I have been in the fashion industry for over 10 years. I most recently left my position as buyer at Browns, a very well known London boutique, and I am launching my own fashion consulting business. I’m always asked – what do I have to do to become a buyer? And to that I have to say, unfortunately there is no set path. You have to be able to spot trends and know when to back a winner; but on the other hand you also have to understand the business in terms of merchandising, profit, markdowns and numbers. In my day, I have met very, very few good buyers.
I have a strategy and consulting background from Accenture, which basically taught me the fundamentals of business. That’s how I learnt to start thinking analytically and to understand the DNA of a business. My first job in fashion, however, was with a young shoe designer called Holly Dunlap at a company called Hollywould New York. I joined Holly as her business advisor, helped her with her business plan, and suddenly found myself as the director of sales
and marketing.
We started with one account – Bergdorf Goodman – but within three years we grew to achieve £2.5 million in sales and about 350 accounts internationally. But what I really learned from Holly was how to build a brand. I then moved to London, where I had the honour of working with Christian Louboutin as a consultant for a few months and that was very interesting for me. It was a time when Sex & the City was just becoming famous and the “red sole” shoes were the talk of the town. I worked with Christian for a few months in a tiny little toolbox of a shop and we had these women who we used to call “Loubanites” who would come in and buy five pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes at £550 each and we thought they were all mental. Little did we know that they were on to something big.
I then decided that I wanted to get away from selling and move to the buying side, so I looked as high as I could and went to apply at Harrods, where I had the opportunity of Mr [Mohamed] Al Fayed himself walking in on my interview with the fashion director of design. And he asked me three very important questions: do you have what it takes to be a buyer? Are you a hard worker? Most importantly – are you going to make me lots and lots of money? Of course, I answered yes to all three and that was the start of my buying career.
I then moved on to a role as senior buyer, women’s designer wear at Selfridges and that was a very exciting time. The Weston family had just acquired the business and we were basically challenged with continuing to innovate and carry on the legacy. But the key lesson I learned at Selfridges is that shopping is also about the experience, not just the brand names and design labels in your shop.
Finally after that, I had the great pleasure of working with Joan Burstein who is the founder of Browns. She started the store in 1970 with her husband Sidney and it is today, still, one of the most renown boutiques in the world. At Browns I learned how to be constantly searching for newness, how to be hungry and how to be always first to market.
I’m going to talk about some of the things we did at Browns to help innovate us as a retailer and got us international recognition. The first case study is called Future Collectables. We wanted to do something that would internationalise us as a brand, take us abroad and get the name out there. And remind people why we’re the best – which is finding designers and our partnerships with those designers. So the Future Collectables initiative took 40 designers and celebrated their best piece or their best-selling piece at Browns over the past 40 years. For example, this would include Roland Mouret and his Galaxy dress.
We repeated that in the same fabric as his original dress. Another included Christian Louboutin with his favourite Fifi pump in a shade that he had never done before. Christopher Kane reissued his first dress from his first show, which we only bought six of the first time around, so as you can imagine people were pretty excited about us reissuing them. We selected 30 pieces and they sold out before they hit the shop floor.
We took on this project and we travelled around different countries – Paris, Berlin, Dubai and Geneva – and we had pop-up shops which had the Browns’ environment with our Future collectables and we reinforced the designers that are carried at Browns and reinforced our branding abroad – and it was hugely successful.
Another exciting project I worked on was the first own label for Browns Focus, which is our contemporary store. We ended up wholesaling that collection to over 100 accounts in the first season. And this came about in a very funny way. We were looking for a designer to design our own label but we ended up coming across this girl – Beatrice Boyle – who had just graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts, and I just thought she had something.
I actually ended up buying one of her pieces on the spot. Her idea was that she took old images from Vogue and sort of collaged and pasted them together and then painted over them. Of course, Cheryl Cole helped out by wearing a design on the cover of her new album and it grew from there. And that’s how Browns started wholesaling.
I’m going to leave you with a final thought from my favourite female designer Coco Chanel, and I think she sums it all up really elegantly, all the points I’ve been making today. “In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.”