Retail transformation with experience

Here I discuss with Alison Lowe MBE the changing fashion industry, new retail and how experience on the high street and online is changing. We hear from many years of experience of working with designers and retailers.

You can listen to the full interview in a podcast at Gaule's Question Time and on iTunes. Please Listen, Subscribe and Rate.

Andrew Gaule: Alison has got her MBE because of her services to the fashion industry, so today we’re going to be talking about the fashion industry and new retail. Pleased for you to join us, Alison.

Alison Lowe: Lovely to join you, thank you for inviting me on.

Could you kick off with a brief introduction to youself, then, first , please

Yes of course. I have, probably what they call these days a portfolio career, in the fact that though I have been working in the fashion industry now for 15 years, actually before that I had a very diverse career base. I think what I’d probably class myself as is a serial entrepeneur, in the fact that I have established and run seven different business, starting my first one at 17. They have including anything and everything, from running a bookshop to having a recruitment agency to setting up an international logistics company before I opened up my current two fashion agencies. So I have a really broad spectrum of actually working across a lot of different areas, but I suppose the point of that is that for me it’s being entrepreneurial. It’s about spotting a gap in the market, looking at how you can do things better and differently, and seeing if there is a solution to doing that. 

And that’s how I came into the fashion industry, in the fact that I was asked to partner with a London Fashion Week platform at that time that was a really large platform running eight catwalk shows a day and designer exhibitions. They were looking at me giving them some consultancy advice on marketing and PR initially. And I went along to my first fashion week very excited, first day. Thought it was amazing and I loved the whole glamour and the excitement of it all. Went back day two and I think the entrepreneur in me started to kick in, and think, “What’s going on here?” 

I started to talk to a lot of particularly younger start-up fashion labels, some of those who are very well established today, and just realised what a lack of support they had. That there was a big gap in the education system of fashion designers, in that they had absolutely no business focus. There was a lot of focus on the glamour and the excitement and taking part in fashion week, and a lot of people telling me, “Well, that’s the way the fashion industry works,” and just saying, “Well, it’s an industry, and at the end of the day any industry is about business.” So I spotted a gap and decided to open up my first agency, which was Felicities.

Great, so can you tell us a bit about the business and the areas you work in now, because I think we’ll come back to those insights you’ve seen on the industry in a moment, because I’ve certainly seen that as well.  Give us a bit of an introduction to the businesses that you now run and what you do.

I think I’m still entrepreneurial in many ways, through the fact that I still carry loads of different hats. Felicities was the first agency that I set up and that’s been running for 15 years now. In that time, we have worked with over 2,000 start-up fashion brands. And though we initially set up looking more at the marketing and promotions side of it, we very quickly, probably within the first six months, realised that we had to open up the level of service that we gave so that we could help businesses with every angle of their business.

So we work with start-up fashion brands, looking at everything about how they’re designing, the range plans they’re creating. How do they manufacture? How do they sell? How do they promote it? And how do they actually build a sustainable business?

Because though initially many of them may present with saying they want PR help, they’re not actually ready for that; they’re not ready to go out and tell people about their brand. They shouldn’t be out there talking to buyers, etc., yet, because they just don’t have the right tools to be able to do that.

The one thing that I find still shocking today that happens in the fashion industry but doesn’t happen in other industries, is the industry is actually very harsh in many ways, it gives people one chance. And you will either get it right on that one chance, otherwise they just won’t bother talking to you again. The industry is not very open to people learning, so it’s really important that the brands wait and make sure they do have everything in place, and then they go out and talk.

So Felicities has run for 15 years doing that. We get far more enquiries than we can ever deal with. I probably get about 20 a month every month come to us. We’ve never had to go out and look for brands in 15 years. But unfortunately we only work with between 15 and 20 brands at any one time, because what we do is so intensive with them, and it’s such a personal one-to-one, because we look at their whole business structure and their finance and everything. We’ve always been really limited with the number of brands that we could work with and help.

