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Source | The New York Times | December 27, 2007
Introducing the Ivanka
By Ruth La Ferla
Looking almost demure in a tailored gray coat, Ivanka Trump stepped onto a makeshift stage to greet the construction crew at Trump SoHo, a new condominium and hotel in downtown Manhattan. The occasion, a topping-off party to celebrate the project’s near completion, was raucous.
“We love you, Ivanka,” one of the workmen bellowed between man-size bites of sausage, his shout followed by a chorus of “Ivanka, you’re the best.”
No stranger to that sort of overwrought reception, Ms. Trump, the daughter of the real estate magnate Donald Trmp, received the homage with aplomb. She stood to thank the men, well aware that her understated coat did little to conceal her curves or dim the sheen of the Champagne-color hair that cascaded past her shoulders.
Just a few hours earlier at her office in Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, she had acknowledged that there are distinct advantages to “being young, blond and, if you will, looking a certain way.”
“I’m 26,” Ms. Trump said, “and I tell myself, ‘Why not have a little fun with that?’ ”
Seeing her swan alongside Mr. Trump on “The Apprentice,” or vamp demiclad in the pages of a fashion magazine, an observer could be forgiven for sizing her up as a bit of garnish on her father’s multilayered business operation. If they do, “That’s O.K.,” Ms. Trump said evenly. Seated somewhat rigidly in a fan-backed leather chair, she pointed out that it is she, after all, who will have the last word.
“As a principal of this company, I negotiate all the deals I’m working on,” she said. “If people think I’m just the boss’s daughter, they’re deceived.”
Clearly, Ms. Trump has inherited her father’s prodigious flair for self-promotion. On the face of it, Mr. Trump rules a real estate empire of 70 properties. But in some ways, he is the Pierre Cardin of the real estate world, a licensing pioneer who has sold the right to use his name on dozens of luxury projects, charging 8 to 15 percent of the gross, according to Forbes magazine, which calculates his net worth as $3 billion. (Mr. Trump, who disputes the Forbes ranking, says the figure is $7 billion.)
Ms. Trump is just as able a master of self-packaging. Her father’s daughter to the bone, she says she has harnessed her energies — to say nothing of television guest spots on “Oprah” and “Project Runway” and nights on the town on the arm of Jared Kushner, the real estate heir and publisher — in service of the Trump brand.
Then there are her exuberant displays of thigh and cleavage in the laddie book Stuff, and in Arena, the progressive British glossy. In October’s Harper’s Bazaar, she was photographed reclining in a dress slit to her thighs, a burly half-naked construction worker pounding a jackhammer at her feet.
In conversation Ms. Trump is unabashed. If her brash antics prompt people to question her competence, “I’m fine with that,” she said. Paraphrasing one of her father’s favorite maxims, she was quick to add, “It’s the end result that counts.”
A full wall in her office is papered with magazine covers emblazoned with her image: Southern Seasons, on the occasion of a new Trump project in Atlanta; New York magazine; and Elle Mexico. (“That last allowed us to appeal to a female buyer,” she said.)
Each cover, she said, represents a calculated effort to promote the family name. “What other developer could generate that sort of publicity for free?”
Although Ms. Trump shares responsibility for the development of several dozen properties with her brothers Donald Jr., 29, and Eric, 23, her recent high visibility has suggested to some that she is her father’s heir apparent.
But Mr. Trump made it clear that he has no plans to anoint a sole successor. “I have three children who are of age,” he said. “I’d like to see them work together.”
Last summer Ms. Trump was named vice president for acquisitions and development of the Trump Organization; within days she visited Dubai to negotiate a deal for four Trump towers, then flew to Mexico, Panama, Hawaii and finally Chicago, where she was to oversee the construction of a hotel tower.
Like her father, she is a hectic multitasker. Last fall, she introduced her collection of diamond hoops, rings and lariat necklaces priced from $750 to $350,000 and up, in partnership with Dynamic Diamonds. The jewelry is showcased in the Palm Beach-playful setting of her new boutique on Madison Avenue. She declined to provide figures but maintained that business “has been great.”
