Gap's Revival | Faded Khakis | 1
Business Wars
Audible
4.6 • 13.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s 2016, and a fire is ripping through a Gap distribution center in Fishkill, New York. When the smoke clears, thousands of Gap T-shirts, khakis, and jeans are reduced to ash. But one analyst sees good news in the wreckage. Gap probably couldn’t have sold all those clothes anyway, and that’s because the company has lost the pop culture cool that once brought shoppers to it in droves. For the next four years, sales don’t improve at Gap and Banana Republic, and Old Navy starts slipping, too. So Gap does something dramatic: It partners with a rapper, a fashion icon, and a lightning rod for controversy — Kanye West. That bold bet won’t spark a comeback, though. It’ll burn Gap instead.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's September 2022 on Wall Street. |
| 0:12.5 | Live from the trading room floor of the New York Stock Exchange, |
| 0:15.6 | CNBC welcomes a very different kind of guest, Kanye West, or yayh, as he now goes by. He joins by satellite, |
| 0:24.9 | and what follows is one of the strangest outbursts CNBC has ever aired. Yeh appears on screen |
| 0:32.9 | inside what looks like a shipping container, bare metal walls, no windows. He's wearing a bulky white |
| 0:39.5 | sweatshirt and a ragged gray baseball hat. He stares at the ground, rarely glancing at the camera. |
| 0:46.2 | Not that it matters. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of oversized, mirrored wraparound sunglasses. |
| 0:52.6 | Yee designed the shades himself and planned to sell them in Gap stores. |
| 0:56.9 | That's Gap Incorporated, the San Francisco retailer famous for laid-back basics. |
| 1:02.7 | Gap was a mall staple during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s before stumbling in the 2000s. |
| 1:09.8 | By 2020, the company was in trouble. |
| 1:12.9 | Gap's sales were sinking. |
| 1:15.3 | Things got so bad, the company even considered spinning off its old Navy brand, |
| 1:20.4 | splitting into two companies just to stay afloat. |
| 1:23.4 | Then a new CEO arrived and brought Yey aboard to help her write the ship. |
| 1:28.3 | Gap signed a deal with Yee to launch a new brand, Yeezy Gap. |
| 1:33.3 | For Gap, it wasn't just a partnership. It was a lifeline. |
| 1:38.3 | But now, Yee is torpedoing his Gap deal just two years into it. |
| 1:43.3 | Yee tells CNBC viewers that Yeezy Gap deal just two years into it. |
| 1:48.0 | Yee tells CNBC viewers that Yeezy Gap's prices are too high. |
| 1:52.3 | He accuses the company of copying some of his designs in their other merchandise. |
| 1:57.3 | And he says Gap's leadership has ignored his concerns. |
... |
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