Biography Charlie Chanaratsopon
Charlie Chanaratsopon is a young man in a very great hurry. "I hate downtime!" exclaims the 35-year-old Thai-American, chopping the air for emphasis. With his slicked-back hair and sleeves rolled up to the elbows, he's always ready to get down to business--even as he weaves frantically in and out of Houston traffic in his black Mercedes S550, eager to show a visitor one of his stores. "I'd probably be the worst lawyer, worst doctor, worst engineer on the planet because of my ADD-ness," says Chanaratsopon.
Launching First Store Since launching his first store in Houston nine years ago, Chanaratsopon hasn't slowed down a whit. He's now opening five stores a month, mimicking the model of fast-fashion giants Zara and H&M by selling attractive but cheaper versions of trendy items, sourced from Asia. Examples: $15 scarves, $9 sunglasses and $7 to $15 iPhone cases. Customers spend, on average, $30.
His drive runs deeper than business, supercharged as it is by a familiar immigrant success story. His maternal grandfather worked at a gas station in Houston to put his two daughters through college. As the first generation born in the U.S., Chanaratsopon always felt the heat to keep pushing. Perhaps a frightening childhood episode played a part, too. Burglars broke into his house at 2 a.m., tied up his family and forced his father to give up all their valuables. "They put me on the floor and started kicking me," he recalls. "They took the revolver out, shoved it in my throat, clicked it back. I'm 13, and all I
Education Some of that business education surely stuck, since Charlie Chanaratsopon ended up in the elementary school principal's office after charging first-grade classmates $1 a day to rent his Nintendo games. Profits fueled more game purchases and, hence, more rentals. Today, he says, "I'm still buying and selling--that's what I love." There were detours. After graduating from Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles with a degree in finance, he became a real estate analyst at Sanwa Bank, then came back to Houston to help his dad find a
Chanaratsopon supervised construction of an office building as well as an adjacent strip mall, which he quickly filled with tenants. That venture was so successful he started financing construction of other shopping centers in Houston's suburbs, building seven in two and a half years. "It wasn't being smart, it was kind of luck at the time," he muses. "The real estate market was so hot, and they were valuing it so high, whatever you built you could make so much refinancing and selling it.�
Charming Charlie Store He dreamed of building 100 such malls and making more money by owning the store that anchored them all. But what kind? Apparel had too many players. Harwin Avenue, Houston's stretch of discount stores offering cheap imports in warehouse settings, offered inspiration. With leftover consignment returns from Silver Express as the merchandising backbone, the first Charming Charlie opened in October 2004.
Chanaratsopon didn't need much encouragement to start fasttracking. "Own the store, own the complex--that was the idea," he says. "That kind of turned when I realized you couldn't physically build 100 shopping centers in six years. The stores were getting so much traction. It was a better business--a faster business." Each cost, on average, $750,000 to open. So he appended a grandiose plan to his business school application to Columbia in late 2005. Over the next two years he flew back and forth most weeks between New York City and Houston, where he not only wrote checks but also hung display racks and swept floors at new locations. Monday mornings he
Awards In 2013, Charming Charlie was awarded with The Accessories Council's "Specialty Retailer" ACE Award, ranked number 745 on Inc. Magazine's annual list of "Top 5,000 Fastest Growing Businesses," and was featured on Forbes Magazine's "Ones to Watch" list. Prior to that, in 2010, Charming Charlie received the "Hot Retailer of the Year" award from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and the "Marketer of the Year" award in the Retail Category from the American Marketing Association (AMA). Within the same year, Charlie was honored with Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the
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