Harald Husum is the CEO of Appaman. Appaman a is wildly successful kids clothing brand based in New York City. Harald and his wife/business parter, Lynn have two daughters.
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Q: At what point in your life did you realize fashion was going to be your career?
A: Well, I came out of not fashion but graphic design. And when we started this, I always wanted it to be a real job. So when you say “my career” that probably took a couple years into running this company that I actually saw that this could turn into something that could last a long time. In 2003 we decided to give it a shot.
Q: What’s the most inspiring aspect of your business?
A: The inspiration is that everything that you do is your personal, I don’t want to call it baby, but everything you do comes back to you. You’reidentified with this company and the brand and every single product and every single word that is spoken by us or one of our employees is your word. So it’s very inspirational because you kind of always have to think about getting better. You get inspired by results. Results are not necessarily more sales, results are when you see that it’s affecting people and that people recognize that this season looks so go good compared to last season, etc. And people are excited about it. There is a lot to be inspired about.
Q: How have your kids influenced your business and your designs?
A: A lot. You know I have two daughters and we started out as pretty much a boy’s line. So, you can definitely, hopefully see it in our girls line that our girls have inspired us. And now the oldest one is 6, so we can definitely listen to her advice more than we could when she was a little toddler and it was all about Dora. And our daughters are very different. The little one, she’s 3 and half and she doesn’t want to put on a pair of pants and everything needs a twirl. And you have the big one that is a skinny girl and she wants to wear everything super tight. They’re very differnt so they’re great to use as fit models because you end up somewhere in between.
Q: How do you balance the time you need to invest in your business and the time you spend with your daughters?
A: Well, that’s a very good question because that touches a nerve of where we are right now. Your ego will always tell you to get bigger and bigger: more important stores, more important collections, you know everything should get bigger and bigger. And that’s kind of the traditional way, the American way, or any way really of running a business. We know that by growing and growing and growing and growing and growing fast, most of the time you’re going to set aside your ego a little bit but more but you’re also going to have much more work on your hands. More responsibility, more stress, more distractions and it’s always been a priority for my wife Lynn and I: to have time. To take alot of vacations and work hard when we’re here but to have very strict day. We don’t come in on weekends unless it’s a trade show or something that there is no way around. And really have time with our kids but not be too distracted. You know, kids do not respond well to someone like me checking my email on my iphone while I’m playing with them. And I don’t respond well to it. I have all the guilt coming with that.
That’s very important, because we have opportunites now to grow alot. There are opportunities to take on a much bigger piece of the cake, so to speak. There’s no lack of ambition, more of lack of willingness to give up our quality time.
Q: How do you think you’ve changed as a person since becoming a dad?
A: In a lot of ways. It’s been so long. If you’d asked me that 6 months after we had our first one, I’d give you a whole different answer. You just start thinking a little differently. It’s like the biggest change in your life and your priorities change.
Q: Are there any particular brands, like Legos for instance, that you have affinity for because it’s something that you remember that you can now share in with your daughters?
A: You mention Lego, and I like everyone else, I’m Norwegian, but Lego was the thing over there and we went to Legoland in the summers. That is definitely the brand that I would pick out. But, I also spent a lot of time in nature growing up in a small town in Norway and there weren’t a whole lot of brands, definitely Legos but not a lot of other stuff. We did a lot of model cars and things like that. I was very much a boy’s boy, you know two older brothers and sometimes those things don’t transfer to my girls.
Q: When you’re talking to consumers in the marketplace did you see Dads buying clothes for kids?
A: When we first started this, which was now almost 7 years ago we got comments like “I never thought my husband would buy our kid’s clothes but now he does because he like’s the Appaman stuff” so it was very new then but now it’s very common. When you go walk around shopping on a Saturday the father has as much say as the mom. Maybe it tapers off with a first or second kid, just an assumption, but we get comments all the time about dads buying.
Meet Harald yourself and learn more about the Appaman brand in their great video:
