Former Gap CEO says he warned Kanye West against partnering with the apparel giant for the Yeezy X Gap collection
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Former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler said he told Kanye West not to go into partnership with Gap.
Gap announced its 10-year partnership with Yeezy, West's fashion brand, in June 2020.
"It doesn't work for someone like Kanye. He is not a corporate person," Drexler told Yahoo Finance.
Retail veteran and former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler said he warned Kanye West not to go into partnership with Gap.
Through a 10-year partnership announced in June 2020, West and his team at his Yeezy fashion brand will design a co-branded collection for men, women, and children. The collection is called Yeezy X Gap.
Drexler - who was CEO of Gap between 1992 and 2002, and was credited with making the brand cool again - said in an interview with Yahoo Finance Live that he didn't think the partnership between West and Gap would benefit either party.
"I told him he shouldn't do the deal because it doesn't make any sense in my opinion," Drexler said, recalling an earlier conversation with West. "It doesn't work for someone like Kanye. He is not a corporate person and Gap is a big corporation.
"He is a smart guy but he shouldn't have done it. And I don't think they [Gap] should have done it, either," he said.
When Gap announced the deal with West, its shares soared as much as 42% - investors saw it as a chance for the brand to make itself relevant to younger consumers after years of sliding sales.
Read more: Kanye West's secret to building a footwear empire to compete with Nike
This June, it unveiled its first collaboration with Yeezy, a $200 bright blue bomber jacket. Drexler told Yahoo Finance that the jacket reached $7 million in sales overnight, but didn't provide any evidence to support this claim. A spokesperson for Gap did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this.
Gap has not yet shared sales figures from its collaboration with Yeezy, but UBS analysts previously estimated that the partnership could be worth as much as $970 million.
Gap Inc is due to report second-quarter earnings later this month.
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