Mr. Wang?”
“Intention? To make money.”
The banker shifted again. “Is that it?”
Charles was confused. He had already talked about his growth strategy, about the buying power of nonwhite women, about the success of other targeted makeup lines, about his stellar supply chain and his plans for distribution.
“What else is there?” asked Charles.
Marsh leaned back dispassionately, dismissively.
“Business is no place for politics,” he said.
“Politics?”
“The fight for inclusion is a worthy fight,” said Marsh, “but it’s not one that traditionally yields high financial returns.”
Who did this wan, overbred man think Charles Wang was? Some sort of brown-people revolutionary with a tube of red lipstick in his raised fist and an ammo belt strung with eyelash curlers?
“This is not some NAACP for eye shadow, Marsh. Do you know what the markup is on cosmetics even when label is buying straight from manufacturer? Seventy-eight percent! Do you know how much I can make, since I make it all myself? Ninety-five percent markup! The research is there. The market is open. I know how to sell. I have mucho skin in the game. I only need more capital; not so much money for very substantial return.”
“No one is questioning your business sense, Mr. Wang. You’ve clearly been very successful so far. It’s my experience, though, that businesses created to do some perceived good rarely achieve that goal.”
That asshole. Worse than the Communists, with words that confirmed their meaning by denying it.
“We simply like to be certain that our money is being used to make more of it.”
Charles thought longingly of Perozzi, his former point man at the bank. They had enjoyed a nearly perfect borrower-banker relationship. Charles requested; Marco assented. Charles prospered; Marco collected. What more was there?