FT: A curiously English vision of design

A curiously English vision of design By Jonathan Guthrie Published: April 22 2008 19:32 | Last updated: April 22 2008 19:32 Isn’t it time for a tidy-up? Sir Paul Smith, the designer and fashion retailer, has probably the most cluttered office of any well-known British businessman. The contents of the long, narrow room include: ● a model scooter ● a bicycle ● some female nudes in oils ● men’s wear designs ● several thousand books, including Enid Blytons and a volume on Russian mafia tattoos ● a statue of Godzilla. But slinging Sir Paul’s detritus into black bin liners would be philistinism in the order of whacking Michel­angelo’s Pietà with a ham­mer. This is not junk. It is an autobiography. It tells how a Nottingham youth with a taste for mod fashion dreamt of becoming a racing cyclist but had to change his plans after an accident. Video Paul Smith Sir Paul Smith talks to Jonathan Guthrie about about the differences in starting up in fashion today compared with his early days, and why he would never float his company Falling in love with a student called Pauline, who became his partner, opened Sir Paul’s eyes to the visual arts. He embarked on a career as a men’s wear designer and retailer. His business flourished, fed by an eclecticism that Japanese customers particularly appreciated. Sir Paul says: “I’m quite good at business and quite good at design, but I’m not particularly fantastic at either.” The paradox is that, had he been driven more by money and less by his curiously English vision, he would “definitely not have been so successful and definitely not been so happy”. That does not mean the wiry 62-year-old is a whimsical dreamer who somehow bumbled his way into creating a retail business with more than 400 outlets and profits last year of £17.5m ($34.8m) on sales of £330m. It is “vital to be financially successful”, he says. But this has mattered more in allowing him to have fun – by making footballs in pastel colours, for example – than as an end in itself. If you want to wind him up, suggest that he should float his business. Then Sir Paul starts making the sign of the cross like a Transylvanian peasant menaced by vampires. The financiers who have approached him “were offering things that meant absolutely nothing”. Capital, in other words. He says: “Why would I need to open 20 shops a year that have no character and mean nothing, when I can open two or three that are really interesting and give people goosebumps?” The most recent, at Heathrow Terminal Five, had a busy opening last month. British Airways passengers had time to kill by going shopping, it turns out. A recipe for a start-up souffle Sir Paul Smith says that getting a business off the ground is “like making a souffle – if you don’t put all the right stuff in, it doesn’t rise”. ● In fashion, this means “having the idea for the product, making it beautifully at the correct price, delivering it on time and getting paid”. ● The important thing for any business is to have what Sir Paul calls “a point of view” or unique raison d’être. If you can find this “way through the reeds to the sea”, starting up is “as easy or [as] hard now as it ever was”. ● In fashion “you’re only as good as today and tomorrow: no one cares how good you used to be. You’re on the conveyor belt: give it 100 per cent or get off”. ● Young designers face two main traps, he says. They can over-estimate the importance of successful shows, which are just “part of the process, not the be-all and end-all”. Also, they can sacrifice their perspective “by believing their own press and surrounding themselves with Yes people” ● The key to successful fashion retailing, Sir Paul adds, is “to keep humble and remember who’s paying the wages: the guy or the lady who comes in the shop. If you take care of them you’ll be fine.” Sir Paul likes to invite young rock bands – the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand – in for lunch around the table in his Covent Garden headquarters. That is more fun than brunch in the City of London. But he is seriously underwhelmed by the whole corporate thing: the pie charts, the focus groups, the standardised shop fronts. Sir Paul says: “I completely understand the big public company strategy and the corporate roll-out and the aggressive marketing that they all do. It’s just not what I do. So many streets around the world – Bond Street, Madison Avenue – already look so similar.” He has always been more interested in cultivating a vision, what he calls “a point of view”. Like many designers, Sir Paul has used his brand on products such as luggage and perfume. He has even helped produce Paul Smith bicycles, although this reflects his love of cycling rather than commercialism, given the degree of brand stretch involved and the toughness of that market. Paul Smith is that rare thing, a fashion brand British men do not suspect of being show-ponyish or effeminate. The theory goes that you can look the business in a Paul Smith suit without getting laughed at in the pub after work. The Japanese also get it. That is down to “the clothes and the Britishness”, and a lot of hard work. Sir Paul has been to Japan nearly 100 times and has about 200 outlets there. He says that many European designers have failed in Japan “because they just didn’t roll their sleeves up and try to understand the market”. Sir Paul has struggled in China, however, where he closed stores in Shanghai and Beijing. Rents were exorbitant and demand for western designer goods thinly based, he found. His advice to fellow retailers tempted by China, Russia or India is to be “very, very careful”. He is grateful, as the world economy slows, that he has no external shareholders, except the Japanese conglomerate Itochu, which is “calm, trusts us and has no involvement in the business”. Had he sold shares to some of the “predators” he has met, Sir Paul says, he would have “jumped off a roof” by now. Fashion was already becoming a tough business before the credit crunch began to hurt, “because imitation can be so quick now”. New fashion ideas pop up in low-cost chains just weeks after they have appeared on the catwalk. Sir Paul says: “Years ago when you did catwalk shows there was no coverage until a lot later. But now everyone sees what you are doing straightaway. That makes the character of the brand much more important ... customers are buying into the sexiness of Gucci or the bohemian aspect of Prada.” He is inured to piracy of the many-coloured stripes that are his signature design. He also feels ambivalent towards them, saying: “Sometimes I’d like to stop using the stripes but they have become my logo, a bit like Ralph Lauren’s polo player.” Talking in his magpie’s nest of an office, Sir Paul displays contradictions that encompass astuteness, naivety, humility and pride. As with many self-made men who left school in their mid-teens, his mind ranges more freely than is sometimes the case among executives with the tram rails of a university education to guide them. Some of his success must be down to charisma, an attribute helpful to entrepreneurs and salespeople, but which no business school can inculcate. Sir Paul says he learnt a “way of being able to talk to people” from his father, a Nottingham draper and amateur photographer whose creativity also rubbed off on his son. Dad evidently never taught young Paul to tidy his room, though. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008