Designer Profile
Ovadia & Sons
The company itself may be only three years old, but the story begins some 30 years ago with the twins' father, who moved to New York from Israel in the early 1980s and started a childrenswear company - "out of the back of a wood-panelled Oldsmobile station wagon", as Mr Shimon Ovadia puts it. The company expanded rapidly on the back of a chance meeting in the early 1990s. The brothers' father, looking to buy excess inventory and cancelled orders, walked into a showroom that held the US license for London Fog. "The owner of the company gave my father $180,000 in credit that same day," he says.
The brothers left school at 15 to start work at their father's fast-growing company, starting in the warehouse before working their way up to design roles. From that point on, they never looked back. "Growing up, we always loved clothing. All of our hard-earned money as teens would go to it," say the twins. It was inevitable that we'd end up designing our own clothes - but what was supposed to start out as a couple of shirts and a few ties ended up being an entire collection.
