Playing shops

AFTER opening his first stand-alone store in Australia, British designer Sir Paul Smith grants a rare interview to WISH magazine.

BEING kept waiting for an interview with a world-famous fashion designer is not a fact that would shock people. It kind of goes with the territory; fashion seems to work to a different form of time-keeping, and everyone knows that. Creativity, it's safe to assume, cannot run to a schedule.

Over the years this writer has been kept waiting for a couple of hours here and there, been postponed a day, two days, a week even. We've been given the run around for the better part of a year and on one occasion flown half way around the world to do an arranged interview only to be asked to come back "in about a month's time." So to be told by a publicist on arrival for our scheduled interview with Paul Smith that "Sir Paul is running a couple of minutes late" barely even registers. What's a few minutes after all? And it really was less than five minutes before Smith bounced into the room set aside for this interview in his new Collins Street, Melbourne, flagship store and announced with complete sincerity "I'm so sorry to keep you waiting - I was just busy with a customer."

Despite being the chairman, chief designer and major shareholder of a company that operates in 75 countries, employs about 2000 people and has a turnover reported to be ₤400 million ($609m), Smith is still a shopkeeper at heart. He has a hand in every product that bears his name, he photographs the advertising campaigns, he designs his stores and is an avid blogger, but his true genius lies in what really matters for a fashion designer: he knows how to sell things. And what's more he loves doing it.

"We all know that there are too many shops in the world," he says waving his hand at his impressive two-level store in a heritage-listed building in the heart of Melbourne's luxury precinct. "Just as there are too many magazines and too many restaurants and too many cars and everything, but it's our job as creative people to find a way to make your shop or your magazine or your restaurant more special than somebody else's."

Some fashion companies would baulk at leasing a store with strict heritage requirements such as this one, but the interior of this 1908 store is perfectly suited to Smith's brand of quirkiness. The entrance to the store is decorated with a cartoonish mural (there are several small illustrations on the walls throughout the store); a fireplace is painted in a bright colour as a bit of light relief against traditional walnut furnishings. In the void over the staircase there's an entire wall of framed artworks, photographs, illustrations and assorted bits and pieces that alone could keep a weary shopper amused for hours.

There's a lot of fun and humour in Smith's stores and no two of them are the same. "I think we've been successful as a company because we design clothes that people like and also because our shops are just interesting places to visit and there's always a sense of discovery in them," says Smith. "I think we all like going to an antique fair or a book shop and suddenly discovering something and going 'wow, I have been looking for this for so long'. I think my shops are full of exciting little things to discover."

Clothing and accessories are the main game at Paul Smith but in his stores customers can find items such as bicycles, books, cameras, cushions, a guitar, a toothbrush, Lego ... in a word, stuff. Stuff that Paul Smith the man just happens to like and hopes his customers will also like.

The Melbourne store is Smith's first stand-alone store in Australia. The brand has had a strong and successful association with department store David Jones and independent retailers such as Robbie Ingham in Sydney for many years, but he says his company's philosophy now is to place more emphasis on its own stores rather than wholesale accounts. "We are leaning more towards our own stores because we can control the environment a lot better. And also, because of the financial worry around the world, a lot of the independent stores are finding it tough at the moment and sadly some of them are closing down and so we are putting more emphasis on being in control of our own destiny through our shops."

After Smith's visit to Melbourne, which was after he'd opened a new store in Tokyo, he flew to Singapore to open a new store there. He has also recently signed a lease for a new store in Beijing, one in Zurich and one in Hamburg and is actively looking for a second Australian store, this time in Sydney. The company also has a healthy online trade, but while it's a profitable side of the business it's easy to get the impression that e-commerce doesn't excite Smith as much as bricks-and-mortar stores do.

"I think the whole popularity of e-commerce ... will level out soon," he says. "There will always be exceptions, there will always be the e-commerce site that's found a way to excite customers more and to do things in a different way. I mean our e-commerce is really popular, but luckily I think it has sort of levelled a bit now and I say luckily because I still love the experience of shops."

