Can anything be more American than Nautica? The clothing company runs advertising campaigns filled with the bold and the beautiful, the young and the restless, all running, jumping, skippering and generally acting in a ruggedly north American fashion.
The subtext is that the great frontier-lands and oceans are easier to deal with when you are wearing Nautica.
It is classic pioneering stuff - and it has been entirely created by a man called David Chu who arrived in New York from Taiwan at the age of 14, unable to speak English.
Mr Chu was in Hong Kong a fortnight ago. He flew in from Taiwan, where he was launching his children's range, but spent 90 minutes stuck in a holding pattern over Kai Tak because of fog. If, as he remarks later, setting up Nautica has been a voyage for him ('The fun is the process of getting there') it is safe to say that there have been few such delays in his commercial journey. He had an idea, he launched it and the winds have favoured his steady progress ever since.
When Mr Chu started Nautica in 1983, the basic premise was that it should provide functional fashion. That is why, he explains, the marketing has appeared so consistently American. 'The casual lifestyle is American and Nautica is about designing a specific casual look. People tend to think of it as just American but it is also about using technical fabrics which have a function outdoors. And there are European heritage ideas in there too.' Like that other great purveyor of the American laid-back dream, Ralph Lauren, Mr Chu did not spring from a gilded Hamptons-old-money slice of society. But he took a canny outsider's view of it. His father was in the Chinese restaurant business and perhaps this was why the son liked to use culinary metaphors to describe his own approach. 'I really look at myself as being like diffusion cooking, a mixture of East and West,' he said.
'If you look at Nautica as a design philosophy, it can come from any place in the world. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're from. America has pioneered that to a degree, wouldn't you say - it's a society which embraces new ideas. It's a unique place today, where it's possible to have concepts, like the concept of the hamburger.' If Mr Chu is a dish, then he is a slow-cooking one, bits and pieces being added to his collection like a good hot pot. His growth has been remarkably consistent. He has gone from a six-item collection of windbreakers and anoraks that made US$3 million 15 years ago when he was 27, to a company with sales of US$387 million (HK$2.99 billion) which licenses its name for fragrances, watches, luggage and, recently, sneakers.