The Manifest Destiny of Josie Natori

“I have no fetish for lingerie,” Josie Natori says with exaggerated exasperation. “To me, it’s clothes. I don’t get all this categorization.” Natori has long had a thing for business. “I knew as a child, I’d have my own,” she says. Her professional inevitability is now marking its 40th anniversary. Given the boundless energy that manifests in rapid-fire conversation, she seems good for another 40 years (or more). She might get close; her father worked until he was 93; her mother, at 92, still clocks in every day at the family construction business in the Philippines, and writes every outgoing check. Natori holds the post of chief executive officer while her son, Kenneth Natori, who joined the company after stints as a reporter for Bloomberg and on Wall Street, is president. Completing the family triptych, her husband Ken Sr., is chairman. Market sources put the volume of Natori’s core business at upward of $50 million; $125 million total including licensees. Natori’s path to fashion came seamlessly as a consumer but circuitously as an entrepreneur. Her mother was, and remains, a voracious participant in the world of style and as a child, Natori followed her lead, her penchant for coordination indicative of her eye for

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