So over the last couple of years we realised – And because I go out and I give lots of talks around the world to different fashion designers setting up in everywhere from Shanghai to Morocco, I’ve just come back from, to Moscow, that actually a lot of the questions that they ask are the same. So we’ve decided to set up a second business, a sister business to Felicities, which is Start Your Own Fashion Label.com. And that’s actually just a platform of resources that designers can go on and answer a question as and when they need it, “How do I create a line sheet? How do I talk to a buyer? What’s the email that I send to a journalist? How do I used Instagram?” So that they don’t have to go on a course, they can just literally download the information in a really easy to use guide and do it straight away.

Good basics for the industry, and general business skills.

Yes. And as I said it’s so surprising that they are such basic elements, but somehow in their education system of learning to be a fashion designer, some of those basic tools. Whether they are missed sometimes, in the education. But other times the students don’t take any notice when they’re at university or fashion school. Because it doesn’t seem relevant to them at the time, they just want to be a designer. So they miss that learning. So it’s only when they actually start running the business that they need to come back and learn those bits. So we just wanted to make that in a really easy format.

And the other side of that is we do offer mentoring for other brands. They can just hop on a mentoring course and get some quick answers on something that’s troubling them. Or they can join our membership, which means that they get to talk to other designers and share ideas and share good practice and perhaps find out that they’re not alone in some of the problems that they’ve got. Because we find again, that designers are quite scared of talking to each other, and it often isn’t encouraged in the industry, so we wanted to give them a forum that they could actually just talk to each other.

Alongside that, as if that didn’t keep me busy enough, I also act as a consultant to retailers, both mass market and high end. Particularly around consumer and marketing and the changing of retail. So one-off consultancies in that area.

I am an ambassador for ‘Be Inspired’, which is encouraging retailers, women retailers, to actually be entrepreneurial and do things differently. That’s actually run by Retail Week, our big publication in this country. And then I go around and I deliver lots of training courses to lots of universities, and I work particularly with University of the Arts a lot and London College of Fashion. Again looking at entrepreneurial skills, telling designers, “Fine go and learn to be a designer, but you also need to learn to be an entrepreneur.” So I do that as well.

So it’s many hats, lots of different things. I am also a judge at the Great British Entrepreneur Awards, which is, again, I tend to look at more of the creative businesses because lots of people are looking at entrepreneurship on finance and manufacturing but often fashion in the creative industries are missed out on that. So I’m passionate, I think, about entrepreneurship and teaching people how to use entrepreneurial skills.

We first met at the Lone Design Club (www.lonedesignclub.com), which declaring my interest, I’m a director of. And you’re passionate about speaking about fashion and retail, as you’ve just highlighted, really brought that to life. And the reason why I’m involved with Lone Design Club, very much what you said at the start, that the business model now in fashion and retailing really doesn’t reward the creative designers and isn’t meeting the desires of what customers are wanting these days. Could you give us views on how you see retail and fashion is changing, and the sorts of things that Lone Design Club and designers are now doing?

Yes. I think the first thing is consumers have changed. Everything has changed because we all have mobile phones. And that has changed the world and everything we do. We all go round attached to our phones. And that’s how people shop and do their research now.

Fashion has been very, very slow at adopting to those changes, and it’s still being incredibly slow at adopting to those changes. So for me, what the retailers are missing out on is everybody’s focused on online. And I remember five, six years ago everybody talking about, “Maybe we won’t need shops in the future, it will all just be online.” But I think with fashion there is still an element of people wanting to go and try things on and touch things and have a beautiful experience of having me time, in some ways, of trying something on in a store, enjoying that experience.

So I think many of the retailers in fashion have just focused on online: “We’ve got to go online, we’ve got to have influencers talking on our Instagram and on SnapChat.” And they just dismissed their brick and mortar as just a place to dump product. If you go into many high street stores that’s exactly what they’ve done. They have dumped product in it. Lots of it, lots of different types. No point of difference from anybody else, there is just lots of it.

And what they didn’t realise is the customer was changing in the way that they were shopping and what they wanted from online and brick and mortar, so the actual physical stores. 

So for me what’s changed is if a customer wants product, if I want a new pair of jeans or a pair of black trousers or a shirt, I can go online and buy that. It’s much easier, I can have a range of options sent to me, try them on, ship them back. I can look to see the best deal I can get and what options are available.