“We are making sales every day,” she said. “It’s encouraging.”
She also appears from time to time as a guest on the Fox Business Network “Happy Hour” at 5 p.m. “We get tremendous response whenever she’s on,” said Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News. “For someone so young, she has quite a following.” Mr. Ailes added he would not be surprised to see her one day turn from real estate to news or entertainment. “She’s going to have that opportunity there,” he said.
Ms. Trump insists that plunging a finger into so many pies will not distract her from her primary calling. “Real estate is my life,” she said. “It is my day job, if you will. But it consumes my nights and weekends, too.” Armed with a BlackBerry and towering heels, her 5-foot-10-inch frame poured into a slender Dolce & Gabbana suit, she is girded for the brazen world that real estate has become.
“Today it is all about branding,” said Donald Capoccia of BFC Partners, a developer of 48 Bond Street, a luxury residence in downtown Manhattan.
“It used to be enough to give a new building a name. And real estate was a low-tech bricks and mortar and dirt operation. But this is a view a young person coming into the business right now certainly wouldn’t have.”
For all her youth, Ms. Trump, who graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School, can talk the talk. She pointed out that 13 hotels are in the pipeline, adding, “People talk credit crunch, but it’s a great testament within the financial community that we’ve secured financing.” Of her father’s new hotel in Waikiki, the Trump International Hotel and Tower, she noted: “We sold the whole building out in five to six hours.” She called it a “gross sellout” of more than $700 million, which has been reported as a real estate record.
Ms. Trump’s negotiating prowess is tricky to assess, as no reporter has sat at her elbow in a business meeting. But colleagues, who declined to be identified lest they offend her father — even while praising the daughter — said they are impressed by Ms. Trump’s decisiveness. “If people think they can elicit from me whatever terms they want, they are mistaken,” Ms. Trump said.
Ms. Trump was bred by her father and her mother, Ivana, who have since divorced, to show competitive mettle. She recalled racing down a ski slope, at age 8, during a family trip to Aspen, Colo. “At one point I remember thinking it was rather bizarre that I had started moving backwards up the hill,” Ms. Trump said. “It took me not too long to realize that my father had hooked his ski pole around the cuff of my unitard. Clearly he wanted to win.”
On the job, competition with her brothers sometimes “reaches a pitch,” she said, confiding that shortly before joining the company she didn’t sleep very well. “My biggest fear was that I would perform well but that there would be some internal conflict” with her siblings, she said. “There was no way to know how we’d get along.”
Nor whether she would succeed. “In the worst-case scenario, I knew I could be fired,” she said. “But it would not have been for a lack of deal flow. What would be scary for me is to exist at the Trump Organization in a minor capacity. Mediocrity terrifies me.”
Insistent on proving herself, Ms. Trump first took a job outside the Trump Organization. Bruce Ratner, the Brooklyn developer, put her to work with the project management team for Ridge Hill, his shopping center in Yonkers.
“She did everything,” Mr. Ratner recalled, “from running the numbers of a deal to negotiating with tenants and coordinating where they would go in the center, to helping lay out the space.”
“She was down-to-earth,” he said. “She worked like everybody else. There was no special privilege about her.”
Ms. Trump disdains the attitude of entitlement that plagues some of her peers. She pays the mortgage on her own apartment, a $1.5 million unit at Trump Park Avenue. No Paris Hilton, she has determinedly sidestepped scandal. After some coaxing, she acknowledged dating Mr. Kushner, but declined to discuss their relationship. “Nothing good can come of that,” she said.
“There are enough stories about my family,” she said. “We have all been in the public eye. And we understand the process.”
No matter. The Trumps, she implied, are impervious to shame. “I grew up watching my father on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” she said. “You may remember, in some of those skits, they had him dressed up like a chicken.”
Here's another pic from the Times article- Ivanka in her boutique on Madison Avenue in NY- (Strikes me as an unusual decor for a place selling hugely expensive diamonds but...) 
And don't think that isn't really an issue with the families, btw... 
