by Lynette Alice

Created on: August 26, 2010   Last Updated: May 01, 2011

Baby Phat, owned by Kellwood, is going through a major reorganization - and the biggest part of that reorganization is cutting ties with Kimora Lee Simmons. While the rumored reasons for letting Simmons go are numerous, none have been absolutely confirmed - just speculated upon based on the comments of sources said to be very high in the Kellwood hierarchy. The question on the minds of most people are what are the reasons Kimora Lee Simmons has been cut from baby Phat, where will she land, and will this improve the Baby Phat line?

Baby Phat was founded by Kimore Lee Simmons along with her ex-husband Russell Simmons in 1999 as another arm of their clothing empire. In December of 2004, Kellwood purchased Baby Phat for a reported $140 million in cash which at the time seemed like a bargain. As the years passed however, Kellwood found that working with Kimora Lee Simmons was no picnic - especially after she and Russell split. After going private in February of 2008, it took barely over a year for the realization to sink in that Baby Phat was a black hole so far as cash went. It was bad enough, bankruptcy filings were in the works by July of 2009.

By June of 2010, not only were sales down, which means lower profits if any, but traffic to the Baby Phat site was even down by about 33% according to Quantcast, indicating there was a drastically decreased interest in what the line has to offer. The question is, what went wrong?

Without the stern oversight of Russell Simmons, it is rumored that Kimora Lee Simmons began using Baby Phat as some combination of her own PR machine and ATM. There was no denying that she had good design ideas when focused, but the latest offering provided little to be excited by. Furthermore, Simmons often insisted that as the face of Baby Phat she and her children appear in ads for Baby Phat - all for a fee cited by some as being steep, and others ridiculous.

Then there was the issue of the ads them self. Simmons is a size ten, and while that is hardly anything to be ashamed of, she did not like that size ten body on public display. That prompted thousands of dollars of airbrushing to be necessitated for each photo - used or not - just to pick from the field which would be used. Then when that didn’t provide satisfactory results, her head would simply be digitally added to a photo of another model giving her an instant new body. This can be seen on her “Dear Me” ad in which her face was used with Daria Werbowy’s body from the French March of 2005 Vogue issue.

Still, that didn’t always work which at times caused the need to use body doubles for shoots with Lee Simmons face superimposed over those bodies which again cost thousands of dollars each day for the models and multiple outfits needed for each. All told, it was rumored to be felt that no amount of creative energy that Kimora Lee Simmons was providing to the line matched the headache of working within the confines of her demands and costs associated to them.

Moving forward, Kimora Lee Simmons will remain active with her other clothing lines and products. She has for the most part declined to comment on anything related to the split aside from a few random Tweets which provided little insight. To this point, she has not been fighting split, and Kellwood has mostly remained mum on any arrangements that may have been made regarding the severing of ties.

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