“Everyone knows I’m the king,” Kanye West said in an interview today with CNBC’s Closing Bell. “A king can’t live in someone else’s castle. A king has to make his own castle.”
That, apparently, is Ye’s aim now, but first he wants to dissolve the 10 year deal he signed in 2020 with Gap. It’s a significant move, given that his Yeezy Gap line reportedly made $1 billion in sales in the first year, according to Forbes. In 2021, Bloomberg estimated that about $970 million of the hip-hop mogul’s fortune was attributable to the Gap deal.
The multihyphenate’s lawyers sent a letter to Gap Inc today indicating he was terminating the partnership. According to the missive, seen by Reuters, Ye maintains that Gap breached the agreement by not selling Yeezy Gap-branded products at its brick-and-mortar retail locations and failing to open dedicated stores for the brand.
On Closing Bell, Ye ran down a list of other issues.
“It was always a dream of mine to take the best product possible to the masses…We designed an entire collection and, actually, I wasn’t able to set the actual price that I wanted for this collection. And then they [Gap] took one of the shirts and sold it for $19. Didn’t price my stuff [how I wanted]. Priced my stuff at like $200 and above their whole price point normally, and then did the exact shirt for like $20.”
Indeed, the first product from the Yeezy Gap line – a blue puffer jacket – sold out within hours in June 2021. Later that year year, it was made available again. The price? $200.
“Sometimes I would talk to the head guys and it was like I was on mute or something,” West told CNBC. “Our agenda, it wasn’t aligned.”
“A king can’t live in someone else’s castle. A king has to make his own castle,” says @kanyewest on his decision to terminate a contract with Gap due to a lack of follow-through on obligations. pic.twitter.com/YoZU9x6sJ3
— CNBC (@CNBC) September 15, 2022