Do Won Chang

Do Won Chang was born in South Korea in 1949 and emigrated to the United States in the early 1980s with his wife Jin Sook, arriving with little money and almost no English, a common and difficult starting point for Korean immigrants to Los Angeles at the time. To support themselves he took on a string of low-paid, physically demanding jobs, including working as a janitor, a coffee shop worker and a petrol station attendant, often working long hours across more than one job at once.

While pumping petrol he noticed that customers driving the newest, most expensive cars were often, in his observation, working in the garment industry, and he concluded that clothing retail might offer a path forward faster than the jobs then available to him. In 1984, with around eleven thousand dollars saved between the couple, they opened a small clothing store in Los Angeles called Fashion 21, aimed at young customers wanting trend-driven clothes at very low prices.

The store's first year brought in far more revenue than Chang had expected, and the couple reinvested aggressively, opening further stores across California and then nationally through the 1990s and 2000s under the renamed Forever 21 brand, built around rapidly changing inventory and low prices that let the company undercut most competitors on speed to market.

The company grew into a global fast fashion chain with hundreds of stores before overexpansion and heavy competition led it into bankruptcy in 2019, a sharp reversal for a business built from a single small shop by two immigrants who had arrived barely able to communicate in English.