Smith, 66, left school at 15 with dreams of being a professional racing cyclist and, on his father's insistence, started work in a clothing warehouse in his native Nottingham. An accident when he was 17 put an end to his cycling ambitions and set him on the course to where he is today. "When I came out of the hospital after three months, one of the friends I met in hospital suggested we keep in touch and meet up some time. And it was by chance that the pub we chose to meet up in was the watering hole for the local arts school. Suddenly this whole world had opened up after being so disciplined as a sportsperson with no smoking and no drinking and early to bed. All of a sudden I was in this world of talking about Pop Art and Andy Warhol and the Bauhaus and it seemed so fascinating to me and I thought maybe I could actually earn a living doing something so cool and interesting.

"One of the people I met was a fashion student whose father was setting her up with a boutique and she said to me 'I don't know how to open a shop.' I said I could do it even though I had no experience at all. It just blossomed from there. I became the manager of her shop and then I started to design clothes and so one day I just decided to open my own shop."

Smith's girlfriend at the time, Pauline Denyer (now his wife) was also a fashion student and she encouraged him to open his own shop, which he did, paying a princely rent of 50p a week, and started teaching him about fashion and pattern-making. "We lived together and in the evenings it was like an education and I would learn about how things were made and the importance of good quality, and so when I started to design myself it was really just clothes for me."

Smith and Denyer were finally married in 2001 after he was knighted. In 1976 Smith showed his first collection under the Paul Smith label in Paris (where he still shows his collections to this day) and in 1979 he opened his first store in London in Floral Street in Covent Garden.

Smith's business, he says, has grown every year and has never gone backwards. The company has never borrowed money, owns a great deal of its own real estate including stores in New York, Tokyo, London as well as its company headquarters in London and its warehouse facility. It hasn't always been a smooth journey and his women's collection, which was launched in 1993, initially failed to excite media and buyers in the same way that his men's collections had done from the outset. Today, however, the women's business has turned around. "Frankly and honestly it [womenwear] was really tough at the beginning because I'm quite laddish and I don't have a strong feminine side, which is required of a women's designer because with women's it's not just about the clothes. It's how you present and market the clothes and about the makeup and the hair and the jewellery and the shoes, and frankly I wasn't really au fait with all that. But during the last five years - and this is the absolute truth and it's not spin - we've really got a good understanding of it now and I've got a good team around me now and we make three collections for women and we've started to get positive reviews from the International Herald Tribune, Vogue and Style.com and important shops have been buying it where previously they passed on it. Fingers crossed, we're on a road to a new horizon with it."

Given his brand's success, Smith says several companies have tried to buy him over the years. "In the 1990s there were lots of people trying to buy me, all the obvious candidates, and to me it was never a consideration. At one point I did take a couple of the offers seriously because my staff were saying to me, 'if we went with them we could do this and we could open 20 stores in a year'. So I got my top guys to sit opposite these people who were proposing deals and it was fantastic because after several meetings my guys were saying to me 'we know as much as they do and why would we want to do it?' "

Smith is remarkably candid about his business, his success and that openness extends into the personal realm. "Because I am the major shareholder and because I am a very content human being with my health and I am very positive and very happy, to suddenly have a very large sum of money wouldn't actually change my life. It would be a burden; I really wouldn't want it. I'm not motivated by more and more in financial terms. I mean, we need to continue to do well but the motivation is really just a love of life. It's not that I'm a wimp in terms of business; it's just I'm content with my lot."

There is a personal question that just begs to be asked of him. He may be content with his lot, but no one can live forever and there is no delicate way to ask him what will happen after he's no longer ... "you mean, when I'm dead?" he says anticipating the bush we're beating around. "It's a question I get asked a lot ... it's an absolutely valid question and it's a difficult one for me to answer. I'm so hands-on, which is fantastic for me and dreadful at the same time. I hope I'm not autocratic but I'm involved with everything. I don't have any children myself. My wife has two children who are not in the business - one is an actor and one is a musician - so I have no natural successor. But if you look at people like Coco Chanel, or Saint Laurent or Christian Dior, they're all companies that were started by a creative and hard-working human being and that have carried on after them. So life after me will be different; if I'm not around it will continue but for sure it will start to change."