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Jay-Z Feeling Artful With Iconix, Tops Charts
Thursday, November 8, 2007
By: Michael Ivey
 When hip hop millionaire Jay-Z last year sold his Rocawear clothing line to Iconix Brand Group, the venture birthed brand management and licensing company Scion, LLC; the company recently purchased high end clothing brand Artful Dodger(R), from Sovereign State, LLC, for a reported $15 million.
 “[Artful Dodger] represent(s) what's next and new in fashion and we are glad to have both the brand and Scott [Langton; designer] as a part of our family,” says Jay-Z. “ Artful Dodger represents the first of many acquisitions that will begin to shape our joint venture with Iconix.”
Artful Dodger is an exclusive apparel brand distributed in the western hemisphere at specialty shops and boutiques like Harvey Nichols in the UK.
 Artful Dodger's founder, creative director and head designer, Scott Langton, will hold the latter titles with Signature Apparel Group as apart of a connected exclusive license deal with Scion for Artful Dodger men's and women's sportswear. “Iam looking forward to working with Signature Apparel, who as a company, has both the production infrastructure and financial capacity to make Artful Dodger the brand I always envisioned it to be,” says Langton. “This union allows me and my team to
focus purely on the designing of the collection and building on the success that we have already achieved in such a small period of time."
Iconix CEO/Chairman, Neil Cole, envisions his company and the Jay-Z brand launching Artful Dodger into a lifestyle brand, enjoying “distribution at high-end department stores and expansion into new product categories.”
Charles Dickens fancies his original ‘Artful Dodger’ (“Jack Dawkins” of the American novel Oliver Twist) “as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but...altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six.”
Meanwhie, Jay-Z’s catalyst puts him on pace to tie Elvis for the most appearances (10) atop The Billboard 200. As of November 7 ‘American Gangster,’ his tenth solo opus, fronted Billboard’s Wednesday Building Chart at 179,000 unweighted units-the
third highest number, behind Kanye West's "Graduation" (437,000) and 50 Cent's "Curtis" (310,000), since Billboard started ranking first day sales in September. The Beatles hold the record (19) for Billboard 200 No. 1’s.
Jay-Z’s VH1 Storytellers special, ‘Jay-Z: Life of an American Gangster,’ airs November 8 at 9pm.
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