But, if I am going to go to a store I want to do something different, and I want to have an experience. I want to be inspired. We used to have this lovely phrase that people called ‘window shopping’, and we seem to have forgotten that customers actually like to do that. They like to window shop, they like to look. They like to be inspired. They like to have some aspiration to own something.

And basically a lot of our brick and mortar retailers now could become the shop windows. That really big shop window that creates a beautiful experience that somebody wants.

And then if they come into a store and they have a really great experience, they will want to buy product. And they may buy it there and then that day, or if not they’ll go onto that company’s website because they feel a loyalty to that company because they’ve had a nice experience.

I talk about it a lot as the ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ strategy. Museums, for years, have always, they create a beautiful exhibition, try to make it as experiential as possible by the lighting, the colour, the sound, the music they play. And when you go into an exhibition, you don’t go into the gift shop first. You go through the exhibition and you exit through it. And if you watch anybody in any major exhibition, as they exit through the gift shop they will buy the postcard, the t-shirt, the book, whatever it is. They have a good experience. Retailers need to do that.

If you could bring people into your store and they have a nice experience and it’s a place they can feel involved with, feel a connection with the brand, then their ‘Exit Through the Gift Shop’ strategy will be that they will buy the product, because they are inspired by it, there’s an aspiration. But if it’s just product, it’s pointless.

So if you go into many of the retailers on the high street today, that’s why they’re not working, because every store you go into has just got packed rails, full of product that is pretty much the same as everybody else’s. There’s no point of difference in a lot of the stores, all we’re doing is shopping by price. And that’s not a good strategy.

The other thing we’re seeing as well is the pushback, now, against the fast fashion, which is that point about piling up the product, having it only there for a short time and expecting customers to buy larger quantities more frequently and only one use. That experience part can push back against that fast fashion and wasteful supply chain and wasteful product side of things. Are you seeing that trend as well being supported?

Yes definitely. Again, I think it’s part of the experience. I think people think, “If I’m going to aspire to something then I want to keep it. I might want to be the first to have it, I want to maybe revisit it, but I also want to know why I’m buying from that brand. I’m not just buying product.” It is the lifestyle of the brand that’s really important as well.

That’s why I’m a big supporter of Lone Design Club to, in the fact that I have recommended many designers to take part in it. Because to me, for a young designer, that’s a chance for them to go and tell people, “I’m not just selling product, I’m inviting you into the world of my brand. I want you to come along and meet me, I want you to see what I do. I want you to look at my product and I want you to love my product and then buy it and treasure it for years.” So moving that slow fashion model into it.

Lone Design Club has been really good, and I think one of the first in doing that of bringing in, having lots of events and experiences around the fact that you have a pop-up shop. 

Yes, and it is inspiring, speaking to these great designers, and they also engage and get fantastic feedback from the customers as well, when they touch it and feel it and see it and get their perspective back from the customers about how they’re going to use the product and wear it and stuff like that. That interaction and experience is so good for building that depth of relationship, with a brand and then the product.

Yes, it’s so valuable. The thing for the young designers, when I’m advising designers, is thinking these days, “Don’t just design product. Design your brand. And it has to be a brand and you have to offer an experience and you’re going to have to have a story that you could then go into somewhere like Lone Design Club and talk to customers and invite them into your world,” but if you are just designing product they are going to fail in the Lone Design Club because they’re just putting things on a rack and hoping it’s going to sell on its own. 

As a start-up brand you can’t do that anymore. I talk to brands about, “Your product is a tiny element of it, in many ways. It is your branding, your aesthetic. How’s your visual merchandising display going to look? How are you going to interact with the customer? What are you going to offer them to build in brand loyalty? The product is such a tiny part of that, and the product only works if you’ve got those other bits.”

I think Lone Design Club is great for designers as well. I know with some of the brands that I’ve tried, that I’ve worked with, and they have tried it. And actually it is the experience of trying it and going, “Oh, wow , I do have to do something here, I can’t just put my product on a rail and let it speak for itself, because that’s actually not what the customer’s looking for anymore, or if they are they’ve already got that online.” So it’s such a good experience for them.

What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities facing designers as they look to launch their brands, make money, and grow in an ethical and sustainable way? 

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