PVH CEO: Chasing Retail Success | Mad Money | CNBC

We had just a very strong business, particularly in Europe and in Asia, driven by our China business, but also our hotel businesses here in the United States. We had a very strong fourth quarter driven by our Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger business.

Look, it's a very highly promotional environment, particularly in North America, and we are planning North America very conservatively as we go into 2017. But we have just very strong momentum internationally behind that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think you need to be a global player. You need strong brands across the board. You need that scalability. And you want to have that diversity from a geographic point of view at the same time.

Well, let me put it a couple of ways. I think competitively we're in a terrific place. We've got two strong brands, our price elasticity, and I touched on a geographic perspective. But from an industry point of view, from a retail point, it is a terrible idea. It's basically a $500 billion tax on the consumer. This will all come through as tax creating selling price increases to the consumer going forward. And the worst thing about it is it's being hidden in a charge on imports. The last thing we want here in the United States is to bring back apparel manufacturing to the United States. This is a low skill, high labor content business. Basically you could pay minimum wage. Why do we want to compete in that product category with the likes of Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kenya? We want to compete in high-tech manufacturing, not low tech, low labor. The people who will be hurt are the mainstream working guys, maybe even people who voted for Trump. Look, I can't imagine President Trump in the White House would be supporting a border tax. I know it's been batted back and forth, but if you think about everything that he stands for and taking care of his constituent base, it just doesn't make sense at all. This is really a big tax on importers and retailers that support the retail sector. Retailers are the largest employer sector in the United States. The top 10 companies from an employment point of view in the U.S. private sector, six are retailers: Walmart, Target, Macy's, JC Penney's, Home Depot, Costco. I don't know why the value of a manufacturing job that pays $60,000 is more valuable than an assistant store manager making $75,000 at one of these key retailers. I couldn't be more passionate about how I think about this as a consumer and as an American tax base. I think this is just ill-founded.

Well, a couple of things. On a dot-com business, sometimes retailers that you don't sell to can have availability of product that gets diverted through the market. I can tell you that is a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny business and it's not us doing it directly, it's going through third-party players. As for Sears, which in its heyday was a major player, today it has been wound down and is being planned very, very conservatively. It's just not a material player for us. We're not going to get hurt if something bad happens. We'll have to manage through a small hiccup, but we've got a plan for the balance of this year very, very conservatively.

Absolutely. Our standalone stores for Calvin and Tommy Hilfiger for the fourth quarter and as we've gone into the first quarter are running high single-digit positive comps in that market. And even more importantly, our order book for fall for both brands. Tommy brand is up 10% on a really large base. Calvin Klein is up over 25% as that brand just grows. We're really seeing phenomenal growth throughout Europe, and it's across Europe from the UK, Germany, Southern Europe, Spain, and Italy. We're really seeing fantastic growth of both brands.