“The company was highly successful. Prior to my ousting, it generated $5 billion in the last 10 years,” said Charney in an interview on Friday. In recent months, Charney said he didn’t think the company would survive without his leadership, and denies the claims that his misconduct contributed to the company’s downfall.“This is a manifestation of Wall Street malfeasance,” he continued, referring to his ousting. “The company got driven into the ground.”

Charney— who is Canadian, ironically—has a classic entrepreneurship story: He started American Apparel as a “Made in America” T-shirt company out of his dorm room at Tufts University in 1989. Twenty-four years later, the company recorded $633 million in sales with over 200 stores in over 20 countries. But in the past three years, the company has faced huge debts, costly legal battles involving its founder, and a drop in sales. American Apparel did what any company does in these moments: turn to private investors for help. Eventually, Charney was ousted by his own board. At the company’s bankruptcy hearing last November, its second bankruptcy filing in two years, the company reported $177 million in debt.

“The story of American Apparel is the best and worst of all things,” said Mark Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “As brilliant a merchant and marketer as [Charney] was, he was guilty of never having taken seriously enough the need to organize his company efficiently, especially to offset the fact that he was working with domestic manufacturing.”

There was a cultural shift that hampered American Apparel, too. Elizabeth Segran at Racked summed it up best, “In their heyday, [American Apparel and Urban Outfitters] made a science of identifying exactly what it was that made hipsters so attractive, then recreated that aesthetic in their stores.” But the company’s plan of mass-marketing a particular vein of counterculture lost its allure, as consumer tastes shifted. Zara, one of the most successful fast-fashion stories in the past several years, focuses on selling designer-like, high-end looking clothes that are inexpensive—a distinct contrast to American Apparel’s stark and basic approach to apparel.

But fashion wasn’t the only thing to change; the retail business changed, too. The economic downturn was hard on the fashion industry as consumers cut back on spending. And brick-and-mortar stores have struggled as online retailers bite into their sales and target demographics. That can be especially harmful for brands like American Apparel, where the business model is to open a bevy of stores and rely on foot traffic. “There are too many stores in too many places,” explained Cohen. “Everybody doing business in brick-and-mortar is migrating in some way, shape, or form to the internet. Everyone is seeing a chronic decline in the productivity of their real estate.”