He Worked Three Jobs Simultaneously When He Arrived in America. He Noticed Who Drove the Nicest Cars. Then He Built a $4 Billion Empire.

Do Won Chang and his wife Jin Sook arrived in Los Angeles with almost nothing.

He was twenty-one years old. They had left Korea with hope and very little else. America was the plan -the belief, shared by millions of immigrants before them, that the work would eventually find its level.

The work found him immediately.

He took three jobs.

Simultaneously. He was a janitor. He was a gas station attendant. He worked in a coffee shop. Three jobs at the same time, because one was not enough and two were not enough either. He cleaned. He pumped gas. He served coffee. He did not complain. He was watching.

He has said that during those early years in Los Angeles he paid attention to the people who drove the nicest cars. Who were they? What did they do? Where did their money come from?

The answer kept coming back the same way.

Fashion.

The people doing well in Los Angeles -the ones in the nice cars, the ones who seemed to have the freedom he wanted -were in the clothing business. He filed that observation away. He did not move immediately. He worked the three jobs and saved. He and Jin Sook lived carefully and accumulated slowly.

In 1984, three years after arriving, they had $11,000.

They opened a clothing store.

900 square feet. In Highland Park, Los Angeles. They called it Fashion 21.

In their first year, the store made $700,000.

Do Won Chang had been in America for three years, working three jobs, watching who had what and why. He had found his answer. He had moved toward it.

The store worked because he understood something simple and powerful: young people in Los Angeles wanted to look like the people in the nice cars but could not afford to shop where those people shopped. He would give them the look at a price they could actually pay. Fast fashion -not a term anyone used yet -was the gap he walked into.

He opened more stores. Then more. He changed the name to Forever 21 -a name that captured exactly what his customer wanted to feel.

By the 1990s there were stores across California. By the 2000s, there were stores across America. By the 2010s, Forever 21 was a global retail empire -800 stores in 57 countries, annual revenues approaching $4.4 billion. Do Won Chang and Jin Sook Chang had become billionaires. He was on the Forbes billionaires list. She was on the Forbes list of America's richest self-made women.

The man who cleaned floors and pumped gas and served coffee, who stood at the gas station watching who drove what and why, had built one of the largest fashion retail companies on earth.

The story has a shadow.

In 2019, Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy. The fast fashion market had changed -Zara, H&M, online competitors had all taken market share. The company had expanded too aggressively into real estate it could not sustain. The empire contracted.

But here is what the bankruptcy does not erase: a man who arrived in America with nothing and three simultaneous jobs built -from a 900-square-foot store with $11,000 -a company that employed tens of thousands of people, served hundreds of millions of customers, and made him a billionaire.

He saw who drove the nice cars. He figured out why. He moved.